FINDING THE CHRIST CHILD

A REFLECTION FOR THE FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY

The Fifth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary does not begin well.  It certainly does not begin joyfully.  One can only imagine the shock and then fear when our Lady and St. Joseph realize they have left their 12-year-old son behind in Jerusalem.  The anguish felt by his Mother is so great that it ranks as one of her Seven Sorrows, comparable to those she will suffer at Christ’s Passion and Death.  It is another reminder that this life is a mixture of sorrows and joys, and that only in the next will our joy be complete and truly fulfilled.

Eventually, they find the Christ Child in the temple of Jerusalem, “sitting in the midst of the doctors, hearing them, and asking them questions.” Should we ever “lose” Jesus through sin, we must seek him out again.  “Seek and ye shall find.” No matter how far we have traveled away from God, whether it be three days’ journey or more, we must turn around, go back, and find him again.  The farther we go in the wrong direction, the less chance we have of finding him at the end of our journey.  And so it is necessary to turn around, to “con-vert”.  We have lost something more precious than gold or silver, more precious even than the air we breathe.  Without Christ in our soul, we are dead.  Dead forever.  Instead of being united to our God, we are spiritually dislocated from him who is the source of all goodness and grace, our first cause and last end.  There is no limit to the anguish we should feel at this separation.

Christ will not follow us when we leave him behind.   He has given us the free will to abandon him.  But he wants us to use that same free will to seek him out again, to return to the God we have forsaken by our sins.  And so he waits.  Meanwhile, our soul is dead and we have no hope of resuscitating it ourselves.  We need help.  And so God sends his Blessed Mother, our Blessed Mother, to go looking for us.  By remaining faithful to her, even though we have offended her Son, she will seek us out and bring us home.  By clinging to the Rosary and whispering our anguished “Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen”, we may be assured still of God’s mercy if we do what is necessary to find forgiveness.