I remember one Christmas morning when I was young, although I don’t remember how old I was. We had just finished unwrapping our presents, but were still sitting at the base of our Christmas tree surrounded by the gifts and detritus that Christmas morning usually brings for small children, I turned to my mother and asked when Easter was. My mother is here today and she can verify this. The reason this question was important was because I knew the best part of Christmas was over. Having turkey was never my idea of a good time, and the next time when we would receive presents and candy was at Easter, and so I wanted to know how long I was going to have to wait. Today’s scripture reading seems to be moving in that same direction that I was all those many years ago. Today many people will take down their Christmas trees, guests will begin to go home, and Christmas music can no longer be heard on the radio. For many Christmas is still in the air and I’m sure that many of us will be going home for more Christmas leftovers. After all, it was yesterday, and technically it’s only the second day of Christmas, but yet here we find ourselves reading and talking about a story not of Jesus as an infant, but instead as a young boy of 12. Kids sure do grow up fast these days.
Now this might seem like a strange passage to read on the first Sunday after Christmas, and it is, although it is the assigned reading for today, but it’s also just a strange passage in general especially for Luke. That’s true first because this story makes no sense in relation to Luke’s birth narrative which precedes it. After all, it is in Luke’s narrative that Mary is visited by an angel and told that the child she will carry is special, and Mary responds by giving us the magnificat, her beautiful poetic response. It is in Luke’s gospel that John the Baptist, who has his own miraculous conception story, is a cousin of Jesus who leaps in his mother’s womb when his mother Elizabeth and Mary meet. It is in Luke’s narrative that the shepherds are sent to Bethlehem by an angel and come to pay homage to the child in a manger, and we are told “Mary treasured all these things in her heart.” And it is in Luke’s narrative that when Joseph and Mary present Jesus at the Temple shortly after his birth and make an offering for their first born son that Anna and Simeon both make claims about who Jesus is and what he means to Israel. And yet if we just read today’s passage none of this seems to have taken place, or if it did then Mary and Joseph have totally forgotten about them after only twelve years, which seems very unlikely. Mary even refers to Joseph as Jesus’ father. This story just simply doesn’t match up with what has come before it.
Now there are usually two responses to this. The first is to try and jump through a lot of hoops in order to explain how in actuality there is not a discrepancy, that even though Mary and Joseph knew all the stuff, they just didn’t understand, etc. The other response is simply to say that Luke has taken another story that was circulating about Jesus and put it into his narrative without being concerned that the stories matched each other. Let us remember that none of the gospel writers are writing narrative histories, this is not a biography of Jesus. Instead they are telling a theological story, which is a very different undertaking, and in that process the facts of the stories, and their ability to hang together coherently simply are not as important as the meaning of the stories themselves. As William of Occam, a Franciscan Friar who was a theologian and philosopher said, in what is known as Occam’s razor, in looking at problems, the simplest answer is not only usually the easiest but it is also usually the best, and I think that is what is going on here.
Which leads us into the second reason why this story is unusual for the gospels, and that is because this is the only story of Jesus as a youth that we have in the Bible. We know that there were stories of Jesus’ childhood circulating in the early church because we find those stories in some non-canonical gospels, and even some that are just about Jesus’ childhood. Some of the stories are sort of benign, such as Jesus making birds out of clay and then turning them into real birds, or one of my favorites, Jesus lengthens a board that Joseph has cut too short for its purpose. You don’t need to measure twice and cut once if you have that as an option. But some of the stories are a little less benign, such as Jesus causing a boy who jostles him to die, and then striking blind those who complain about him. It seems likely that Luke was familiar with some of these stories, or at least the desire to give more information about Jesus’ early life, and so he decided to put one into his gospel. But he did not do this casually.
There are several reasons for this story to be included. The first purpose it serves is to do exactly what it does, which is to give us a story of Jesus as a young man of twelve. In the ancient world, in telling stories of great men, there would be a story about their birth with some miraculous elements, then there would be one story about the child as a twelve year old, and then the story would pick-up with the main character as an adult. This pattern is found in stories about Siddhartha, better known as the Buddha, Cyrus the Great of Persia, Osiris in Egypt, and most importantly for the early church, Caesar Augustus. Because as Matthew in his birth narrative mirrors the story of Moses and so sets Jesus up against Moses and says that Jesus is greater than he is, Luke appears to be doing something very similar here and saying, through similar stories, that Jesus is greater than these other men, especially Caesar Augustus, as Jesus is given many of the same titles as Augustus as well, including price of peace and son of God. Although lost to us, the people who first heard these stories would have been very aware of the themes and common story telling motifs and would have known what they meant.
But, what is also striking about this story, especially in comparison to the other stories of Jesus as a youth, is how plain and ordinary it is. It doesn’t tell of miracles or remarkable things, and it also doesn’t tell the story that people often think this story tells. If you look at paintings of this scene, especially from the Renaissance, you will see a portrayal of Jesus standing and teaching the leaders of the Temple who are sitting at his feet. And, in the only sermon I can remember hearing on this passage, the minister was talking about Jesus’ perfect knowledge and how bored and yet also frustrated Jesus must have been as a youth knowing he had all the answers. Now I was a teenage boy, and can remember some of that time, and we have two teenagers in the house and so I know about kids who think they are smarter than everyone else and know all the answers, but this was more than just the normal teenager behavior. But that is not what is taking place here. In fact, if this story was to be heard without any of the birth stories which precede it, which may have been how it was probably originally told, we would see how ordinary and yet extraordinary it is and really come to appreciate what place it is holding in the overall gospel narrative, because it serves several very specific and important purposes.
