Two nights ago we contemplated Jesus as an infant. Today’s gospel lesson invites us to dwell on him as a child. The story of Jesus as a boy exercises a strong fascination on us, not least because of our culture’s preoccupation with childhood. Presbyterian clergyman and children’s television pioneer Fred Rogers, creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, reflects the prevailing view when he said that “childhood lies at the very heart of who we are and who we will become.”
Childhood, however, cannot be understood apart from serious reflection on parenthood. Before the child becomes an individual, he is dependent on his parents. Indeed, he only becomes an individual capable of assuming responsibility for himself insofar as his parents have nurtured and protected him adequately. Just a moment’s pause and we will see that there’s hardly a relationship more essential to human life than the parent-child relationship.
Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, are going up to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. They are but a few among many, part of a large throng that includes relatives and friends. Passover is one of the three annual pilgrimage festivals, for which all Jewish families had to go up to the Temple in Jerusalem, as mandated by Torah or Jewish Law.
So this is a very ordinary event in the life of a typical Jewish family of the time. All seems normal. Indeed, we can relate it to our own family trips and reunions. We left our homes and neighborhoods to go to distant places. There we reconnected with grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. We may have fond memories of these times. We recognize the important role these visits played in our own growth and development.
But then something happens. The boy Jesus wanders off and becomes separated from his parents. At least that’s what his parents assume. In actual fact, however, Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem for a very specific reason, which we will consider in due course. But how are we to understand this turn of events? How can this have happened?
Paradoxically, we might suggest that good parenting made this behavior possible. John Bowlby, an outstanding child psychologist who published his work in the late twentieth century, developed the concept of the “secure base,” which I think is suggestive in connection with our Gospel lesson. The secure base is provided through a relationship to a responsive parent who meets the child’s needs and to whom the child can always turn as a safe haven. When the child learns to trust in the availability of this relationship, he becomes bolder and can therefore explore his world, secure in the knowledge that he can always return to his safe haven.
Author and psychiatrist Curt Thompson expands on this idea. He writes that security is about the ability to move away from our “relational base and step out to take the risk of new adventure, whether that’s across the crib, across the room, or across the country. It means we are willing to try new things and make mistakes, even difficult ones, because we know we have a place to return to where we will once again be seen, soothed, and made to feel safe.”
But Jesus has been gone too long; he has not returned to his “secure base.” Failing to find him among their relatives and friends on their return home, his parents go back to Jerusalem to look for him. Finally, after three days they found him in the temple among the teachers, listening and asking questions.
We may remember leaving the circle of our parents and the protection of a mother’s arms to enter into a great big world. We may remember also the moments when we did not come home at the expected time, when we did not meet our parents at the place where we’d agreed to meet them. And if we are parents, we can remember our fear, our exasperation with our child when we finally did find him.
As we have already suggested, Jesus is exploring his world outside his family circle. He is confidently interacting with people whom he did not know before. Again, his behavior here reflects good upbringing. He is involved in an activity we might expect of a healthy twelve year-old boy.
If we reflect on this activity for a few moments, one of his teachings about children may come to mind. We refer here to that episode when Jesus called a little child to him and placed him before his disciples. Then he said: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
We usually interpret this to mean that we have to have the trust of a child, if we would ever come to know and experience God as Father. This is not wrong. But this interpretation is not exhaustive. The child is not only trusting; he is also curious. The world around him fills him with wonder. Can it be said of us as adults that we are as curious as a child? Many live as though convinced there is nothing more to learn. This is not a good state to be in.
At my first church, when I was still a seminarian, the pastor organized an adult Sunday school class. My task was to recruit churchgoers for the class, which we planned to hold after the service. I remember the rejection I got from one man after I asked him to come join us. He said: “Oh no. I’m good. I learned all those stories about Noah and the flood when I was a child.”
We can say of this man that somewhere on the road to adulthood he lost his curiosity, his sense of wonder, at least with regard to the source documents of his faith. He did not appreciate that the Scriptures are inexhaustibly rich. Study them over a lifetime and you will still not plumb their depths.
