Feast of the Holy Family

Sirach 3:2–6, 12–14

Colossians 3:12–21 or 12–17

Matthew 2:13–15, 19–23

We see in today’s readings St. Matthew, and the Church, emphasizing the continuity between Jesus and the Jewish prophetic religious tradition. By choosing the reading, the Church stresses another theme in Matthew: how Jesus’s very survival depended on the faith and obedience of his family. The book of Sirach, like Proverbs, is part of Israel’s Wisdom tradition. Unlike Proverbs, however, it is in the Apocrypha and was written much later—only two centuries before Jesus’s birth.

In last week’s reading, Matthew tied Jesus to King David, and in his genealogy just before this, Jesus’s ancestry is traced back to Abraham—two crucial figures in the Hebrew tradition. Today’s reading connects Jesus to the third great figure in this tradition: Moses.

Moses also survived the slaughter of male babies, ordered by the Egyptian king (the massacre of the Holy Innocents recounted in Matthew 2:16–18 is omitted in today’s reading). Like Jesus, Moses also returned to Israel from Egypt. As the NJBC puts it, Matthew sees Jesus as leading his people in a new Exodus, out of the slavery of sin to liberation.[i]

Matthew goes one step further by referring to an unknown prophecy in verse 23: “He shall be called a Nazarene.” The NJBC explains this is probably a reference to a nazir “consecrated” in Hebrew. This would connect Jesus to Samson, a heroic strongman who fought and killed the enemy Philistines (cf. Jg 13–16) soon after the Israelites returned to the promised land from Egypt.

Jesus the Samson figure! That’s a stretch, to me at least. Jesus was always committed to basing his kingdom on nonviolence. For this reason, tying him to King David, the great military leader, is also inappropriate. Jesus himself shrank from the messiah title because of its Davidic connection. No messiah in the King David tradition would ever be crucified by the enemy occupiers.

It seems as though Matthew is “throwing the kitchen sink” at the problem of Jesus’s ties to Israel, trying to connect him to all the big names in Jewish history, no matter how preposterous, in order to root Jesus firmly into the religious history of Israel. Apart from Matthew, we have no other account of the flight to Egypt or the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. The NJBC tells us we cannot be certain about this or any of the other details concerning Jesus of Nazareth’s origins, except that he was born around 4 BC, his mother was Mary, and his legal father was Joseph. The consensus among most Scripture scholars is that we cannot know whether the flight to Egypt and the killing of the Holy Innocents happened. I would say these two events may tell us more about St. Matthew than they do about Jesus.

The “historical Jesus” is not the same as Matthew’s Jesus, and we must remember it is Matthew’s Jesus who we are exploring this year. The interrelationships between the gospels, the Jesus of history, and the Jesus we believe in are complicated, and I explore these issues in depth in appendix D.

Matthew wants very much for us to see Jesus as the complete fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy and as a figure in complete continuity with the religious traditions of Israel. New Testament scholars believe this is because Matthew’s community was made up Jews who had become Christians and who fervently wanted no separation between Judaism and Christianity. God bless them! If only they had succeeded. Alas, Judaism and Christianity, once joined at the hip, eventually went their separate ways. I believe both traditions are the poorer for it. I respect Matthew’s noble efforts to keep them together. However, his devotion to this cause has some (unintended?) consequences that we need to be aware of.

Why do we have four gospels rather than only one? Because each one helps us to see part of the mysterious truth of Jesus. We have to be careful when reading Matthew to remember this preoccupation with the relationship between Jesus and the Jewish tradition. It does shed light on who Jesus is, but at other times Matthew’s vision of the Jesus–Jewish connection seems at odds with the Jesus we see in the other gospels—and even in Matthew.

The many ingenious efforts of Matthew to embed Jesus in the Jewish tradition paradoxically reveal the ways in which Jesus also breaks with that tradition. I have already mentioned his nonviolence versus King David’s militarism. We will see many other examples of how Jesus creatively challenges Jewish religious traditions as we read through St. Matthew. I believe it is important to do justice to both the continuity and the discontinuity between Jesus and his tradition, not only to understand Jesus better but also so that we can understand better why so many devout, upright, God-fearing Jews could not—and cannot—in good conscience follow his teachings. This will help Christian believers today to maintain our respect and reverence for the Jewish religious tradition.

