Answers
Luke 2:41-52
December 27, 2009
There was an entertaining series of movies a while back, “Home Alone,” in which through a remarkable mess of mis-coordination and miscommunication, the 10 year old son was left behind in a New York City mansion over the Christmas holidays. And in good Hollywood style there needed to be a Home Alone Two, so somehow his parents had to bungle matters again the next year and leave him behind again. In both years he thwarted the efforts of house thieves with great relish. Seldom did the movie revert to the parents’ worry and anxiety. It was more fun with abandoned boy.
Passover was as big a holiday as one could find in ancient Judaism, celebrating the liberation of the Jews from captivity in Egypt as a result of the final plague - the passing over of the Angel of Death over the first-born of the Israelites whose door frames had been painted with the blood of a lamb. If that sounds familiar, it’s supposed to be. It’s the prequel, the preview of Easter. We hear this story in the Lectionary only once every three years on this Sunday, so Christmas and Easter are of one cloth. It’s worth walking slowly to Jerusalem and back.
“Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover, and when Jesus was twelve years old, they went up according to custom.” This has to mean that until he was 12 Jesus was left home at Passover, probably with older relatives who did not want to make the 230 kilometer round trip by foot. Judaism was a faith rooted in The Land, especially in the territory of Jerusalem, so when it came to the major feasts and holidays, you had to be in Jerusalem. It’s hard for us to think otherwise, but this meant that any attempt to properly celebrate the Passover outside of Jerusalem and its Temple was considered invalid, indeed blasphemous.
But now he was 12, an adult according to the standards of the Minyan and his first legitimate opportunity to be fully Jewish. Regrettably, the Gospel tells us not a word about what the family did in Jerusalem during the Passover, simply that it had ended and the parents set out to return home. The boy Jesus, it simply states, stayed behind in Jerusalem, and seemingly he intended to. Jesus was not lost; he had found what he was looking for.
His parents did not know it - a subtle phrase to describe the parental condition. What do parents know anyway? Thinking he was with the Nazareth caravan, it was easy to miss him for the first day. The second day they were more thorough and hightailed it back to Jerusalem, looking high and low. On the third day they found him in the last place they thought imaginable, in the Temple.
They found him studying. Isn’t that a clear sign of divinity - a 12-year-old boy absent-mindedly spending his time studying the Torah with the help of rabbis and teachers? For days, for heavens’ sake. That’s how study happens in Judaism - reciting, interpreting and arguing over Scripture, attempting to derive as practical an application as possible. Appropriately, Jesus was listening to his elders and asking them questions. But they were amazed at the kind of questions he was asking, demonstrating his understanding of the whole scheme of Scripture, and after a while they began to listen to him and his answers were something to listen to.
Does this make Jesus divine? Not really, for I am sure there are Jewish adolescents today who can rival and surpass what is intimated here about Jesus. Does it reveal a hint of who Jesus will become in not quite two decades? To some degree, certainly, for Jesus will be verbally sparring with the Pharisees and Sadducees, and there was no corner out of which he could not paint himself.
Our English translations of the Bible are notorious for not capturing the tone of voice and accent and emphasis of certain controversial statements. The English comes out bland, plain prose. Mary and Joseph were “astonished.” That’s a nice word, but I think something stronger is required. Flabbergasted would be a good middling idiom for the expression Mary would then spell out, “Son, why have treated us so?” I am not asking for volunteers, but just how did you express it that time with your son or daughter?
Jesus, like most 12 year old boys is clueless regarding his parents’ anxiety - an authentic witness to his full humanity. He responds to their plight, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” As far as Jesus was concerned, this was the first place they should have been looking for him, not the last. They did not get it. And that little attribution, “My Father’s house,” must have made no sense at all for Joseph. Or maybe it did; things weren’t ordinary that night 12 years ago, if you remember.
Then the subject changes: Jesus went down to Nazareth with his parents, not his parents leading the way as was the case before the festival. Such is the day when one’s child takes the lead and creates a new universe. He was obedient to his parents, as if it were a decision he had opted to take by his own fancy. Mary once again pondered and kept all these things in her heart; her wisdom derives more from these deep ponderings than from any innate wisdom she may have possessed prior to the Holy Spirit coming upon her. Clarence Jordan rephrases the last verse, “And Jesus forged ahead both mentally and physically. God liked him, and people did too.”
There is nothing extraordinary about this vignette, but that is why it is extraordinary. Jesus is portrayed in his most plainly human character, innocent as can be, though not unflawed. The eternal question has always been after Christmas, how can you and I live like Jesus as human beings? Is it even possible to imitate someone who is the divine Word made flesh? If we have a Jesus who is as absent-minded as this 12 year old in the Temple, then we have a chance. We have an opportunity to be godly. When we see a Jesus eager and excited to forget the world and his parents for the world of talking about God, and figuring out how to live in God’s world, then can you and I figure we have learned it all yet? It is an old rabbi’s maxim that to study is a form of prayer, of coming into the presence of God. Like Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, we will never be able to completely understand what Jesus is all about, what kind of God we truly have. We are commissioned to ponder all these things in our heart as we pilgrimage on.
One more thing about a 12 year old Jesus studying in the Temple: it was still 18 years before he would begin what he was meant to begin. Christmas Eve we celebrated in grand style the birth of the Messiah, God With Us, and the world was in desperate shape and needed saving right then. Yet, it took 30 years before something really was done. God made sure that all of this redemptive activity was achieved in good, slow human time. We demand God to act now to prove that God is real. We insist that something needs to be done yesterday. God acts in God’s own time, and that may be too slow, or simply the full life of a human being working to be godly.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan