A family embracing God made man

Scripture Notebook
Nicholas King SJ Feast of the Holy Family
Ecclesiasticus 3:2-6.12-14 Colossians 3:12-21 Matthew 2:13-15. 19-23 THIS GREAT feast is normally celebrated on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas, but since this year January 1 is a Sunday, the feast has been pushed back two days to make way for the great solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God.
We are, however, following Matthew's gospel this year, and since Sunday's gospel is taken from Luke's presentation of the history of our salvation, it seemed good to reflect on what Matthew has to tell us of the Holy Family.
The gospel reading is the account, found only in Matthew, of the flight into Egypt, omitting the terrible tale of the slaughter of the innocents. It is a formidable story, this, and will have chilled Matthew's Jewish readers to the marrow. For Joseph, the just and good man who dreams dreams will have reminded them with striking clarity of the patriarch whom the jealousy of his elder brothers drove down into Egypt; and this was, ultimately, the cause of the slavery from which Moses rescued the people of God.
We shall be seeing in the course of this year how Matthew is often concerned to present Jesus as the new Moses, and no Jewish reader of this gospel will have missed the point that Joseph is counselled to "take the little child and his mother and flee to Egypt" (of all places!).
Nor will they have missed the significance of the reason for the flight: The Messiah of Israel must take refuge with the ancient enemy of Israel, because the King of Israel seeks to murder him, just as once a Pharaoh had sought to murder all Israel's male children; and, with no concessions to subtlety, Matthew now hammers the message home: "He arose, and took them by night" (precisely as the Jews had done in the original Passover).
The point that Israel's establishment has been unfaithful to the God who formed Israel as a people is made, delicately but unmistakably by Matthew's use of "out of Egypt I called my son", a quotation from a passage in Hosea that emphasises how again and again God's tender, maternal love has been met with blank rejection from the people of God.
The echoes of Israel's past arc there also in the second half of today's passage: "when Herod died" marks a relaxation of the situation for the holy family, just as the death of a Pharaoh, and the arising of nother Pharaoh "who knew not Joseph" had meant that things got worse for Joseph's kinsmen.
The dreamer is again warned, in a way that is standard in the bible for the authentic servants of God, to retrace the journey of the original Exodus, and Matthew almost quotes Jethro's words to Moses: "Go back, for the men who were seeking your
life are dead", in case we had not quite grasped the point. Then Jesus enters the land of Israel (with Joseph and his mother), just as Joshua (the names are the same in Greek) had before him.
Not even this brings rest for the holy family, however, for another dream alerts Joseph to the danger of settling in Judaea itself, "for Archelaus was ruling Judaea in his father's place". So another king of Israel drives the Messiah of Israel away "into the parts of Galilee", that traditionally suspect • area of mixed race and doubtful orthodoxy and a barely comprehensible dialect.
So they settle in Nazareth, and Matthew rounds the whole thing off with a (slightly muddled) quotation indicating that God had foreseen the whole thing.
And why does the Church give us this gospel reading on the feast of the Holy Family? Quite simply, it is that Joseph and the child and the child's mother are seen in this story as the lone group prepared to follow the commandments of God against the worst that man can do. Without this remarkable family, the new Exodus could never have taken place.