God Has A
Family
Dear
Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
God
has a Family. This is a good news for all of us. Yes!
According
to Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 4, verse 15, assures us of
this truth: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with
our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without
sin.”
The
Great Apostle means to say that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God Himself,
came into our world and made His home here, to stay with us forever, is really
one among us, a true fellow human person, like all of us.
In
becoming human, God has accepted the rule of “fair play”, walking side by side
with us on the long journey, throughout the ups and downs of our life on earth.
First,
He took our human nature—it is to say, by so doing, God now has a human heart,
beating in tune with ours. For this
reason, His heart was moved with pity when He saw people dying of hunger and
lost like sheep without a shepherd (see Mt 14:14). He shed tears when Lazarus, His friend,
passed away (see Jn 11:35.) He was so
frightened when facing a violent death that, according the Gospel of Saint
Luke, Chapter 22, verse 44, “His sweat became like drops of blood falling on
the ground.”
In
our celebration of the Holy family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph today, we come to
realize the amazing reality that God the Father, the Almighty Creator of the universe,
has decided to build a human family for His Only Beloved Son to be born into,
to be fed, and to be educated by human parents in order that the Son of God may
become the Son of Man, and that God Himself may become true human.
By
so doing, God teaches us the truth that the family plays an indispensable role
in the completion of our vocation of a human person, the very important
foundation of our human dignity and our human rights for we were created by the
loving and caring God in His own image. The family is the first school of which
our first teachers are our dads and moms, who teach us, by truthful word and
good examples, how to be humans and Christians.
Second,
the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is one that is built on the very
solid and stable foundation of the very traditional institution of
marriage. Marriage should be taken into
its serious nature as willed by God the Creator, it is to say, the union between
a man and a woman. It is to this couple,
the husband and the wife, the father and the mother, that God has given His
power of procreation, it is to say, of bearing children.
Jesus
loves the human family so much that He blesses it with the sacrament of Holy
Matrimony. Saint Paul, in his Letter to
the Ephesians, compares the love of the human spouses with that of Christ and
His Church.
Finally,
the Christian family has Jesus as the heart and the soul of its life. When Jesus went missing, Mary and Joseph left
everything behind and did their best to look for Him.
Saint
John-Paul II in one of his letters to families wrote that if you have ever met
some people very kind and good who lend you a helping hand without asking
anything in return. You should be sure
that those people have a very happy childhood in the loving and caring hands of
their papas and mamas.
But
if you suffer a lot because of some very bad, selfish and evil people, be sure
that those people have a very unfortunate family life.
Amen.
Fr. Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Nhut, O.P.