The first is to indicate that Mary and Joseph are devout Jews. They are doing the things that are required or expected of them by Jewish law, including traveling to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem for the most important Jewish holidays. And, we are told that they did this every year, and that it is Mary and Joseph who go. They are not doing this for Jesus, or their other children, they do it because they consider it important for their own faith, and the kids go along with them because that’s what they have to do. Within the gospel of Luke, the temple also plays a significant role, with the gospel both beginning and ending in the Temple. This episode also serves as a foretaste for what is to come in Jesus’ ministry and life.
In this story, Jesus is interacting with the teachers at the Temple in what appears to be a very positive way. But later, he will interact, and have question and answer sessions with the teachers, but in adversarial roles. In addition, we are told that after realizing that Jesus was not with them that Mary and Joseph looked for him for three days, before they found him. Now some commentators say not to read too much into this because this phrase is not the one Luke uses in reference to the three days between Jesus death and resurrection, but I’m one who feels that the gospel writers were very deliberate in what they included and what they did not include and therefore I do not think that Luke’s phrase of three days is just coincidental. Instead I think it is a direct reference to Jesus’ death and resurrection which also takes place after another pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover, and ends with a group of people leaving without Jesus, although this time they know why, and a very small group returning after three days, but this time instead of finding Jesus they instead find the empty tomb, and what better time to remind us that we are not a Christmas people. Even though sometimes it doesn’t seem that way, Christmas is not the most important Christian holiday, in fact it pales in comparison, because we are an Easter people.
What this passage also reminds us of is Jesus’ humanity. As I already said, this passage, for some reason, often seems to be used to talk about and highlight the divinity of Jesus, but in doing so they have to distort the story. While the story does say that all who heard him were amazed, it says this in relation to the line before in which Jesus is not teaching, but instead listening and asking questions, and then the last line says “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years.” That means that Jesus, at the age of 12, did not know it all, but instead was still learning, which we’ll return to in just a moment. What this passage also emphasizes is that Jesus had a family of origin, a mother and father, and that they did not always get along, that Mary would get exasperated with Jesus just as all parents do with their children. And every parent or grandparent or guardian can imagine the panic they must have felt at having Jesus missing, because it’s a panic every parent has known. Before I was a parent I always looked a little askance at parents who put leashes on their kids to keep them around, thinking bad thoughts, until I had a child who would disappear at a moments notice because she didn’t need us around and was going to go do her own thing. I don’t know if that’s what Jesus was like, but I can totally sympathize with Mary and Joseph in this moment.
But, the story also shows us that Jesus is connected to a greater community which surrounds him with their presence and their teaching and their protection, as Mary and Joseph had assumed that it was amongst this group of relatives and friends with which he had been traveling as they made their way back to Nazareth. But it is in sitting at the feet of others, not just his parents, that Jesus is able to ask questions and to learn about the faith and about God. This is a communal exercise we are engaged in here, it is for a specific reason that Jesus says, wherever two or more are gathered in my name there I am amongst them. This is serious work that we do when we gather together, and recognizing the strength and importance that the church is an intergenerational organization, and we are really the only one that remains in society. But it’s also realizing that we are never done learning about God, about scripture, about our faith, and learning from each other.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said of this passage, “It plainly follows, that though a man were pure, even as Christ was pure, still he would have room to increase in holiness, and in consequence thereof to increase in the favor, as well as in the love of God.” That means that if even Jesus could increase in knowledge and wisdom, then surely there is room for us to grow in our faith as well. That we never cease sitting at the feet of the masters asking questions, engaging in conversations, in order to increase what we know and to deepen our faith. We never graduate from Christian education, a phrase I don’t like, but instead prefer to use the term faith development, because we are never done being formed, never done becoming Christians. There is always ways to get better in the ways that Paul says faith will be evident in our lives as we heard in that passages from Colossians this morning.
There are lots of ways we can continue to grow in our faith. One of them is by coming to worship. Another is through reading and studying scripture. In 2022 we would like to challenge everyone to read through the Bible in the entire year, and so starting on January 1 we are going to encourage you to follow a reading schedule which has 3-5 chapters a day, and this is not starting at Genesis 1:1 and ending at Revelations 22:21, but a little more structured. And if you follow through on December 31 of next year you will have read the entire Bible. I really hope you will take on this challenge. Another way we learn more is by meeting with others in small groups to discuss our faith, and also to take Christian formation classes, and we are working on creating a new discipleship pathway that will help all of us to do.
John Wesley said, “Every one, though” they may be “born of God in an instant, yea and sanctified in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees…” If Jesus could learn from others and grow in wisdom and in years, surely we too can learn from others, and teach others, as we continue to grow in years and to grow in our faith. I hope that in 2022 we will learn to engage with each other, engage with scripture, engage with God, and engage with our faith in new and exciting ways. I pray that it may be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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