Love in the Holy Family
Our Collect prayer today expresses our shared desire that God, who was pleased to give us the shining example of the Holy Family, would graciously grant that we might imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life, and in the bonds of charity. In alignment with that prayer, all of our readings today are about the bonds of charity, that is, love, in the various stages of life. They encourage us to consider how we can better imitate the Holy Family’s love and virtues.
Sirach shows us love in the family in all its stages, with a special emphasis on the responsibility of children towards parents. You might consider reading it twice more: once to consider how Christ lives this, and another time to consider how it applies to the family of God, the Church. We struggle with a deeply ingrained disregard for authority and struggle to obey even the letter of the law, much less to cultivate a spirit of obedience, and yet these are essential to the church in all its forms: in our homes, in the parish, and in the universal church.
The Psalm celebrates the blessing of fruitfulness in work and in married life.
Paul’s letter to the Colossians encourages love of neighbor, and working for the good of one another. We like this part.
The second portion of Colossians 3 challenges husbands and wives to rise to a higher standard. We like this less. The world hates the end of this reading. It hates it so much that the Church even offers the option of omitting it. But, ignoring a challenging teaching does not make it go away, and the vocation of marriage is, above all, a call for spouses to help one another to grow in holiness.
Wives, you are often wiser and usually more articulate than your husbands. And yet, the English here asks you to “be subordinate” to him. Husbands, you are asked to give yourself sacrificially to your wife and avoid all harshness or bitterness towards her, without conditions, such as whether she notices or adequately appreciates your sacrifice. You are instructed to be active in the rearing of your children, who are instructed to be obedient. These are all difficult.
It is worth exploring what exactly Paul says to wives here, since this is such a challenging passage. He wrote in Greek, so sometimes things are lost in translation. The phrase “be subordinate” is translated inadequately and has a lot of baggage for us. The Greek word here is a combination of the verb tasso with the prefix hupo and suffix mai. huppo-tasso-mai. Hupo means under. Easy enough. Tasso is a military term for arranging soldiers in formation to confront an enemy. Mai is “yourselves”. So, “deploy yourselves in formation under your husband”. Paul puts it this way all three times he addresses order in the home in his epistles. He does not say “guys, get yer women under control.” He does not say “women, know your place.” He says wives, deploy yourselves as an orderly and effective support of your husband. It was especially contrary to the culture of the time to use language suggesting the wife should choose to make herself anything, much less a co-worker and active partner. The instruction to submit herself does not in any way demote her, but rather restores the wife to the place she had in the first family of Adam and Eve: a co-worker in the Lord’s garden.
The real challenge here is more to the husband. At the time, it was more counter-cultural to charge husbands to love their wives. Love of any kind was not a driver for marriage, and deep friendship was uncommon between spouses. Paul’s command to the husband was nearly incomprehensible to the gentile culture when he asks the husband to not only love his wife, but to love her as Christ loves, and to be willing to sacrifice even his life for her.
Digging into Paul’s instructions reminded me how much I love words and etymologies, and yet how unhelpful they can be. I love my wife, and I love beef jerky. Not. The. Same.
We know that God is love, and that the enemy’s final assault is an attack upon marriage and the family, so is it any surprise that it has become increasingly difficult for us to define love and family, to understand God’s plan for the family, or to distinguish between the meanings and aspects of love? And yet, we so need to understand God’s plan for our family, for all families, and how to love.
Most of us have heard that the ancient Greeks had various words for love, and are familiar with the four loves C.S. Lewis (may God have mercy on his soul) wrote about: agapaō (unselfish, giving love), phileō (neighborly love), eros (the love of desire), and possibly storgē (love of parents). Or, if you forgot those and asked AI and the internet, they would tell you ancient Greeks had 7 words for love. Unfortunately, two of those are not Greek, and one is a joke from a 1973 book that somehow made it onto the internet and into AI as fact. Allow this to be my final caution of 2025 regarding the dangers of trusting AI.
Anyway, while it is true that the Greeks had various words for love, they are used interchangeably in the Greek Septuagint Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. (Found in Antiquity). I won’t belabor the point, but suffice it to say, with all due respect to C.S. Lewis and the millions of preachers who have drawn deep significance from how Jesus referenced agapaō and phileō when pardoning Peter, those two words are both used in the Bible to describe romantic interest; love of things and ideas, love towards God and neighbor, God’s love for us, and the love of the Father for the Son.
All this is to say that we will not come to an understanding of love by digging into words and their etymologies.
Likewise, philosophy will only help a little. Saint Thomas of Aquinas defines love as “willing the good of the other” and shows us that this means we make an active choice to desire and work for what is best for someone else. The novice is often tempted to over-spiritualize this, and to remove the feeling of love from the equation. But, love is an act of will that leads not only our actions, but our hearts. As the Kendrick brothers express in the movie Fireproof: “Don’t follow your heart, because your heart can be deceived; …LEAD your heart.” For St Thomas, love is to will the good of the other, to desire union and communion with them and to share their good, and this all leads to giving ourselves. Love is not less than emotion, but it is certainly more. And yet, this is only slightly helpful, because… Which good do I will? Am I capable of discerning wisely the proper good, and how to help another achieve or receive that good? Every parent understands the difficulty of deciding which good to prioritize for their children. Justice? Mercy? Self-Esteem? Humility? Creativity? Obedience?
So then, how is it we can come to understand what it means to love, if we can’t define the word clearly, the internet lies to us, no amount of deeper digging into the scriptures and ancient languages will make it perfectly clear, and philosophy provides only a partial solution requiring a more perfect understanding of “good” than I possess?
By studying the Holy Family? Well, there’s nothing wrong with study of love, of the Holy Family, or of God, and much to be commended in such study, but there is no amount of study that can replace spending time with God, and with the Holy Family. We do not understand love by studying love, but by giving and receiving love. We do not understand family by studying family, but by living as family.
Love is experienced more than it is understood. God is stubbornly incarnational, despite our attempts to the contrary. The sacraments all require personal connection. God chose to take on human nature in part so that we could experience “God with skin on.” We are commanded to be together regularly.
So then, spend more time with the Holy Family. Be with them. Live with them.
Dedicate yourself to more consistently spending time with them in the Rosary, and perhaps even consider adopting the tradition of a first Wednesday devotion to St. Joseph. Spend more time with Joseph and Mary in adoration of our Lord.
Bishop Plácido said something that has stuck with me: “Joseph was always very conscious that he was in the presence of Jesus and Mary.” We, also, are in the presence of Jesus, and Mary, and therefore in the presence of St. Joseph, who remains in their presence. Being aware of the presence of my departed grandparents is a great help to me in avoiding sin. Being aware of the presence of the saints is a great help to me in pursuing virtue.
Living with a greater awareness of the Holy Family’s presence can greatly encourage us to grow in the virtues lived out in their family, especially in the chastity, purity, obedience, humility, courage, and deep faith of Joseph, patron of the universal church, of this parish, and of families.
St Joseph, patron of the dying, and of all the church, and father of the Holy Family, watch over our families.
