Journey's Weekly Homilies
Holy Family Cycle B
December 29, 2002
Homily by Marcia Burdon
1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:22-40
We have just celebrated the birth of the
Messiah, the Savior of Israel. When Jesus was born, the
world was at peace. Caesar Augustus was hailed as the savior
of the world, for creating the Pax Romana. Why did Israel
need a savior? During this time of peace, Israel was
occupied by Rome. Peasants were taxed so heavily that they
couldn't pay their debts. They were losing their land, land
that had been in their families for generations. Losing
their land meant losing their way of life. They lost their means
of feeding, clothing, and sheltering themselves. They also
lost their status, their honor. Some of them survived as
artisans: potters, carpenters, etc. Others begged or
became bandits. Many starved.
No wonder that people's hopes were high that a
Messiah would come, a glorious leader who would force the Romans
to leave Israel. This idea, of a successful rebellion
against Rome, died in the year 70, when the temple at Jerusalem
was destroyed. Jesus' message of hope, of nonviolent
resistance to oppression, took on new significance for those
struggling to survive. In this time, after the destruction
of the temple, Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels. Each in
his own way preached the same message of hope: "Jesus
is the Messiah, the Savior of Israel."
What did Matthew and Luke mean, the Savior of
Israel? They each require a whole gospel to explain.
I'm not going to explain all about salvation in one homily.
But one important part of the salvation that Jesus brought was the
new family he created, a family gathered together from those who
had no land or status. So, since this is the Feast of the
Holy Family, I will focus on Jesus' idea of family.
The good news is, we are all part of Jesus'
family. Becoming a Christian means joining that family, the
family of God. The bad news is that a lot of the people in
the family of God have low social status. Associating with them
could lower your social status. The problem begins right at the
beginning of the gospel of Luke. Virgin births were not
unheard of in Roman times. The conception of Caesar Augustus
was quite miraculous, for example. His mother was sleeping
in the temple of Apollo. A serpent glided up to her and a
short time later left. Ten months later Augustus was born.
He was regarded as the son of the God Apollo. But his mother
was a high born, upper class woman. The problem with Mary
was not that she was a virgin, but that she was a low class,
common peasant woman. How could a common peasant give birth to the
Son of God? How could someone like Jesus, the son of a peasant
woman, be the son of God? And yet, what Jesus did during his
lifetime was so extraordinary, he must have been the son of God.
One thing Jesus did was to explain what the
kingdom of God was like. Included in this description of the
kingdom of God was the description of a new kind of family, the
family of God. This family of God wasn't completely new.
In the Old Testament, widows, orphans, and strangers were under
the special protection of God. They were under God's protection
because they were particularly vulnerable. Widows, orphans, and
strangers did not have the protection of family. It is only
a small jump from this idea of God as the protector of the
vulnerable, to Jesus' vision of God as the father and protector of
a family of the vulnerable. But this small jump was
significant because it incorporated all the
Mediterranean ideas of family loyalty and family obligations into
Jesus' new family of God. So not only did God protect those
in Jesus' new family of the vulnerable and dispossessed, but they
owed loyalty to God and to each other.
As I've said before, this new family Jesus
created was rather low class. It's not clear why well off,
educated people joined, but Luke, in his opening sentence, appears
to be making a pitch to the most excellent Theophilus, a high
class patron, to join or support the Jesus movement.
Apparently higher class people did join, despite the risk to their
social status. Most of us, like Theophilus, are fairly well off by
the standards of those days. But we have still decided to
join Jesus' family, and accept the obligations that that
commitment places on us. The appeal of Jesus' vision of a
kingdom where all can live in peace and the vulnerable are
protected is still strong today. Christians everywhere work
together to help their brothers and sisters. As we look
around us we see that there is still plenty of work to do to build
the kingdom. We see the mentally ill, forced to
live on the streets or in jails, because there is no money to pay
for their care. We see children whose parents abuse or
neglect them, and child protection services that are over
extended. We see schools that cannot afford to teach our children.
We see rivers we cannot afford to stop polluting, and natural
resources we cannot afford to stop using up. This is the
feast of the holy family. What legacy are we leaving for our
children?
In Palestine, in the first century, peasants
ate meat once a year and fish once a week. By age 30 their
teeth were rotting, their eyesight was gone and they were
suffering from protein deficiency, internal parasites and poor
diet. In the cities of antiquity nearly a third of the live
births were dead before the age of six. By the mid-teens 60
percent would have died, by the mid-twenties 75 percent, and 90
percent by the mid-forties. Yet somehow they managed to work
together and care for one another. When a plague came to the
Roman empire, in the early years of Christianity, most people with
the means to do so fled the cities. The early Christians
went out into the streets and nursed the people who were sick.
They gained many converts by this means, and the Church grew.
No person was too insignificant or unimportant for them to care
for.
The people in those times dreamed of a better
future for their children, and they worked and died for that
future. Their dreams came true. We are the inheritors of the
future they dreamed of. Can we do less for our children?
Notes: I got the story about the conception of Caesar
Augustus from The Birth of Christianity by Crossan and the
statisics on health in antiquity from A Social Science Commentary
on the Synoptic Gospels.