Feast of the Holy Family – 28 December 2025
In these days between Christmas and the New Year, in the great Octave of Christmas we focus our attention on a family. Not an idealised or sentimental family, but a real one: fragile, vulnerable, displaced, and living under threat.
The Holy Family does not step onto the stage of history surrounded by safety or certainty. Almost immediately, they are on the move. The Gospel we hear today reminds us that this child is born into danger; that his parents are anxious, searching, sometimes confused; that their life together unfolds amid political violence, fear for a child’s life, and the necessity of flight. Jesus grows up not in a protected bubble, but in a world where cruelty, injustice and insecurity are altogether real.
It reminds us yet again that God has not chosen to save the world from the outside. God chose to enter it exactly where it is most exposed: in the life of a family trying to stay together under pressure.
This year, perhaps more than many, we hear this feast differently. Recent events have left many families unsettled, grieving, anxious about safety, about the future, about the kind of world their children are inheriting. Violence, hatred, and social fracture have not remained “out there”; they have touched neighbourhoods, communities, and hearts. And for many families, Christmas itself has been marked not by ease but by absence, tension, or quiet sorrow.
The Holy Family speaks directly into that reality. They are not presented as perfect, but as faithful. Their holiness does not consist in having everything sorted, but in staying turned toward God and toward one another when things are uncertain. Consider Joseph for whom no words are recorded in the text of Scripture, but he is a man who listens, who acts, who protects. He wakes in the night. He responds to danger. He carries responsibility he did not choose but does not abandon. He stands as a sign of steady, humble courage. Mary, herself, treasures and ponders what she cannot yet understand. She holds together joy and pain, promise and perplexity. Her faith is not naïve; it is resilient. She shows us that love does not require certainty, only trust. And there is the infant Jesus – a child who is to be nurtured, taught, protected. God entrusts the salvation of the world to the daily faithfulness of a family.
This is perhaps the most challenging and consoling message of today’s feast: that families, in all their complexity and fragility, remain one of God’s primary ways of healing the world. The Holy Family reminds us that holiness grows in kitchens and car rides, in hospital rooms and school drop-offs, in moments of reconciliation after conflict, and in perseverance when love is tested. It grows where people choose not to give up on one another. At a time when social trust feels thin, when fear can so easily harden hearts, this feast calls us back to the foundations: to homes that are places of safety, to relationships marked by patience and mercy, to communities that support families rather than isolate them.
It also calls our wider Church to responsibility. If God chose to be born into a family under threat, then the Church must stand unambiguously with families who are vulnerable: families grieving violence, families living with trauma, families displaced, families struggling economically or emotionally. The Holy Family does not sanctify withdrawal; it sanctifies solidarity.
This weekend the Year of Jubilee we have been celebrating closes in the local Churches through the world, finally concluding in Rome next weekend. And throughout this Year of Jubilee, we have focused our hearts on the theme of hope, the letters of which have stood boldly on the steps of our church through 2025 – not the false hope that everything will be easy, but the deeper hope that God is already present in the midst of what is difficult. The same God who entrusted himself to Mary and Joseph continues to entrust himself to us—often in fragile, unfinished, human ways.
As we place our families, and the wounded fabric of our society, before the Lord today, we do so knowing this: God has already chosen to dwell there. And where God dwells, even fear and grief can become places where new life begins.
