… his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been worried to death looking for you.” (Lk 2:48)
A pretty typical interchange with a teenage son. It continues as you might expect: he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you realize …?”
And they ended up none the wiser: But they didn’t understand him.
In any TV drama this would just be the same old, same old. Yet another rather hackneyed account of parents and children being on different wavelengths.
But this is the “Holy Family”! Aren’t they supposed to be different, better, not like the rest of us, with our conflicts, hurts, and confusions?
Apparently not. Yes they are different, of course they are, but they are also the same. Jesus was different – he was God! But also he was man, and baby, and boy, and teenager. God became man, not to demonstrate how different He was, but to show how similar He is. He was born, he lived, he suffered, he died – just like any other person. His mother had a child she loved deeply, that sometimes she didn’t understand, sometimes remonstrated with him for his unreasonable behavior, who grew to be a man, who was executed like a criminal. Most mothers don’t suffer the last part of this, but nothing else is unfamiliar.
There is more similarity than difference to our experience here, for mother, for father, for son.
The Holy Family – just another family. In one sense no, of course not… but in another sense, yes. God on earth doesn’t want to prove how different He is – because He came to show us that we are like Him. His family was like ours. We are made in His image. We just have a hard time believing it.
And the most obvious difference? The bit I skipped over… That son, the Son, rose from the dead. Only God gets to do that. Well actually no – we all get to rise from the dead. We just have a hard time believing it.