We would love to be a fly on the wall and eavesdrop on the discussions Jesus and the teachers were having. Imagine the depths that they were probing! But for her part Mary is not interested in asking about those discussions now, even if they give her more things later to treasure in her heart. She is upset with her son. “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”
Luke means to convey here Mary’s deep distress. He uses a strong word. It’s the same word he uses in the story of the rich man and Lazarus to describe the torment of the rich man in hell. In light of this, we might propose a stronger translation: “Son, why have you tortured us like this?”
We spoke earlier about becoming an individual. There is the road that each of us must go in making the passage from child to adult. This involves conflict between child and parents, especially during adolescence. Parents have to learn to let go. They have to give the child the space to develop, to become his own person. This can be extremely difficult, especially when we cannot make sense of their life choices. Mary’s reaction is not negative commentary on her parenting. Hers is an entirely natural reaction. And, we may add, Jesus’ response to her is entirely natural.
We look at Jesus and his family and are seized with wonder when we think that he too had to navigate the turbulent waters of adolescence, to learn that in our families we bring each other distress and consolation, heartache and relief. It’s all part of growing up. It’s all part of the “with us” with which Jesus had to totally identify if we are to say that in him God is really with us. If we believe the Christmas message about Jesus, Immanuel, God with us, we can find comfort in the fact that God knows and understands. Immanuel has entered into our reality. He knows what it means to be in a family.
This is important for us to consider, especially in our current moment. Within the last week, millions of Americans found themselves traveling to gather with their families to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. It’s a season often full of joy surrounded by our loved ones. Or at least it is meant to be. This is hardly the case for everyone. Far from it. Indeed, marriage researcher J.P. De Gance informs us that more than at any time in our nation’s history family members remain estranged from one another. In a new book coming out this upcoming March, a survey of more than 1,600 adults currently estranged from their parents found that more than 70 percent of them were from homes where the biological parents are not married. Today, just 17.8 percent of all households are homes with married parents and children in it. That number was 40 percent in 1970.
Today it’s easy to imagine someone hearing this story and saying: “well, at least Jesus had a mother and father who cared enough to worry about him. My dad was an absent father, and then left us altogether. And my mother, in her search for a man who would treat her decently, left me to fend for myself.” That is a reality for so many today. And it is no secret that it’s tearing apart the social fabric of our nation today.
This reality is to be deplored, but it should not cause us to overlook the central scene in this narrative. Jesus is not in the house of his parents. He is in his Father’s house.
Commentator John Nolland points out that Jesus grows up, in a family, in a faith community, with a life like ours. But unlike us, he is so deeply connected to his heavenly Father as an adolescent that he simply expected that his parents would know that in the Temple, talking about the things of God, would be the obvious place to find him on a family trip. Growing in the wisdom and favor of God was the desire of his heart.
Bible students seize on Jesus’ response to his parents to highlight Jesus’ uniqueness. This uniqueness consists in his special relationship to God, for which the most appropriate term is the familial one: “father.” They further point out that Jesus’ use of the intimate term “Father” to address the God of Israel is really without precedent. It indicates the unique relationship between this boy and God.
In the last analysis, this is the good news that our lesson delivers. For God is Father not only to him, but also to those who believe in him. In our Gospel lesson next Sunday, we will learn that “to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). Both he and those who receive him are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters (Heb. 2:11).
We realize that this does not erase painful childhood experiences of an absent or abusive father. We know that what psychologists and life coaches today call father hunger is pervasive, especially in our community. But a relationship with God our Father is the most important relationship we can have. He is Father to the fatherless. Of him the Psalmist says: “Though my mother and father forsake me, he will receive me” (27:10).
Through faith in Jesus, we come to know and trust this God as our father. And like Jesus, we too grow in wisdom and favor with God as we mature in our faith.
On Christmas Day we opened gifts. Some are simple and basic; others are complex and intricate; we don’t know what we have until we open the box and take account of all the parts and how they are to be used.
This is a useful analogy to what we experience during Christmastide. We have received God’s gift to us in the birth of Jesus Christ. This we celebrated at our lessons and carols service on Christmas eve. But this gift has multiple parts. Then we discovered in him Savior and King. Today we discover in him One who knows what it’s like to be in a family. He is with us in all the joys and disappointments of family life. More than that, he is the one who reveals God as Father, as his Father and, through faith in him, our Father. Let us then in these days after Christmas contemplate all that is contained in the gift that God has given to us. The gift of Jesus Christ. Amen.