Reflection for the readings of December 31, 2023 — the Feast of The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Year B 2023
Friends, one can only wonder what families with members with same-sex attraction feel about the backlash to Fiducia Supplicans. Do they feel a part of the family of God’s people? Of what use is the water of baptism if their children or themselves are discriminated against on the basis of an adjective — gay, lesbian, or queer? A more fundamental question is, how do families deal with children who are different? Do families rob them of the basics because they are different, or do families find ways to help them along in their day-to-day life? What do they turn out to be in the Church, their spiritual family, when it won’t even bless them?
In today’s Gospel, Simeon tells Mary and Joseph that Jesus “is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted — and you yourself a sword will pierce — so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Perhaps Mary and Joseph pondered similar questions as they heard all that was said about Jesus (Luke 2:33). He was born into a world that was hostile to him. Herod saw him as a threat to the stability of his state. Caesar Augustus saw him as a political rival. His own people could not see how Jesus is the Christ, because Jesus didn’t match their messianic criteria. Jesus was misunderstood. He was rejected. The circumstances of his birth and the existential realities of his parentage didn’t help either. Jesus was ambiguous — a sign of contradiction. And perhaps some might have thought that God must be condemned for not being “clear enough” in his prophecies about Jesus.
Families are struggling with callous pontifications on moral issues in the Church. “How I wish priests were married,” a parent once told me, “Then they would understand better the struggle of a parent loving a child who is living with disability, same-sex attraction, and who is different.” The moral high ground is often just cold and heartless. “Why would I bring a child into this world or raise him or her as a Catholic if he or she would not feel welcome, prayed for and loved as a person with struggles like every one of us,” another parent said angrily. “Christ did not take the flesh of Adam before the fall, but the flesh after the fall,” another parent said.
“In what way, indeed, could Christ have better commended his kindness than by assuming my flesh? My flesh, that is, not Adam’s, as it was before the fall” (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux). My flesh, this flesh with its moral struggles, bruised and derided by the men and women of high moral ground, but loved and assumed by its author—Jesus the Christ. In this postlapsian flesh God became man to restore in man that which he lost to sin and shame. In this flesh, “being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Benedict XVI).
Notice that Pope Benedict XVI does not qualify the person to be encountered. He did not say, being a Christian is an encounter with the perfect person from the perfect family who has perfectly kept all the Church teachings but an encounter with Jesus Christ who is present in all people. That is why in teaching us how to pray, Jesus did not say, the Father of the perfect, or non-sinful persons. Rather, he said, “Our Father” without qualifying the “our.” And in Matthew 5:45, Our Father let his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. If Our Father could bless “the evil” with his sun, why can’t we bless gays who, though, not evil, acknowledge their struggle with their sexuality and orientation and their sinfulness?
Why can’t we show them, and many others who struggle with “public” sins the warmth of God’s love? G. K. Chesterton once said, if a man goes to a brothel, it is not sex per se that he is looking for. It is love. When he is loved, he suddenly forgets the way to the brothel. Could it be that it is love that our brothers and sisters in same-sex relationships are looking for? On the other side of the controversy, could it also be that those of us reacting negatively against gays are also searching for love? If gays, lesbians, divorced, and remarried Catholics don’t feel loved by the Church, can they love those who do not love them? Can we all repent, that is, return to God, who, according to 1 John 4:8, “is love.” Bishop Robert Barron is right. We need to focus on God and let his love urge us on.
As the crowd in Poland shouted in 1979 when Pope St. John Paul II returned to his homeland, can we all shout, “We need God! We need love!”? It is in love that we and our respective families — biological and spiritual — can learn from Mary and Joseph how to respond with kindness to the callous pontification and the spiritual abuse we suffer. They responded not with fear and disenchantment with the world that would be hostile to their son, Jesus. But as the Luke’s Gospel related, “they stood there wondering at the things that were being said about him.” Yes, these things said about you, about your children, your relatives and your friends are horrible. Nevertheless, you have to stand, here in this same Church where some condemn you and ponder with the Holy Family all that is said about you.
This is what families do. They don’t give up. They stand tall with their back against the wall of faith, trusting that at the end all manner of things will be well. For “Unless your faith is firm,
you shall not be firm” (Isaiah 7:9). Tom has decided to remain with the Church even after he was denied communion in his local parish because he is gay. He said that he had a choice to be bitter or better. He chose to be better. He loves his pastor who up to this moment is still very dismissive of him. All he prays for is “God, you know me and my struggles to be chaste, teach me to love genuinely those who treat me badly. Together, let’s make our parish a family for all people.” Hearing this, I can only wonder, what will Tom turn out to be?
Image: Adobe Stock. By Mladen.
Fr. Francis Afu is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Armidale, Australia. He is currently undertaking a PhD Research Fellowship in the United States.
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