This interpretive key to reading Matthew will also help us understand better the problematic chapter 23, in which Matthew’s Jesus incongruously attacks the scribes and Pharisees as “hypocrites,” “fools and blind men,” and repeatedly threatens them with “Woe to you!” It is incongruous because Matthew’s Jesus told us earlier, in 5:22, “I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire.”

At the shallowest level, we could read chapter 23 as a plain contradiction of chapter 5 and Matthew’s effort to embed Jesus in the Jewish tradition. If we dig a little deeper, however, I would argue that Matthew’s over-the-top chapter-23 Jesus reveals the dangers of trying “too hard” to bind Jesus too tightly to a tradition to which he was both deeply faithful yet also transcended.

Christianity Versus Family Values?

Our first reading sheds further light on Jesus’s transcendence of his tradition—if, that is, we read just one verse beyond where the Church interrupts Sirach. In speaking about how a son should treat his parents, verse 3:7 of Sirach reads as follows: “he will serve his parents as his masters.”

Some Christians tie Christianity very closely to the importance of preserving strong family ties. Yet Jesus repeatedly undermines family ties, as he was creating a kingdom based on a community that transcends family ties, which is demonstrated in Matthew 12:50 when he declares that “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.” He even prohibits a potential follower from burying his father (Matthewt 8:21–22). He promises he will cause family conflict (Luke 12:49–53) and emphasizes this when he says, “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:34–39).

I do not see how any of this is at all compatible with serving our parents as our “masters.” I go into more detail in appendix E regarding how a careful reading of the Wisdom tradition, and especially Sirach (a book written less than two hundred years before Jesus’s birth), reveals many of the ways in which Jesus broke with the Jewish Wisdom tradition.

Jesus no doubt wants us to be kind and loving to our parents, and that is what our reading today (without verse 7) advises. Jesus commands us to love everybody, after all. As you will see in my appendix article E, parts of Sirach are problematic. Because our reading today omits verse 7, it is not contradicting the gospel message. Still, with its emphasis on “family values,” I would say the first reading is more alongside than inside the Good News.

Let’s return to Matthew and the insights of John Chrysostom before wrapping up this week’s reflection. Chrysostom points out that the holy family were exiles, refugees, and fugitives through no fault of their own.[ii] Fortunately, the ancient world had not “progressed” enough to require visas and passports for those wishing to flee for safety to other countries. We Christians today need to remember this story in the gospel and show compassion for the many refugees and immigrants who are fleeing to our nation for safety and economic security.

Finally, one crucial dimension of Jewish prophecy is that one day “all the nations” would recognize Yahweh as the true Lord of the universe. As NJBC tells us, Israel realizes during and after their exile in Babylon that “the universal lordship of Yahweh cannot be vindicated unless he is recognized as Yahweh by all peoples.”[iii] The prophets frequently wrote about how “all the nations” would come to Jerusalem and know the Lord; many psalms also pick up this theme. We can see it in Isaiah 45:18ff as well as in next week’s readings for the Feast of Epiphany: Isaiah 60:1–6 and Psalm 72.

This is a prophecy that Jesus clearly does fulfill. And as John Chrysostom informs us, Matthew was right on this. The Magi came from Persia or Babylon, while the holy family fled to Egypt. We can quibble with whether Matthew’s account of the infancy narrative is historically accurate. But it was prophetically true: Jesus’s message was universal and eventually spread throughout the world.

Chrysostom asks: “Why was the Christ child sent to Egypt? From that point onward, we see that the hope of salvation would be proclaimed to the whole world; Babylon and Egypt represent the whole world. Even when they were engulfed in ungodliness, God signified that he intended to correct and amend Babylon and Egypt. God wanted humanity to expect his bounteous gifts the world over. So he called from Babylon the wise men and sent to Egypt the holy family.”[iv]

The universalism that is symbolic at the start of Matthew’s gospel becomes explicit at the end. This is important: Matthew ends his gospel at 28:19–20 as he begins it—with the call to spread Jesus’s message throughout the world. This passage is so beautiful that, in closing, I am going to quote it in full. I remember as a boy being struck with how comforting those final words are: “I am with you always.”

“Go therefore, instruct all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you; and see: I am with you every day until the consummation of the age.” (Matthewt 28:19–20)

[i] NJBC, 636.

[ii] ACCS, 1a, 33.

[iii] NJBC, 1304.

[iv]ACCS, 1a, 31.