THE PRESENTATION OF THE LORD: A FAMILY AFFAIR

“And the Lord, whom you seek, shall suddenly come to His temple.” (Malachi 3:1). With these words, the Prophet Malachi pointed to an event in the distant future almost shocking in its subtlety. The Lord suddenly appeared in his Temple without a white charger and without a retinue of followers. Rather, he came as a month-old infant in the arms of his impoverished parents. Only those most attentive to the workings of the Lord, the elderly Simeon and the octogenarian Anna, recognized him in the heart of the humble family that was his first monstrance. 

The Feast of the Presentation on February 2 has become particularly close to my heart in the past several years. As my wife and I wrestle with raising a young family while trying to pass on a living faith to them, this feast is a welcome glimpse into the Holy Family’s own religious practices and family challenges. Even as they struggled to provide for their humble family—a poverty evidenced by their offering of the poor family’s sacrifice of a pair of birds instead of a lamb (see Luke 2:24 and Leviticus 12:8)—they made sure to perform their religious duties as a faithful Jewish household. St. Luke points out that “when the time came for their purification,” a purification that was not strictly necessary in their unique case, “they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” Luke 2:22). Perhaps they could have skipped the whole thing, and maybe Joseph could have completed a project or two to generate a little extra income. But it was more important to be a religious family than a well-to-do family. 

This event also gives us a touching view of the ordinariness of their lives despite the utterly unprecedented reality of raising the eternal Son of God. They still had to go to the Temple, to procure what sacrificial animal they could afford, to perform the ritual. Mary and Joseph responded like many of us would, namely being rendered speechless by the spectacle of Simeon and his bittersweet canticle describing light for the nations, glory for Israel, and a sword for Mary’s heart. The struggles and the glorious moments are intertwined in this event from Jesus’ family life as they are in all our families’ lives. 

Those of us blessed and called to be priests of the Domestic Church, to lead small souls in the glorious and frustrating reality of family life, should take note. In the financial struggles and tax-inspired census, in the heights of angelic visions and the lows of painful prophecies, but mostly in the quiet humdrum of life in Nazareth, the Holy Family was just that, a family, and a family set apart to serve the Lord as they could and not as they couldn’t. 

This is the calling for every Christian family: to be a holy family, a sanctified family, a family that is different for the Lord. In doing so, we will be conformed to the image of the Holy Family in which the Lord dwelt. St. John Paul II once reminded the Church: “The sacrament of marriage is the specific source and original means of sanctification for Christian married couples and families. It takes up again and makes specific the sanctifying grace of Baptism” (Familiaris Consortio 56). The sacrament of Baptism causes the Lord to begin to dwell within the individual, and the sacrament of marriage causes the Lord to begin to dwell within the family. God himself dwelt within the Holy Family, and he also dwells within your holy family. He dwells there amid the ordinariness, the dishes and the laundry, the financial juggling, and the attempts at family prayer that go horribly wrong. 

After the Presentation in the Temple, the Gospels are almost completely silent on Jesus’ life for thirty years. He spent these three decades learning and growing, praying and listening, mourning loss and celebrating life, all of it experienced within the daily cadence of Jewish piety and religious practice. This beautiful family life was an offering acceptable to the Lord because it was presented to the Lord from its very beginning, at first by the will of Jesus’ parents and then after he attained the age of reason by his own will. Being completely and fully human and yet completely and fully God, Jesus of Nazareth brought God into all the ordinary things of life: pregnancy and childbirth, family religious practices, poverty, friendship, puberty, work, seeing friends move away, etc. He experienced all of it. As a fully human person, Jesus could offer to God the Father what none of us completely offers: our unreserved freedom, even our very lives. And as God, his unreserved freedom and his very life are of infinite value. Because Jesus is fully God and fully man, his death can count for me and for you. Because of the grace of Baptism and Marriage, our daily deaths can be united with his and thereby take on immense value. 

The Holy Family was an ordinary family that was extraordinary in its willingness to invite the Lord into the mundane. The Feast of the Presentation gives us a brief glimpse into this beautiful dynamic. When we also invite the Lord into the ordinariness of our marriages and our families, we become set apart for the Lord, a monstrance that displays his light for all nations.

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