A Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph
Readings: Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 Colossians 3:12-21 or 3:12-17 Luke 2:41-52
You have died, and the doors to the divine presence have swung open. What will you see?
In one way, nothing; in another, everything. Initially, your body does not accompany your soul, so you will not encounter God by way of any of your senses. You will not literally see God. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, we speak of “seeing” God because it seems to be the noblest of the senses, but the “vision” of God will be what St. Thomas would call an intellectual one.
What is an intellectual vision? Let’s put it in context. Following a long line of Catholic thought, Thomas contrasts the knowledge of God, the angels and ourselves. God, Thomas says, simply is the union of being and knowing, what is and what is known. So God never not knows.
In contrast, angels must will to know something, and they do so by way of what philosophers call intuition. Once they decide to know something angels know it immediately and exhaustively. How appropriate that one of their New Testament titles is “watchers”!
In contrast, human knowledge is discursive. To pick up on the Latinate term, it “runs about.” We need senses, language and acts of communication to share what we know with one another. We do not know by an act of the will alone. We must take time to learn. Nor can we share our knowledge with others by a mere act of the will. No, we must talk about it, write about it, sing about it. For us, knowledge is a sweaty business.
But following St. Thomas, when those doors swing open, we will “see” God by way of direct intuition. There will be no heavenly orientation. Looking upon the Lord, we will know all that we are given to know. And contrary to popular imagination, there will be no juridical process in which God rehearses our sins. We will not watch ethereal film clips that catalog them.
No, the saints are rather united in saying that when we look upon the face of Christ we will immediately know whether the life we have lived has readied us for this vision. Strictly speaking, God will not pronounce judgment and send us to hell. We will already know that this has always been our choice.
Yet the immediate revelation of our sins is perhaps not the most fearsome aspect of entering God’s presence. To my mind, much more terrifying will be the revelation of who God always intended us to be. And as the intellect that called the cosmos into being, God knows all that is and all that might have been, the realized and the unrealized.
Every decision we make is contingent, tied to preceding and subsequent causes. God knows not only all that is but also all that might have been, and someday God will share this knowledge with us. Saved or damned, we will see what might have been, the saint we could have become if only we had been more attentive to the work of the Spirit. And this will be our great cause for shame: what might have been.
In his ascension to the Father’s right hand, our Lord did not experience any revelation of the Messiah he might have been. No, when he died on the cross, he said, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30), and it truly was. All was complete. Everything that his Father had given Jesus to do, all that the Father wanted him to become, was fully realized.
Our Lady enters salvation history saying, “Let it be done unto me according to thy will” (Lk 1:38). When she was assumed into heaven, she never had to ponder the saint she might have become. Like her Son, she surrendered everything, given all that she was, to the will of the Father.
We celebrate the Holy Family, a feast that pricks us a bit. It leaves us feeling that we and our families have not measured up. That realization is something we need to own in this life because we will surely encounter it again, much more painfully and fully, in the life to come.
The family is a microcosm of salvation history. We are sinned against before we ever sin, and there is so much that simply had to be as it was. Still, it is in the family that we first learn of sin, of grace, of resentment and redemption. And it is within the family that we begin to offer our partial surrenders to God’s will.
As we age, regret enters our lives, knowledge of what might have been. It is a great moral burden that the aged must carry. Perhaps it is a measure of God’s mercy that in eternity, the regret will be instantaneous and comprehensive. We did not become the saint God dreamed of before the mountains were fixed or the stars hung in the sky. And this realization will remain. As St. Thérèse of Lisieux put it, God fills every soul in heaven, but not all souls in heaven have the same capacity for God. This compass is something we carve out through lives of penitence and asceticism.
But hopefully, like St. Joseph, in large measure, we will have become what God always intended. There is no jealousy in heaven. Joseph does not resent the fullness of his adoptive son. Christ was, after all, the complete and perfect initiative of God among us. Nor is he jealous of his spouse. Someone had to be our inspiration, the model of what it means to be full of grace, to fully receive the Son.
Still, man and saint that he was, Joseph entered heaven knowing that it could have been different, that he, too, could have given more. That realization, like the eternal awareness of the damned, is a permanent part of the redeemed cosmos to come. But it nestles into a knowledge still greater: All is grace. In his mercy, God will yet fill our lives with his presence—partially in this life and fully in the life to come.
