Today, after anticipating the coming of Jesus for four long weeks and celebrating his birth for two, we are suddenly encountering pre-teen Jesus seemingly ignoring his parents.
After all that talk about “Silent Night,” it’s a real shock to the system!
How did we manage to miss the last eleven years of Jesus’ life? You might be tempted to blame the sudden jump in the story on the Lectionary – which is the schedule of scripture readings we use in the Episcopal Church. But it’s not the Lectionary’s fault. We’re still only in Chapter 2 of Luke, after all.
This is simply a consequence of Luke’s story-crafting. He has a point to make and only so much time to make it. Cuts had to be made!
If Luke were a movie, all we would have missed was a brief growing-up montage set to gentle string music, with a kindly voice reading verse 40: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.”
At the end of today’s reading, we actually get the bookend to that verse: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” Those two, brief summaries signal the swift passing of time.
In the next verse, we will be propelled nearly 20 years into the future, to the time of Pontius Pilate and the start of John the Baptist’s ministry, which ushers in the final Passover pilgrimage of Jesus, from the Galilean countryside to Jerusalem, where he will die and rise again. This little passage in Luke is the only time kid-Jesus gets any airtime in the whole Bible.
So, why tell this story at all? What does it tell us: about who Jesus is, about his parents, and about the promise of God?
First, let’s think about the setting…
It was the festival of the Passover, a time for commemorating God’s rescue of the Israelites from the tyrannical Pharaoh of the Exodus story. As practicing Jews, Jesus’ family traveled to Jerusalem to make sacrifices in the Temple, and join the community in remembrance and praise to God for their rescue.
Though Passover was a religious obligation, it was also a family reunion: along with his parents, Jesus was accompanied on the journey by aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and people from his village he wasn’t even related to. They traveled together in a large caravan to share protection and resources on what would have been more than a 30-hour journey on foot.
Once in Jerusalem, the family was hosted by extended family and friends, with everyone sharing responsibility for making sure the kids and animals didn’t go missing.
Now, let’s think about what happens in the story…
The sacrifices have been made, the feasting is over, and Mary and Joseph are packed up and ready to head back home. They can’t find Jesus, but they figure he’s with someone they know, so they walk a whole day before they begin to worry. But, the next day, after no word on Jesus’ whereabouts, they have no choice but to turn around.
For three whole days, they search family homes, rented rooms, marketplaces, and streets for their son. After nearly giving up, they go back to the most unlikely place to find a child by himself: the Temple. And there he is, talking like a grown-up and holding his own with the religious scholars.
Mary is not having it. Now nearly a week behind on their journey home, Mary is not in the mood to ponder the blessing of this holy child, because, the fact is, this little blessing is acting like a brat.
The parental desperation has been building up over the past 4 days, and has now given way to annoyance: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” Jesus, unbothered, replies: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
What the…excuse me, Jesus? What a weird thing to say. You’re 12 years old. And your parents were on their way home to Nazareth, to your father Joseph’s house.
Oh, right. Jesus isn’t a normal kid. It’s all coming back now.
You see, in spite of God’s repeated proclamations to Mary and Joseph – through angels, shepherds, and relatives – that Jesus isn’t a normal kid, the trials and stresses of daily living have lulled his earthly parents into a false sense of normalcy.
In those first years of new parenthood – the fear, the anxiety, the annoyance, and the overwhelm – this “miracle baby” simply became a part of the mix of life, with all of its everyday distractions and demands.
Gabriel’s angelic message and Elizabeth’s blessing were just surreal memories now, hazy and almost unbelievable after years of continued toil under the hardship of first-century life, the always-simmering oppression of Roman rule, and the realities of raising a kid, who was fully divine, but still fully human.
Mary and Joseph didn’t get any special privileges for raising the Son of God, after all. Just like everyone else, they had family obligations, ailing loved ones, household chores, work obligations, and sacrifices to make at the far-away temple. Their lives were exceedingly, boringly normal.
It is a harrowing fact of human nature that even a miracle as big as the incarnation could, in some sense, stop resonating, could stop sustaining hope.
I think this is why Luke tells the story.
Not only does the story of 12-year-old Jesus do theological work, by confirming Jesus’ divinity throughout every moment of his incarnate life. For his exhausted, distracted parents, it was a disruptive, inconvenient, and necessary reminder that God’s promise was still true after all those years.
It was a reminder that Jesus isn’t normal, and life with him isn’t normal either.
This child truly is the Anointed One. This child truly is the Son of the very God who dwells in the Temple, who rescued their ancestors from tyrants, from enslavement and exile and ruin, who turned their mourning into dancing and their sorrow into joy.
And this child, in a few more years, will manage to bring about the revolutionary salvation of the world regardless of his parents’ successes or missteps.
And because of that reminder to his parents, it is also a reminder to us, that Jesus is who he says he is – always, at every point in his eternal life and at every point of our journey with him. He is our rescue and our hope – he is God’s promise come true.
Even when we are distracted by our exhausting, confusing, dangerous, normal lives, the miracle is still a miracle, and God is still with us. And just as importantly, God’s promises aren’t diminished just because we forgot, or got distracted, or were too tired to say thank you.
What a gift to have this story. What a gift it is to know that God can use anything, even disruption and inconvenience, to remind us that we are held in a state of grace.
Our scriptures remind us that even our normal lives aren’t normal, because Jesus is still in the act of inconveniencing us in order to reveal himself to us, transforming hatred into love, sorrow into joy, and death into life. Like Mary, we can treasure all of this in our hearts, even when we don’t fully understand what Jesus is up to.
Leah Wise 