When a young person joins a religious order, his or her parents often have a sense of loss: they feel that they are having to give up their child; this child has declined to carry on their line; in a sense, this child has left their family.

I’m pretty sure my parents felt like that until they came to my profession ceremony. There, they were surrounded by members of my religious Order, including many of our student brothers, who welcomed them with such affection that at the end of the day, my mother said, “I have never been kissed by so many young men.” (Did I hear my father add, “I should hope not”? I don’t remember.) In any case, I think my parents learned that day that I hadn’t been lost to them; rather, in my brothers they had gained a much larger family than they could have expected from me otherwise.

Today, we celebrate the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born into a human family. His divine Father wanted him to have a human father and to be raised within a home created by the marriage of his mother Mary to her husband Joseph. Jesus is the Lord of all, but he was made dependent on, and subject to, his human parents. Their faithfulness to one another, and their devotion to their son, provided Jesus that most basic of human needs—the security of a loving home—from the first moment of his life.

There is no question that the gospel story very strongly affirms the importance of marriage and family life in the plan of God. Jesus lived some thirty years within his home in Nazareth, being cared for as an infant by Mary; learning the carpenter’s trade as a boy from Joseph; and as a young man, helping to support his family. He received his human formation; he became the man whom his disciples came to know and love; within his parents’ home, under their influence, in Nazareth. There, as the gospel says, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.” (Luke 2:52)

But important as it is, marriage and family life is not an absolute: the gospel story makes that clear. For example, it tells us that when he was a boy, Jesus went missing from his family on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His parents frantically searched for him, but when they found him in the temple, talking to the priests, he calmly asked, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” We can forgive his parents for being “astonished,” and maybe even angry. The gospel tells us, “they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them.” (Luke 2: 41-51)

Again, after Jesus had left home, his mother and extended family came looking for him, having heard of the stir that was surrounding him, and being naturally concerned. The gospel says that he was told, “‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you,’ and he replied … ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” (Matthew 1:46-50)

There is a scene in one of the Italian films about the life of Jesus (I can’t remember which) that makes this point of the merely relative value of domestic life with particular force: Joseph has died, and Mary is urging Jesus that the time has come for him to begin his public ministry. But the Lord’s human soul is torn: how can he leave his mother alone, when family love requires an only son to care for his widowed mother? So it is Mary, knowing that her son has a mission beyond their home, who forces the issue. His leaving her becomes, ironically, his final act of obedience to her. Granted, this movie scene is fiction—but it dramatizes pretty well that domestic claims must sometimes be overruled.

In the event, of course, Mary is the first of her son’s disciples. At the climax of his public ministry, when he is on the cross, Jesus gives her to his beloved disciple John to live with him, be protected by him, and assist in the formation of the infant Church. It is awesome to think of Mary at the cross having to give up her own son, and to receive John and with him all of the disciples, and ultimately all Christians, as her children.

If you trace this theme of family in sacred scripture, an interesting possibility arises: that the mission of Jesus, beginning with his holy family, was to restore to humankind the sense of ourselves “being family.” Sin has the effect of destroying that sense of being all related to each other. It is a truth proclaimed in Genesis by God creating one man and then one woman from whom all other human beings come: the name of Eve means “mother of all living.” The first crime was fratricide—a violation of the bond of brotherhood. And the countless violations that have followed from that first one begin to be redeemed by our Creator making himself brother to us all in the home of his blessed Mother Mary and her husband Joseph.

So we might say that the Holy Family is the first stage of God’s plan to restore us all to the reality and sense of “being family” to each another. The Holy Family is ultimately us, united in the family of God that came to be at the Cross of Jesus and was revealed at Pentecost with mother Mary in the midst of the disciples. Of this Holy Family which is ourselves, St. John writes in his first letter, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he [our Lord] appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)