Growing God
Luke 2:41-52

December 28, 2003

Sometimes it works that the Gospel story mirrors what takes place in the sequence of our lives lived together. And this Sunday is one of the clearer examples. The First Sunday after Christmas is traditionally one of the lowest attended Sundays throughout Western Christendom. Too much Christmas on Christmas Eve for so many; or perhaps enough Christmas to last for quite a spell. Luke’s tale following the birth and dedication of Jesus has seemed anticlimactic for most of Christianity as well.

If you want to know something concrete about most of Jesus’ life - the almost 30 years between his dedication at one week old and his stepping into the Jordan River with his cousin John the Baptist - this is it, 12 verses about his 12th year. One doesn’t learn a lot about the actual day-to-day life of Jesus from this story. The nativity seems to have worn out the evangelists as well and only Luke made this paltry entry in the biography of the Messiah. We’ll just mumble along until we garner enough strength for the ministry and Passion of Jesus in time for Lent and Easter.

There’s just a few of us here for the story, but that should make it easier to stop and listen, because like many short stories there’s a lot to be said.

Naturally, people wanted to know what kind of person Jesus was. Some people made up stories about the young Jesus, as in the Infancy Gospels of Jesus. At the age of five Jesus was playing with some young friends and one of them probably pushed and shoved and taunted just a little too much. Jesus turned towards his playmate and said something gentle like, “Drop dead!” And so his friend did drop dead. “Oh my God!” Jesus screamed. Quickly he resurrected the boy back to life. Bizarre as this story is, the point being made is that Jesus, even as a young child, could control the forces of death and life.

We want to know how Jesus lived in order to understand how we might be able to muck through the doldrums of ordinary life and cling a little bit on to the divine. If Jesus is fully human, we need to know how he pulled it off so we can make an honest effort to do the same.

In the 430’s the Christian Church was embroiled in a mighty battle of words and political intrigue to outdo even the machinations of the merger of the new Conservative Party. The antagonists were two schools of thought and territorial influence: that of Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria. Both cities still exist, but we haven’t much from them for well over a millennium. The hot button was what type of person was Jesus Christ. The patriarch of Alexandria was Cyril, a great thinker and writer, but a ruthless politician, and not a nice guy. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and unchangeable. Christ was the unity of God and humanity, but was always more divine than human. How could the unchangeable God become an ungodly creature and sin and suffer, Cyril wanted to know? For God to become fully human meant that God would give up being God, and that made no sense.

Along came a fellow named Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, a student of the school of Antioch that advocated the human nature of Jesus. Nestorius was a brash person, a bull in the china shop, who could said what he believed even if he didn’t have time to think it all the way through. He would eventually pay for that impatience with his job, his reputation, and his life. Theology was a rough business in the mid-fifth century.

Nestorius thought it reasonable that Christ had two natures, one divine, the other human. Christ performed the miracles through the divine part of his being, and suffered on the cross through his human dimension. Christ was a new kind of human being, and while God is still God, one of Nestorius’ favourite Biblical passages was our final verse of today, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour.”

Yes, it doesn’t make sense that God would somehow be human while still being God, and every verb and preposition was enlisted at one time or another in the debate. If Jesus “increased” from his 12-year-old maturity that must mean that God can be improved upon. Does that mean that our God was not quite as perfect as God would become? What kind of God still needs work?

Cyril of Alexandria didn’t like that kind of talk and was able eventually to muster the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431 that deposed Nestorius from his episcopal seat and condemned him as a heretic. Cyril had won the battle, but in the long run Nestorius’ way of thinking about Jesus would win. Jesus was not just God in human disguise; Jesus was more than that: a complete human being who suffered with us and for us. Very Good News, for it means God isn’t finished yet with you and me.

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. It was a routine, a ritual incumbent upon most Jews within reasonable traveling distance of the capital. Judaism centred then around the ceremonies and ritual sacrifices in the Temple, the world’s most magnificent building as far as they were concerned - the dwelling place of God, in fact.

Some contemporary estimates put the visiting throng during Passover at over two million people. It was one huge, wonderful convention for Jesus and his parents. Lots of sights to see, great food, friends you haven’t seen in a year and everybody was on holiday - no working. Sure, it was a high holy day, but a fully human event writ as large as one can imagine. What a place for a 12-year-old boy!

As the moveable feast wended its way back towards Nazareth, Mary and Joseph discovered to their horror that he wasn’t with relatives and friends. He had been left behind in Jerusalem. Retracing their routes, they found him finally sitting delightedly in the Temple talking theology with the rabbis. Four days of anxiety did not make this at first a heart-warming reunion.

Mary was doing the talking, “Why have you treated us like this?” “Did you not know that I would be in my father’s house?” responded Jesus. He had been bantering back and forth questions and answers wit h the teachers, a form of intellectual and spiritual gymnastics based upon the Torah. He not only knew the Bible, but understood its spirit as well.

They patched up their sore feelings and went back to Nazareth, and Jesus was obedient to them. It must have been an annual treat for Jesus to come back each year and talk and argue again with the Temple teachers. The teachers probably looked forward to the encounter as well, those teachers who could stand having their authority and knowledge stretched and challenged. We don’t hear a word about those 18 or so Passovers, but they must have been prologue to his ultimate confrontation in the big city.

Mary treasured all these things in her heart, just as she had done following Jesus’ birth. Our children amaze us sometimes, don’t they?

And Jesus wasn’t complete; he increased in wisdom and in divine and human favour. Jesus would mature, get better, get smarter, become more compassionate. He would become more human. And by logical extension of the arguments of Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople and countless other Christian thinkers then until even this day, God would increase in wisdom too.

Human beings have a lot of difficulty with an unchangeable, all-powerful and all-knowing God. We can never really comprehend what those characteristics mean and how they play out in our lives. So, there is always the tendency to reduce this immutableness of God down to a set of human ideas that don’t change, that stay put so that we can memorize them. It’s then that we have God cornered and with a little bit of hard work on our part, we can become completely righteous. We believe we now understand all of God’s commandments for humanity (and we of course are God’s messengers and ministers!). We believe we know what justice really is about and can be the judges of what is just and unjust in this world. The worst kind of righteousness is self-righteousness - the root of many of this world’s worst problems.

We prefer a God who doesn’t change from our ideas, but that’s not the kind of God described over and over again in the Bible and throughout Christian history. Our God grows and matures still, our God repents and changes her mind. If I believe that I am righteous, I’ve got to know that God still thinks he’s got to improve, to keep changing and evolving. I better not get stuck in the mud of my self-righteousness and get moving again.

And if, more likely, I believe that I am unrighteous, not that very good a person at all, the Good News is that God hasn’t made it yet either. I can keep trying, I can keep becoming a new person all over again; maybe I am a person suited for the next generation. Maybe I can be reinvented, reborn, for after all, God was in Christ, full of grace and truth, born to a woman Mary on Christmas Day.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan