The Gospel of the Holy Family presents us with a scene marked by danger, flight, and uncertainty. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus do not live a “protected” faith, but a faith tested by history. Yet it is precisely within this fragility that the missionary face of the family of Nazareth is revealed: a family called not to preserve, but to guard and deliver God’s gift to humanity. Mission is born not from security, but from listening; not from strength, but from trust. The Holy Family thus becomes an icon of every Christian family, sent into the world as a living place of the Gospel.
The figure of Joseph emerges in the Gospel as the one who makes God’s mission possible through concrete obedience. It is he who receives the angel’s word; it is he who discerns; it is he who acts. Joseph’s obedience is never abstract: it translates into immediate, demanding, risky choices. “He rose in the night and took the child and his mother” (Mt 2:14). Night signifies the darkness of uncertainty, but also the time of pure faith, when one cannot see everything and trusts.
Joseph does not ask for explanations, does not seek confirmation, does not procrastinate. His mission consists in being an instrument for God’s plan to continue in history. He accepts a change of country, job, and social identity. He becomes a refugee to save his Son. In this sense, Joseph is the first “missionary of the incarnation”: he defends God’s presence in the world with his daily faithfulness. Indeed, obeying the mysterious divine plan, he brought Jesus the Savior to Egypt, to the distant land, anticipating the missionary journeys undertaken by Christ’s disciples later, in the time of the Acts of the Apostles, to the ends of the earth.
Today, Joseph speaks to every father, every leader, every believer called to protect the lives and faith of others. Mission often comes through silent decisions, made in the secrecy of conscience, where obedience to God comes before consensus, security, and success.
Mary lives her mission not by directing events, but by fully inhabiting what happens. In the Gospel narrative, she doesn’t speak words, but her presence is essential. She accompanies her Son in his precariousness, shares his exile, accepts a life marked by fear and poverty. Her mission is entirely based on total availability to God’s plan, which began with her “here I am” and “fiat.”
Mary is a missionary because she generates and protects life. In the silence, in the toil of daily life, in the seclusion of Nazareth, she continues to believe that God is at work. Her service is humble because it does not seek visibility; it is silent because it relies on the Spirit rather than words. In this way, Mary shows that mission is not just about setting out far away, but about remaining faithful wherever God has placed us.
Her figure illuminates the mission of so many mothers, so many women, so many believers who evangelize through care, patience, and the ability to suffer without losing hope. Mary teaches us that the world is also saved through hidden love, the love that doesn’t make headlines but sustains life.
Jesus is the heart of the Holy Family’s mission and, at the same time, is already God’s missionary from the very beginning of his existence. He does not yet proclaim the Kingdom with words, but with his very life. The Son of God enters history on the side of the persecuted, the exiled, the threatened. Egypt, a place of slavery for Israel, becomes the Savior’s first refuge, indeed his first “mission territory,” far from his homeland. In his person the Word is now fulfilled: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” He now identifies with all the people enslaved by sin and walks with them in a new exodus of history, the final one, towards the promised land of eternal happiness with God.
In Jesus, the story of a God who saves not from above, but from within the human condition is fulfilled. His mission is to fully share our fragility, to take the risk of love, to allow himself to be entrusted to the hands of a poor and vulnerable family. Nazareth, an insignificant place, becomes the space where the Son grows “submissive” (cf. Luke 2:51), learning obedience and work and observing the holy tradition of his people transmitted in Sacred Scripture.
This tells us that the Son’s mission is not power, but gift; not domination, but proximity, to share divine love with everyone along the way. Every Christian family becomes a missionary when it allows Jesus to live within its own history, transforming even wounds and fears into a source of salvation.
In conclusion, the Holy Family is truly a family on mission because it experiences God’s mission amidst the fragile normality of life. Joseph obeys, Mary serves, Jesus shares. Thus, the home of Nazareth becomes the first missionary space in history. Today too, every family that listens to God, embraces life, and walks in trust becomes a sign of the Gospel in the world. And so be it. Amen.
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