Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt,
and stay there until I tell you.
Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.
Joseph had an important, even a vital role to play as the protector of the Holy Family. He was quick to obey the angel of Lord both out of reverence for God and out of love for his family. He did not wait until morning to obey, lest he wait too long, but "took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt". It was he that provided the family with what was necessary for travel and it was his skills that allowed them to make a life in Egypt for as long as there was need, "until the death of Herod". Joseph was not an optional afterthought given to provide a father in appearance only. He really was the head of the household, but he led them with servant leadership, knowing better than to lord it over the holy mother and child in his charge. And it was through Joseph that Jesus received his ancestral claim that made him heir to the throne of David.
We tend to think first of individuals and only secondly about families. Modernity makes us want to believe that Jesus could have been dropped into history fully formed without any of this backstory and and that he would still have developed into the Messiah we recognize. And certainly there might have been a variety of ways God could have brought about our salvation. But Jesus would not be the Messiah we recognize had he not come from the specific family that was his by the plan of his heavenly Father. In his human nature Jesus grew and learned like other boys, and it was from his father and his mother that these lessons chiefly came. God himself was, after all, the one who gave the commandment to honor one's father and mother. We cannot conceive of Jesus choosing to have a father and mother and somehow disregarding this commandment.
God sets a father in honor over his children;
a mother’s authority he confirms over her sons.
Whoever honors his father atones for sins,
and preserves himself from them.
When he prays, he is heard;
he stores up riches who reveres his mother.
The fact of the matter is that individualism such as marks our current era was unthinkable in the time of the Holy Family. It was not even a question that the family was the fundamental unit of society, the context of action for any individual. It was not a world of individual actors negotiating with one another the terms of relationships in implicit (or sometimes explicit) contractual arrangements. It was a world marked by covenants ordered to the gift of self. Yet a family could only be a truly Holy Family to the degree that it put God first, as indeed Joseph did by his prompt response to the angel's summons. This explains the hard words Jesus spoke about families. They were only potential obstacles to the Kingdom because they were so good and could therefore go so very wrong when misdirected.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me (see Matthew 10:37).
The need for holy families was the reason Jesus prized obedience to the word of God over ties of blood. Blood relationship was the ideal context for sanctity but it could not in itself sanctify apart from this sine qua non.
For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother (see Mark 3:35).
We see in the Gospels mostly the outliers of the family life of Jesus, those situations which were more unusual and more difficult to square with our understanding of family life. But the holiness of the holy family would have been so all pervasive as to in fact by hidden and difficult to describe. It stood out when Jesus stayed behind in the temple precisely because he was so often in the place they expected him to be.
My son, take care of your father when he is old;
grieve him not as long as he lives.
Even if his mind fail, be considerate of him;
revile him not all the days of his life;
We know that the Holy Spirit himself inspired these words as words that Jesus would embrace, both in regard to his earthly father and to his heavenly one. And we know that we have been invited by faith to be members of the family of Jesus. He himself has the greatest possible love for family, which he, together with the Father and the Spirit, invented as a way for the Triune God to reveal their own inner life to us. But Jesus went further by becoming a part of a human family. He made it possible for us to elevate the ties of our own families to the supernatural level of grace, and demonstrated fully the heights that such a level attains. When the peace of Christ controls the hearts of a family these words of Paul will more and more describe it:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,
as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another,
singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs
with gratitude in your hearts to God.
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