NOTES for Col 3:12-25
Today’s text is quite straightforward. Not because it is easy to accept, but because everyone has parents, and many have wives, husbands, and children. Consequently, it is very easy for us to see how often we fall short of what we read. If things are not right with our parents, then they are not right with our children; if not with our children, then with our wives or husbands—somewhere, something is wrong. Yet there is a precedent: people have succeeded in realizing relationships like these within a family, when an inexhaustible reserve of goodwill made it possible to live in peace and love and, when necessary, in forgiveness. In the Holy Family we see that it is genuinely possible for a human being to live this way. Someone may say, “Of course—Mary and Joseph were raising Jesus, the perfect Man, whereas my children are nothing like that.” Yet this was more likely an additional difficulty in living the life of the Holy Family, for they bore responsibility for the Savior. What parents usually find hardest to accept is that their own child follows his or her own path and chooses it independently. In this case, the parents had to accept Jesus’ way of the Cross and help Him along that way.