Sermons
January 5, 2025 (2nd Sunday of Christmas)
“Don’t be clever.”[1]
Luke 2:41-52
I think I was probably eight or nine; Gram and Papa were up visiting for a weekend. Gram happened to notice that I hadn’t made my bed one morning. I knew how to make my bed; my mom had taught me to make it when I was four. But I guess I didn’t want to deal with Gram giving me a hard time about not making my bed, so when she asked me why I hadn’t made it, I said, “I don’t know how.”
Well, she went in and tore a strip off my mom. “You need to be teaching her how to work with her hands; at her age she doesn’t even know how to make a bed?!”
At the time I thought it was funny; I have always been just a bit of a smart aleck. But I wouldn’t have said that if I had known it would get my mom in trouble with Gram.
Most kids, I suspect, go through a smart-aleck phase. Maybe more than one—and some of us don’t outgrow it. In our reading for today, I suspect Jesus’ parents thought he was in that phase.
They went to Jerusalem for Passover, as they apparently did every year; it looks like they probably traveled there with a group, maybe extended family. And after the festival, as they were headed home, they didn’t notice that Jesus wasn’t with them.
That’s not hard to do with a big group, as it turns out.
When we took our big road trip to the Oregon coast years ago, we had twelve people traveling together in three vehicles—my grandparents’ RV, our Oldsmobile, and my aunt and uncle’s brand-new minivan, first one I’d ever seen. Usually whenever we would stop, we’d switch from one vehicle to another, so we would count noses and confer over the CB radio (this was well before cell phones) to make sure everybody was accounted for.
But for some reason, on the last day of the trip, after a lunch stop in The Dalles, Oregon, we didn’t. We all piled into our vehicles; I had been in our car but switched to the motor home because I wanted to stretch out for a nap. My folks and Ann and Richard all pulled out ahead of us, and as we were leaving the parking lot, I was standing in the motor home getting ready to get a drink out of the fridge when I could faintly hear someone calling my name.
My aunt Sue was running behind us waving and calling. We had almost left her!
Jesus’ family apparently didn’t count noses as they left Jerusalem, either, but there wasn’t really any reason to worry until, presumably, he didn’t turn up when they stopped for the night. Then they started asking questions, going to each little family group to see if he was with them. Everybody said no, so the rest of the group proceeded on home while Mary and Joseph turned around and went back to Jerusalem.
I wonder if they waited till morning, or walked all night to get back there.
Seems the text isn’t totally clear whether the day they traveled before they missed him and the day it took them to go back to Jerusalem count in the “three days” before they found him. It looks to me like they left Jerusalem one day, went back the next day, and then looked for him for three days. (It’s likely that the reference to “three days” is meant to foreshadow Jesus’ death and resurrection at the end of the Gospel. Luke rarely puts in any detail without a good reason.)
When Mary and Joseph finally locate Jesus, he’s in the temple with a group of Torah scholars. It seems that it was customary for scholars to get together for discussions at these festivals, and Jesus was with them. Just on the cusp of adulthood, he was sitting with these scholars, listening and asking questions. (Contrary to a lot of art and older commentaries, he probably wasn’t “teaching the teachers”; but he was participating in the discussion at a level not usually expected for someone his age.)
No doubt he was mortified as only a twelve-year-old can be when his mother waded right into the middle of the group—she really shouldn’t have been there, but a mom whose kid has been missing and now has been found isn’t someone you just stop—grabbed him by the arm, and proceeded to give him what for.
I’m sure you can imagine the mixture of relief, love, and anger she felt as she asked him, “What do you think you’re doing? We looked everywhere for you! We’ve been worried sick!”
And Jesus’ answer was one that might have made sense to them later, but at that moment it sure didn’t. “Well, you should have known this is where I would be—in my Father’s house.”
Some of the commentators say that remark might have felt like a slap in the face to Joseph, but it wasn’t unusual even then for God to be referred to as Father, so I’m not so sure Joseph would have taken it like he may have if Jesus had said, “You’re not my real dad!” But even so, it had to have sounded like a smart remark. “Well, where did you think I’d be?”
Somehow I suspect the trip home wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses for Jesus, as Mary and Joseph continued to chew him out intermittently the whole way. But once home, it says Jesus grew up doing what his parents told him, and was a likeable kid, maybe wise beyond his years.
Even in Luke, who tells us the most about Jesus’ birth and childhood of any of the four Evangelists, there’s a lot of time that passes without comment. Last week we heard about his circumcision at eight days old, and about a trip to the temple for his dedication and Mary’s purification when he was six weeks old; today we have jumped forward twelve years. And after this we don’t see him again until he’s thirty and begins his ministry.
That has led to a lot of speculation about his “missing years.”[1] Some put together “infancy gospels,” describing how the child Jesus made birds out of mud and struck his classmates dead when they teased him. There was a legend that was popular in England that had Joseph of Arimathea taking him to England to study.
What did he do during that time?
Well, my suspicion is that he had a more-or-less normal childhood, maybe learned a trade in Joseph’s shop, studied Torah with other boys his age, just all the things a Jewish kid in Galilee at that time would have done. It’s not included in the Gospels because, apart from the few stories that are there, it wasn’t all that noteworthy. The stories that are included are there for a reason: to show that Jesus was recognized as an extraordinary person from the very beginning.
But you know, I think a story like this tells us something else—something that theologians beginning with the author of Hebrews have thought about. Later it was developed into the idea that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.
A person can’t be fully human without a normal childhood in which they sometimes get into trouble with their parents. I’m not saying that Jesus sinned—the author of Hebrews makes that clear: Jesus “in every respect has been tested” [tempted] “as we are, yet without sin.”[2] But as the Fresh Prince, Will Smith’s youthful alter ego, once said, “Parents just don’t understand,”[3] and parents raising the Son of God may well have not understood even more than normal parents.
Their son wandered away from them at the temple and wound up in the midst of a discussion of Scripture with learned scholars. When they found him, they asked him what he was thinking, and what he said back to them sounded like a smart-aleck remark. With the benefit of the rest of the story and two millennia to think about it, we know he wasn’t backtalking them, just stating the obvious: he was most at home in his Father’s house, doing his Father’s business.[4]
But we have to think that a Lord and Savior who got in trouble as a kid, even if it was because his parents just didn’t understand, is one who does understand how human beings, kids and adults alike, sometimes get into trouble, sometimes say things they might not have said if they’d engaged their brains before they engaged their mouths, sometimes are misunderstood. And such a Lord and Savior knows just exactly how much we need him, and exactly how to intercede on our behalf with his—and our—heavenly Father.
I don’t know about you, but that gives me a great deal of comfort.
[1] Even country singer-songwriter John Prine got in on the act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suoJ6mLVBlU.
[2] Hebrews 4:15
[3] The song by that name is a story of a misadventure that would not have happened if the narrator had simply stopped to think; unfortunately, kids don’t always do that.
[4] What the NRSV translated “in my Father’s house” is “about my Father’s business” in the King James Version; either translation is possible and neither is incorrect.