The Radical Family Of Nazareth

Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family. What we celebrate is the presence of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus in Nazareth. To truly know what we celebrate today, we must look at the formative years of Jesus through the lens of the marginalized and the oppressed.

Mary and Joseph began with an extraordinary explosion of Grace. But this Grace did not arrive in a vacuum; it entered a world of Roman occupation and economic hardship. The coming of the Holy Spirit brought the gift of Jesus, the Savior, who was born into the proletarian class—the tekton workers who knew the weight of the hammer and the burden of the tax collector.

We know the story of state-sponsored terror that forced them into fleeing to Egypt. They were political refugees, victims of a tyrant’s fear, seeking safety in a foreign land. We have heard of the return and the fear of the empire that pushed them back to the periphery—to Nazareth. Here, Joseph and Mary lived as pious first-century Jews. Their lives were "decorated by the gift of the ordinary," which in their world meant long hours of grueling labor, shared communal meals, and the survival strategies of the poor. It was in this "ordinary" struggle that Jesus learned the value of human dignity over profit.

However, the real gift we celebrate today is what we were able to see through Jesus. It was his mother and father, the laborers Mary and Joseph, who influenced his words and his parables. When Jesus spoke of the vineyard, the debts, and the mustard seed, he was speaking from the collective memory of the Nazareth working class.

We also celebrate the experience of Jesus in Nazareth as a radical experience of love that broke the boundaries of the "private home." Nazareth gave us a Jesus who knew the temptations and limitations of bloodlines, creeds, and tribal politics—the very things used by the powerful to keep the people divided. Therefore, when Jesus was later confronted by his own family to return to the safety of his hometown, he used that moment to launch a spiritual and social revolution. He asked: "Who is my family? Who is my mother and my brother?"

In asking this, Jesus expanded the definition of family beyond the nuclear unit and the "blood and soil" of nationalism. He fundamentally rejected the idol of the Nation-State. Jesus’s definition of family is a direct rebuke to any "Christian Nationalism" that seeks to baptize a flag or claim a country as God’s exclusive territory. By redefining family as those who "do the will of the Father," Jesus stripped away the religious excuses for borders and walls. He made it clear that the Kingdom of God is not a geopolitical empire, but a global solidarity that transcends citizenship, language, and national interest.

The radical experience of Nazareth gave us a Jesus with an ever-expanding sense of solidarity. Family was no longer a closed circle of privilege or political alignment, but a commitment to doing the will of the Father.

And what is this "will"? It is found in the Good News to the poor. It is the commandment to love one another with a love that demands mercy, the cancellation of debts, and fidelity to a creative plan where the last are first. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth," we are calling for a world where no one is exploited and no one is discarded. We align ourselves with a merciful desire that no one should perish under the wheels of poverty or the violence of exclusion.

So, as we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family and our own parish family, we boast of no exclusivity. We are not a privileged country club or a closed circle of the "elect." Instead, we are a communal household called to partake in God’s work of liberation.

Our mission is to develop the same radical love seen in Nazareth: a love that sees the "other"—beyond race, class, gender, or lifestyle—as our own flesh and blood. For it is only in this deliberate act of solidarity that the will of the Father will truly be done on earth as it is in heaven.