A house can be holy and still be hurried. Picture Joseph waking in the dark, heart pounding, listening to a message that feels like both mercy and emergency. There is no time for long conversations, no time to tidy loose ends. A child is lifted, a mother gathers what she can, and a family slips into the night—because God has chosen to save the Savior by sending him away.
The startling part is where they go: Egypt. Not the postcard Egypt of museums and pyramids, but the Egypt that lives in Israel’s memory: the place of slavery, the furnace of temptation, the land from which they once begged to be freed. It had become a symbol for everything that crushes and corrupts. And yet the angel says, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you.”
Then, even more astonishing, the Messiah is later summoned back with the words the prophet once used for Israel: out of Egypt God calls his Son. Salvation comes, not only through escaping evil, but through God entering the places we have labeled as hopeless.
That is an essential lesson for any family—and for any Christian heart. We are tempted to sort the world into clean categories: good people and bad people, safe neighborhoods and dangerous ones, “our kind” and “those people.” We learn to speak with contempt. We learn to expect nothing but trouble from certain places, certain cultures, certain relatives, certain sinners. But the Holy Family’s path refuses that kind of certainty. God sends his Son into the very land that represented bondage, and he draws healing and holiness from the unlikeliest soil.
Why? Because everything that exists is held in being by God. At every moment, the Lord keeps breathing existence into the world. If someone stands before you—wounded, angry, confused, even dangerous—it means God has not stopped sustaining them. And God does that, not by accident, but because he sees something worth loving. His love is not naïve, and it does not excuse sin; but it does reveal that no human being is beyond his reach, and no corner of creation is outside his work.
On this feast of the Holy Family, we honor a household that became refugees, strangers, and then returnees. Their story trains our hearts. When our family life feels like “Egypt”—a season of strain, misunderstanding, or fear—God is not absent. When our community feels like “Egypt”—full of tensions and labels—God is still calling, still preparing a way back to the promised land of peace.
So let your home become a small Nazareth: a place where no one is written off, where a harsh word is replaced by patience, where prayer makes room for the inconvenient person, the difficult conversation, the child who is struggling, the elder who feels forgotten. Refuse the easy habit of looking down on others. Speak and act as someone who believes God can draw sons and daughters out of Egypt.
The heart of a Christian is meant to resemble the heart of God: wide enough for mercy, steady enough for truth, and brave enough to hope for transformation.