This Reflection is taken from the Sunday Devotion written by this blogger for Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, SD on January 3, 2021.
Luke 2:41-52
The parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem every year for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day's journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, "Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety." He said to them, "Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.
New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Church of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.
REFLECTION
+ Give us strength to set our hearts on the pilgrims’ way. Amen +
Apart from the stories about Jesus’ birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, there is nothing said about Jesus’ growing up years, except this one story of a 12-year old Jesus going with Mary and Joseph to the Temple to celebrate the passover. The question that comes to mind is why Luke bothered to include it. Apart from it being a quaint story of a young adolescent boy staying behind in the Temple to talk to scholars and showing his parents some attitude, it doesn’t seem to offer us anything that we don’t already know about Jesus… or does it?
A little history that is not obvious to us in Luke’s telling of this story might be helpful in understanding Luke’s reason for placing it in his Gospel. The Jewish Talmud records a tradition that during the Second Temple period (the time in which this story took place) it was customary for families to take their first born sons to the Temple, particularly on the Feast of Passover, to do their first fast recalling the 10th plague of the Exodus story in which the firstborn of the Egyptians were slain. After such a fast, the firstborn son would be taken to the Temple to be blessed by the sages. [See Exodus 13].
This is most likely why Luke mentions Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to Jerusalem as a 12-year old. We can deduce from that encounter with such scholars, the inquisitive and bright boy that Jesus was had a lot of questions and was learning quite a bit from them. In fact, his claim at having to be in his Father’s house likely proceeded from those conversations; hence, his rather smart aleck question addressed to Mary and Jospeh, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Obviously Mary and Joseph did not know.
After loosing track of Jesus a days journey away from Jerusalem, they came racing back to the still over-crowded Jerusalem and having to take three days to finally find him in the Temple conversing with these scholars, they likely would not have been in a mood to be questioned about what they did or did not know. One can only imagine the immense relief they had when they found him and the frustration they soon felt after finding Jesus calmly conversing with a group of scholars who were taken by this bright 12-year old’s answers, but who also might have had it in mind to question Jesus where his parents were.
We get an understated sense of Mary’s and Joseph’s frustration with Jesus in Mary’s question, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” As if to add fuel to the fire, Jesus had the effrontery to basically say, “Why did you bother coming to find me? You should have been able to figure it out where I’d be.”
The simple fact is that Jesus knew all of that and didn’t bother telling Mary and Joseph of his intent to stay behind, and then acted annoyed at being confronted. Like any headstrong 12-year old who was determined to have his own way, Jesus didn’t want to risk the answer he likely knew would be “No.” Luke saying that Mary and Joseph didn’t understand what Jesus was saying is a mild way of saying they had enough of Jesus’ sass. Perhaps the most revealing comment in this story is “Then he (Jesus) went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.”
Why Luke added this story may have been to illustrate that after all the hoopla of Jesus’s birth as the Son of god, Jesus is truly one of us and what is true about us is true about Jesus also. Jesus had to go through all the “growing up” things we did. He made mistakes, and he sinned.
In this story we see Jesus committing both a sin of omission in not telling his parents what he was planning on doing and then committing the sin by following through with his plan. To top it all off, he tries to place the blame for Mary’s and Joseph’s anxiety on them for not having figured out what he was up to. While we might tend to overlook these obvious transgressions because we know Jesus is God’s Son, the simple fact is Jesus did things he shouldn’t have done and, like us, he had to learn from them, which he did. The last line of today’s lesson tells us that Jesus just didn’t hit the earth running with the fullness of God’s knowledge and wisdom when it says, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”
Amidst the chaos of that moment, Mary grasped the truth unfolding in her son. I can imagine that for Mary every such moment of watching Jesus grow into the son God shaped in her womb took her back to the day Gabriel greeted her with the news that she would be Jesus’ mother. Any parent can relate to incidents when a child acted less than stellar. Often such events are the ones we end up cherishing the most because they demonstrated how much that particular child needed us and reminded us how much we loved that child.
Jesus never claimed to be a a perfect human. He was not some sort of superhuman, or some type of divine “bot” infiltrating the human network. In spite of his imperfections and perhaps because of them, Jesus grew into the forgiving perfection of our Father’s love toward all creation, a task he accomplished on the cross. Jesus did not make this a personal pursuit. Everything Jesus did he envisioned his followers doing because just as what is true about us is true about Jesus, what is true for Jesus must be true for us. As Jesus grew into the perfection of our Father, he encouraged us to seek such perfection, when he said in his Sermon on the Mount, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Matthew 5:48].
May we, like Jesus, strive to grow in the perfection of God’s love for all creation as we set our hearts on the pilgrim’s way.
Amen.
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Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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