Both marriage and family have had an essential role in God’s plan for humanity’s salvation.  Throughout salvation history, marriage and the family protected the “promised seed” of Genesis 3:15 from which the Redeemer-Messiah was destined to come to rescue humanity from sin and death.  The line flourished in the families of the descendants of Seth, son of Adam and Eve, and his descendant Abraham and his wife, Sarah.  Their son Isaac continued the line of the “promised seed” in his marriage to Rebekah as God continued the Abrahamic covenant through their son Jacob-Israel.  St. Matthew and St. Luke traced that family line in Jesus’ genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew 1:1-18 and the Gospel of Luke 3:23-38.  It culminated in the Holy Family of Joseph and Mary of Nazareth, and Mary’s son, conceived by the Holy Spirit, the “promised seed” sent to undo the work of Satan (1 Jn 3:8) who is the Redeemer-Messiah, Jesus Christ.

In the ecclesial community, we experience the Christian family which constitutes a specific revelation and realization of that which is called the “domestic Church.”  The Christian family is a communion of persons in the Body of Christ; it is “a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (CCC 2205).  In the procreation and raising of children in the Christian family, we reflect the Father’s work of creation and become His partners in the flow of salvation history.  The spiritually re-born children of God in the Christian family continue to have a mission to fulfill in salvation history.  God calls every Christian family to partake of the prayer and sacrifice of Jesus Christ and to complete His mission to evangelize within the family and outside the family to the human families in the world.

SOURCE: Michal E. Hunt’s Agape Bible Study. Used with permission.

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GOSPEL: Initial observations

Jesus in the Temple is a story unique to Luke’s gospel. Luke may well be using a source here (for example, there seems to be no awareness of the virginal conception in the story). Rather than an innocent reminiscence, the story bears the marks of post-Easter composition.

This deceptively simple tale serves several purposes of the evangelist.

1. It reminds us of the Jewishness of Jesus and his family.
2. It fulfils one of the conventions of ancient biography: childhood prodigies.
3. It begins the portrait of Jesus as a prophet and as a reader of Scripture.
4. It portrays Jesus as a human being, experiencing the ordinary development from childhood onwards. (
5. It shows Jesus himself taking “ownership” of all the things said of him thus far in the Infancy Narrative of Luke.

All five elements are significant for Luke. He is very likely writing against what we may call proto-Marcionism, that is the desire to uproot Jesus from his Jewish matrix, and behind that a desire to dismiss Judaism as somehow surpassed and superseded. He may also be countering the beginnings of Apollinarianism, evident in other non-canonical accounts of Jesus’ childhood. Typically, these so emphasise the divinity of the child Jesus that he seems hardly human. There is a considerable contrast, for example, with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (quoted below; you can find it here: http://www.gnosis.org).

SOURCE: HEARERS OF THE WORD by Dr. Kieran J. O’Mahony, OSA

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The focus of the inspired writer of the Book of Sirach in this passage is the relationship between children and parents based on the fourth of the Ten Commandments to honor one’s father and mother (Ex 20:12 and Dt 5:16). Of all the Ten Commandments, it is the only one that contains a blessing and an implied warning. Sirach lists the blessings that belong to those who fear offending God by honoring their parents, and he begins by saying that it is God who gives parents authority over their children (verse 2). The blessings in verses 3-6 and 14 for giving honor and respect to one’s parents include:

• Whoever honors his/her father makes atonement for sins (verses 3 and 14).
• Whoever glorifies his/her mother lays up reward in heaven (verse 4).
• Whoever honors his/her father will have good relationships with his or her children (verse 5).
• God will hear the prayers of those who honor their fathers because the sin of disrespecting one’s father in violation of the 4th commandment will not be a barrier (verse 5).
• Whoever glorifies his/her father will enjoy a long life (verse 6; cf., Ex 20:12 and Dt 5:16).

SOURCE: Michal E. Hunt’s Agape Bible Study. Used with permission.

Ps 128:5 suggests the singing of the psalm during pilgrimage journeys to the Jerusalem Temple where a priest welcomed them and pronounced a blessing over them. Zion is the symbolic name for the Church of the Sinai Covenant. This psalm then is concerned with instruction and blessings for people making a religious pilgrimage to the Temple of God.

SOURCE: Michal E. Hunt’s Agape Bible Study. Used with permission.

The feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread took place during an eight-day period in the early spring as a required memorial of the Exodus redemption (Ex chapter 12; Lev 23:4-14; Num 28:16-25).  The feast of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15-21^st) began at sundown on the day of the Passover sacrifice and was one of the three “pilgrim feasts” in which every man of the covenant who was thirteen years and older was required to appear before God’s altar with his sacrifices (Ex 23:14-17; 34:18-23; Dt 16:16-17; 1 Chron 8:13).  In the first century AD, the two feasts were celebrated as though they were one feast lasting eight days and were referred to simply as “the Passover.”  It was a joyous time and many families made the journey to Jerusalem, like the Holy Family on this occasion.

Jesus was twelve years old when He made the journey (verse 41).  Biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias writes “… the Talmud speaks of thirteen years as the border-line for the fulfillment of the law.  Luke 2:42 is not in contradiction with this rule; the twelve-year-olds were brought on the pilgrimage in order to get them used to the event which would become a duty the next year” (Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, page 76).

SOURCE: Michal E. Hunt’s Agape Bible Study. Used with permission.