A young soldier once wrote to his father, complaining of his many duties and the demands of the military life, even rising in the early hours to begin the day. His father was not impressed, and replied: ‘My boy, your mother and I must get up three or four times a night to calm a crying baby [they had just had their fourteenth child], and that is less romantic than your physical training. (Howard Twilley)

Many of the abilities and abilities we possess as adults and probably never comprehend are due to our parent’s unrelenting sacrifice. Brushing teeth, tying laces, riding bikes: nobody is born with these abilities – someone has had to endure boredom of the highest level, repeating the same old thing repeatedly and again for our sake. How bored my mother must have been spending night after night throwing me in the air whenever I managed to read a word correctly (I had stubbornly refused to start reading), but it worked, and I was soon reading without any encouragement.

Every one of us has the benefit of numerous acts of generosity and sacrifice. That is what it means to be part of a family, to be a part of a community where people give themselves freely so others can grow and develop. I exist against a hidden backdrop of generation after generation, a story of formation in human life of which I am a part of the chain.

Jesus, as the genealogies in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke remind us, is a part of a family story, he exists against a backdrop of generation formation, of sacrifice and generosity. In the Gospel, we see Jesus’ immediate family situation shifted to the limit through anxiety and fear of loss.

Mary and Joseph have searched for three days and three nights for Jesus, and when they find him in the Temple his words must have cast a shadow over the life they lived together: ‘Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house.’ The child given to them to raise, to sacrifice for, is destined to be the sacrifice of liberation for the whole human race. Jesus’ destiny is to give everything back to the source of creation, so that it may be renewed and recreated. He tells us that the backdrop of all things is the patient generosity of the Father, who will sacrifice even his own Son so that we may have a life.

Therefore, the holy family is a family learning to live backwards. The child is often the image of the parents, but in this family, Mary is in the image of her Son: without sin she is a mirror for the newness of what God is doing in Christ, and Joseph – like us a sinner – is called to let that image be formed in him patiently, through the graces of the Holy Spirit working within him.

This family, called to form and raise a boy, is a school where the adults are established through knowing and loving the child. The Gospel contrasts the scribes in the Temple, amazed at the wisdom of the boy Jesus, as so many will be amazed at his words in his earthly ministry – an amazement so compatible with taking offence, rejecting Jesus, putting him to death. Those entrusted with teaching Israel will not desire to learn, will not be able to see.

Mary, we are told, kept all these things in her heart. Mary’s humility allows her to be taught by her own child, and so she can become more deeply in the image of the one who is the true image of the Father. Going back to Nazareth Jesus is obedient to Mary and Joseph and grows in stature. The holy family is a place of passing on the story of human life, of the old transforming into the young. Moreover, this family is a place where the young shape the old, where the heart must grow older as it contemplates the face of Christ.

As much of what we do is passing on, passing on the benefits of human life and human life to those who will come after us. Whether it is our savings, the future good of the planet, or a love for great literature, human beings seek to convey it to others. But not everything is passing away into the future. The child born of Mary has come to renew humanity, to bring it back to life in the freshness of God’s Holy Spirit through the merciful patience of the Father.