On December 28 this year, Christians celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family, drawing us back towards the Nativity at the onset of Christmastide. We remember with gratitude how St. Joseph, the foster-father of the Lord’s earthly family, spirited Him away from Bethlehem, after receiving the shepherds and the Magi, because an angel had warned him: “Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.”

The Magi had told Herod the Great, the Romans’ client king in Judea, that the King of the Jews was to be born in Bethlehem, and, to eliminate what he saw as a threat to his throne, he ordered the murder of every boy there aged two and under. December 28 usually commemorates this Massacre of the Holy Innocents, but, because the Feast of the Holy Family always falls on the first Sunday after Christmas Day, it is being omitted this year.

Of the Holy Family’s time in Egypt, and then Nazareth after Herod had passed, Scripture tells us little, though this period accounts for the greater part of Jesus’s earthly life—what the Church calls the “Hidden Life of Christ.” Only a few moments pierce the quiet veil between His infancy and the beginning of His public ministry, some 30 years later.

Yet what the Gospel does reveal is profound: Jesus, as true God and true man, “was subject unto” St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary, living under their care and authority. Their ordinary home, filled with daily work, prayer, and love, serves as a model for Christian families—and so the Feast of the Holy Family is also a feast for all families, a time when we should draw together again, and do particular honor to our parents, if they are still with us.

It is also a fitting moment to ask for the Lord’s blessing for our families, as His own family was blessed. One way to do so is by offering the Prayer for Families, composed by churchmen for the Book of Blessings in the 1980s:

We bless your name, O Lord,
for sending Your own incarnate Son,
to become part of a family,
so that, as He lived its life,
He would experience its worries and its joys.

We ask you, Lord,
to protect and watch over this family,
so that in the strength of Your grace
its members may enjoy prosperity,
possess the priceless gift of Your peace,
and, as the Church alive in the home,
bear witness in this world to Your glory.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Image by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.

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