In today’s second reading, St. Paul encourages the Christians of Colossae to “put on” the virtues of Christ – that is, to be clothed in “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,” just as one might proudly show off new pieces of clothing. With each virtue we grow in, we emulate Christ more and more – we look more and more like him, you might say. And then on top of the other virtues, St. Paul says, “Over all these put on love, the bond of perfection.” Charity is to be worn over all the other garments since it is charity that makes us most perfectly like Jesus. You might say it’s the piece that really completes our spiritual outfit.
St. Paul can encourage the Colossians to do these things because he recognizes that with the coming of Christ, a special give-and-take has occurred between us and God – an exchange of gifts, you might say. By taking upon himself our humanity, clothing himself in our flesh in the person of Jesus, God has made it possible for us in turn to adorn ourselves in Christ, clothing ourselves in the spiritual qualities and attributes that by our own power we would not be fit for. We know how to be compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, patient, and loving in a natural, human way, although we don't always do those things. But we couldn't those things supernaturally, in the order of grace – not until the Incarnation made it possible for us to share even now in the attributes of God. St. Athanasius of Alexandria summed this up well – this idea of a mutual exchange of gifts between humanity and divinity – when he said, “the Son of God became man so that we humans might become God.” The more closely we live out the humanity of Jesus, the more fully we become united to his divinity.
The Holy Family (c. 1610) by Sisto Badalocchio
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. All of the celebrations within the Christmas season are new considerations from different vantage points of the same, central mystery: that in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God shows how fully he desired to share in our human reality. God might have revealed himself to the world as a fully mature person, or even a superhuman figure of some sort or another. But, no – he was born into our world as a humble child and so was raised in the context of a human family. In his human experience, the Lord Jesus came to know as we do what it means to grow, to experience, to learn, and all of the other realities of family life that are at once routine and also marvelous in themselves.
In doing so, we might say that God has consecrated the very idea of the family, and made the reality of family life a means of grace. The birth of Jesus has made it possible for the family itself to be a place where godly gifts can be given and received, and where the virtues of Christ can be learned and adopted. The family is the first place then that we learn to practice charity – to learn to love with the heart of Christ. A Christian family is formed by the bonds of natural love, but in and through relationship with Christ, those bonds are elevated and perfected by Christian charity, the “bond of perfection.”
Perhaps then we can understand better what St. Paul goes on to say in this famously controversial passage from Colossians: wives are to follow their husbands, and husbands are to love and care for their wives, and children are to be respectful to their parents, and parents in a certain way also to their children. He says these things not to enforce stereotypical views of power and gender, but to show how mutual love and service should be the hallmark of every member of a family, especially a Christian family. These words might offend our sensibilities if we look at them in a worldly way, but I think they make spiritual sense if we remember how God views the family to be: as a sort of training ground for practicing the love of Christ, for learning how to love as the Holy Family loved.
Because the family is a place of great love, it can for that very reason also be a place of great suffering. Division, divorce, abuse, addiction, illness, old age, and countless other difficulties and burdens are all too familiar to us in the context of the family. In today’s Gospel, the Holy Family was forced to flee for their lives to a foreign land because a murderous ruler was seeking to destroy the Son born to them. While this fulfilled a particular prophecy, it also reminds us that the Holy Family knew its own difficulties – perhaps different from our own – but nonetheless very human. And like theirs, our sufferings – perhaps especially the sufferings that come from family life – can be redemptive, if we continue to give and receive the heavenly gifts that God has communicated to us. Clothed in the virtues of Christian understanding, service, humility, patience, and above all charity, we learn to invite the grace of the Holy Family to become our own.
Friends, whether you are showing off some fancy new threads this Christmas season or not, remember that you are called to display to others the newness of Christ, for you have been clothed in his love. To others, and perhaps especially to our families, we must remember to don “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,” and charity on top of everything else. As wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, children – or in whatever other way we may fit into the context of a family – the world needs the example of our Christian families just as it needed the model of the Holy Family.
May the newborn Christ give us strength to endure the trials and difficulties of family life, so that in the charity we show in family life, we may be ever more fully fashioned in his likeness.
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