Family Values

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator

The importance of family figures large in our culture, but it could not possibly be as important as it was to the Middle Eastern people of two millennia ago. Family and one's connection to family were the repository of one's heritage, the locus of one's present, and the promise of one's future all wrapped up into one. Without family, one could find oneself without the necessary resources to survive.

The Gospel illustrates the importance of family not so much be emphasizing what we have come to call "the Holy Family," so much as it stresses the fictive family that Jesus established when he struck out on his public ministry. The symbolic value of the Twelve as well as the seventy-two notwithstanding, Jesus could not have survived in his culture without the men and women who walked with him, supported him, and who carried on his mission after his death and resurrection. While our churches often have a statue or relief depicting Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we know with certainty that Jesus must have grown up in a much wider circle which he came to know as his family. As today's Gospel clearly illustrates, he also left that environment and formed a new reference group for himself and for his disciples.

The Gospel relates that Jesus defined his family as those who hear the Word of God and act upon it. The Gospel also relates that Jesus chose twelve men to be his close associates, a group that was supported by men and women who followed him and even used their financial resources to "keep body and soul together." Solitary life in first century Israel was simply not possible. As the Middle Eastern proverb goes, "It is in the desert that one learns the necessity of caravans."

The harsh fact about chronic illness and/or disability is that it often results in isolation. The whole purpose of CUSA is to provide relief for that isolation. By our participation in the support system that CUSA endeavors to maintain, we continue the Gospel admonition to hear the Word of God and to act upon it.