Pope’s Angelus of Sunday 31
December 2017: Full text
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| The Nativity scene in St Peter's Square.- AFP |
This Sunday, Pope Francis reflects on the Feast of the Holy
Family and how St Luke’s Gospel describes the presentation of Jesus in the
Temple
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
On this first Sunday after Christmas, we celebrate the Holy
Family of Nazareth, and the Gospel invites us to reflect on the experience
lived by Mary, Joseph and Jesus, while they grow together as a family in mutual
love and trust in God. Trust is an expression of the ritual performed by Mary
and Joseph with the offering of her son Jesus to God: "They brought the
child to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord" (Lk 2:22), as required by
the Law of Moses. The parents of Jesus go to the temple to certify that the
child belongs to God and that they are the guardians of his life and not the
owners.
This gesture emphasizes that only God is the Lord of
individual and family history; everything comes to us from Him. Every family is
called to recognize this primacy, guarding and educating children to be open to
God who is the very source of life. From here comes the secret of inner youth,
paradoxically witnessed in the Gospel by an elderly couple, Simeon and Anna.
The old Simeon, in particular, inspired by the Holy Spirit says about the child
Jesus: "He is destined for the fall and for the rising of many in Israel
and as a sign of contradiction [...] so that the secret thoughts of many may be
laid bare.”
These prophetic words reveal that Jesus came to bring down
the false images that we make of God and of ourselves; to
"contradict" the worldly certainties on which we claim to support
ourselves; to make us "rise up" to an authentic human and Christian
journey based on the values of the Gospel. There is no family situation that
is precluded on this new path of rebirth and resurrection. Whenever families,
even those wounded and marked by frailty, failure and difficulty, return to the
source of Christian experience, new paths and unimagined possibilities open up.
Today's Gospel story tells us that Mary and Joseph,
"when they had done everything the law of the Lord required, they returned
to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew to maturity and he
was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.” A great joy of the
family is the growth of children. They are destined to mature and become
strong, to acquire wisdom and to receive the grace of God, just as happened to
Jesus. He is truly one of us: the Son of God becomes a child, He agrees to grow
in maturity and strength, He is filled with wisdom and the grace of God is upon
him. Mary and Joseph experience the joy of seeing all this in their son; and
this is the mission to which the family is called: to create the best
conditions that will allow for the harmonious and full growth of children, so
that they can live a life that is good, worthy of God, and constructive for the
world.
This is the wish I have for all families, a wish I accompany
with an invocation to Mary, Queen of the Family.
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