I suspect that, in many cases, the last thing we want to hear about the first Sunday morning after Christmas is the sheer bliss of family life. Having spent the last few days closeted with our own family, we have a very good idea of how far removed it is from the Nazarene ideal that is so often placed before us. You will all be familiar with the family photograph album. You may even have pored over it during recent days. You will be familiar with the formal family photograph, a picture taken not to mark any particular occasion, but merely to record that this particular family looked like this at this particular time. Everything is very staid, formal and correct. The hair is combed and the clothes are spotless. Everyone is standing still in their correct, allotted positions. When you look at this image, this photograph and try to match it with the reality, you will say to yourself: How very different image and reality are. You know the hours of preparation that went into the staging of that image. That formal frozen frame could never capture the energy and the turmoil that gave that lot their identity and their life. In fact you know that the formal photograph is a complete set-up, an artificial masking of reality.
But our image of the Holy Family can be distorted in this same manner. Medieval artists set out to do for the Holy Family what today's photographers do for our families. Now as long as we know the conventions in operation it doesn't matter. Our critical faculties will supply the necessary correctives. But, unfortunately, we have been trained to suspend our critical faculties when dealing with our received images of the Holy Family. Consequently that energetic and interesting family has been reduced to a bloodless cliché. Mary and Joseph have been portrayed as fawning parents living in awe of their wonder-working son. We are left with the impression that it was Jesus who formed the personalities of Joseph and Mary rather than the other way around. Here the child was truly regarded as father of the man! Both the Holy Family and ourselves are damaged by this approach: Firstly, it underestimates the very active role that Mary and Joseph played in the formation of the character of Jesus; secondly, through elevating it out of reality altogether, it destroys the Holy Family as a role model for our own families.
As Matthew's infancy account makes clear, the Holy Family confronted the harsh realities of life and death in the very early days of the infants life. The hatred of Herod hunted them into exile. This is no snap shot for a picture postcard. This is the stuff of survival. St. Luke's gospel is less dramatic and more domestic than Matthew's. Luke exposes tensions that are familiar in every family. Jesus gets lost for three days. His parents are sick with worry. When they eventually find him he has a smart answer for his mother: "Did you not know I must be about my father's business." We see there at work the tensions and strains so familiar to the rest of us. Every twelve-year-old that ever existed has an answer for his mother! There is a religious and social impression abroad of the family as a happy, tension-free religious and social unit. This image is often portrayed in TV game shows of the American variety. If we fall for this sort of stuff, we will soon be forced into the conclusion that there is something wrong with our own crowd. Our families are the places where we are all allowed make our mistakes in security. The family is the anvil upon which our personalities are formed. If there is no hammer blows, we will all turn out to be undifferentiated, uninteresting lumps. Where there is no tension, there will be no growth. It is reassuring to learn from the gospels that the family at Nazareth was no different.
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