Hope for each other

Bishop Scott Bullock
Homily from the Year of Hope Closing Mass
Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Rapid City
December 28, 2025

For this Feast of the Holy Family, we have been given the Gospel reading that recounts the first major crisis for the Holy Family — the menace of Herod who seeks the child Jesus in order to destroy him. The family is forced to flee to Egypt we know, by no means safe in its own right, since Egypt is associated with the chosen people as a place of bondage and degradation. Nonetheless, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus flee to Egypt — though there is a passage omitted that we just hear, of that actual flight and the Massacre of the Innocents. But then after the flight, the Gospel continues,  “When Herod had died, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” 

But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go back there, and because he had been warned in a dream, he departed for the region of Galilee. He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth.”

So, even upon their return to Israel, they are still under menace, and, we are told, end up in Nazareth, out of the reach of Herod’s son, Archelaus. It’s worthy to consider how was the Holy Family affected by all of these threats, and how did they react? While the Gospel details are scanty, I think we can easily imagine that, while Joseph and Mary were persons of extraordinary faith, nonetheless, they were no doubt distressed by these circumstances, and, at the same time, would do anything to protect the child Jesus. Though certainly they did not want to be in a foreign land like Egypt, they would do anything to protect the family.

I would never think of comparing the Holy Family with my own family, but I think there is a weak analogy there, in that our family, when I was young, too were displaced. Not by Herod but by General Motors. It was the years of the OPEC Oil Embargo from 1973-1974. Many of you are quite too young to know about those days, but this was a restricting of the oil supply that sent a shock wave through the automotive industry that employed my father. High gas prices produced a demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars that General Motors simply did not produce. Japanese imports soared, sales plummeted of American cars, and cuts were necessary at what many had formerly called “Generous Motors.” Dad received an ultimatum: relocation or unemployment. After some months of uncertainty, the news came down: dad’s job was waiting for him, not in Detroit, where he had worked for 15 years, but in the State of Delaware on the East Coast.

As it turns out, I have been thinking about this because, just yesterday, I was visiting the town where we moved to in Delaware with a priest friend.  As we walked the streets, I saw the old house in the old neighborhood, drove past the old high school, and walked the campus where I first attended college, the University of Delaware. Floods of emotions filled me in that place where I haven’t lived since I was 17 years old. That was a while ago.

Our capacity for memory is astonishing, isn’t it? One of the most divine aspects of us, when memory transcends time and hints at our eternal souls. A predominant memory was the truth of the sacrifices that my parents made, for our sakes, in uprooting our family for the sake of our well-being and security. This is what parents almost universally do for their children.  My memories were clear — my parents did not will or wish for the uprooting of their family from our home in Michigan, where all their family originated, but they did it nonetheless. The result — we continued as children, very much thriving children. While such circumstances never allow us to consider a what if — if the move had not been made of the generosity of my parents and what would have happened if we were thrown into economic uncertainty — things probably could have turned out quite differently.

So, when I posed the question, how did the holy family’s upheaval affect them, I suggested a hint from my own family history. I imagine many of you could look at your own family histories, and the sacrifices that your parents and ancestors made, to reach a similar conclusion: parents made great sacrifices to preserve your security.  Or, as our faith would understand it, their choices preserved hope. Hope, that virtue we’ve been considering during this Jubilee Year of Hope that ends with the Feast of the Holy Family. 

At the beginning of the year, I quoted Emily Dickinson’s great poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” which alluded to the fact that hope lifts us and helps us thrive and soar. We can indeed instill hope to each other, particularly in our families, through acts of sacrificial love for the sake of each other. It’s the type of love that St. Paul speaks of in his teaching we just heard: husbands, loving your wives in all humility; wives, humbling themselves before their husbands; children, humbly obeying their parents. In each of these acts, we sacrifice our own wishes for the greater good of our families and preserve hope. 

However, we can act in self-sacrificing ways which the world might suggest could threaten our happiness, because, as our faith teaches, Christ is our spes unica. He’s our singular hope. Because Jesus Christ came to Bethlehem, preached a message of hope through his adult life, and then saved us by the great act of love that was the Cross, we have a perfect sign of hope that is Jesus. He is the great safety net of hope that allows us to deny self-preservation, sacrifice out of love for others, and be a sign of hope and know we won’t be diminished. Because of our spes unica Jesus all will be well! In fact, as the love of Christ fills us with this hope, we gladly aspire to live in holy families by sacrificing for each other and preserving hope there, whatever misfortunes and mis-directions life throws at us.

The Holy Family was uprooted into a place of uncertainty, avoiding the Massacre of the Innocents and living in a foreign land, and yet they remained the perfect community of hope. Our own families, often motivated by our faith and fortified by the grace of God, have replicated our families as places of hope patterned after the example of the Holy Family and empowered by the grace of God that make such sacrificial love possible.

As this Year of Hope ends, let’s take with us two conclusions. First, Christ is our only hope! Inasmuch as we can follow his lead, obey his teaching to lay down our lives for each other, and trust in the grace of the Holy Spirit who is given to us, his hope can course through our lives to the lives of those we love.

Second, and related, we then are to be hope for each other by bearing the hope of Christ through acts of love like his, self-sacrificial love. We become hope by loving others, especially our families, according to the pattern of Jesus’ self-sacrificial love.

Once again, we have come to this, our great classroom of hope, the Eucharist.   Here, we watch with faith as Jesus’ sacrifice of the cross is re-presented to us under the forms of bread and wine. Here, we receive this outpouring of divine life that is from the Cross, God’s perfect act of self-sacrificial love. Here, we are empowered with the love and grace we need to bear Christ’s love, Christ our spes unica, to our families, our family of faith, and the family of humanity. When so often all these families are tempted to despair in the quite imperfect world, we can be sent as a leaven, a leaven of hope that is Christ’s hope coursing through us and reaching out to starving hearts. 

 So brothers and sisters, let’s go forth, Holy Family of Christ, and be hope to a world that is longing for that gift until Christ comes and let’s be the only hope that can ever save the world, Christ’s hope. For this is what families can do for each other!