A Homily for the First Sunday after Epiphany

+ “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
 
With these words the boy Jesus reproves the Blessed Virgin Mary for what was, on her part and on the part of Saint Joseph, an entirely understandable anxiety at having apparently lost their twelve-year-old son. A mother’s distress when she cannot answer the question “Where is he?” is more than understandable. So too is her surprise and even annoyance at finding that, instead of travelling home as she would have expected, her son was off doing his own things – conversing with the teachers in the Temple, no less!
 
The boy’s response “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” seems precocious. One might expect a humble apology. Instead, Our Blessed Lady is reproved.
 
This misunderstanding – if not quarrel – in the Holy Family is instructive. At matins this morning Saint Ambrose commented that Our Lady was rebuked because her thoughts were purely human. She had not yet grasped that, even as a boy, Our Blessed Lord belonged in His Father’s house; that his God-given mission took precedence over all other concerns.
 
There is no sin involved here. Everyone is acting for the good. But what is happening is that Our Lord making manifest a hierarchy of goods: that which concerns God, that which is supernatural, comes before merely human concerns.
 
In placing this Gospel before us today the Church invites us to consider this teaching carefully. What comes first for me in the particular circumstances of my life? Are my concerns purely human? Does the worship of God and the keeping of the teaching of His Church take a second place, when it should occupy the first?
 
In particular, for young people considering the question of how Almighty God is calling them to serve Him in this life, this teaching presents a clear challenge. Am I concerned simply for human comforts, or am I willing to accept that if I “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be [mine] as well” (Mt 6:33).
 
An honest and generous consideration of this challenge may give rise to the reality given expression by the song of the psalmist:
 
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
    that will I seek after;
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
    all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
    and to inquire in his temple. (Ps. 27:4)
 
There is no monk who does not know the moment when this reality, when these words, first touched his heart and he knew that henceforth he belonged ‘in his Father’s house.” And there are no few parents for whom this caused anxiety, particularly when their child is seemingly very young and may be thought to be behaving rashly or against his or her best (worldly) interests.
 
That the Holy Family itself experienced this tension should be something of a comfort to all parties concerned. But the teaching set before us by the Church today calls us beyond mere comfort. It calls us all – whatever the particular circumstances of our life and whatever vocation to which Almighty God calls us – to be about the things of God first. It calls us to a radical acceptance that yes, we must occupy ourselves with the things of God before all others – be that as a monk or nun, a spouse, a single man or woman, a secular cleric or an apostolic religious. And it calls us to not only permit, but to encourage and foster others, so to do.
 
Many years later as Our Blessed Lady knelt at the foot of the Cross, amidst the terrible human anguish she suffered, perhaps she remembered her twelve-year-old son’s rebuke? Perhaps even then she could not comprehend fully how His insistence on doing His Father’s will was truly necessary, at such a brutal cost?
 
The light and glory of the Resurrection of her Son removed all doubt and wiped away all tears. So to it shall for us, if but we place the things of God first and persevere in faith in Him.

Perhaps, today, we kneel before the Cross of this altar in anguish. Perhaps doubts continue to arise in our hearts. Let us ask the intercession of our Blessed Lady and beg the grace of perseverance that we, and all close to us, may more perfectly know and live from the light and glory of the resurrected Christ that, in this new Year of Our Lord 2021, we too may be first and foremost occupied with the things of God! +

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