Summary: When Mary and Joseph lost 12-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem for three days, they looked for him in all the wrong places. But for us today, there are no wrong places to look for Jesus. And when we find him, Jesus will call us to be a healing presence to everyone, everywhere, all the time as he also reminds us that he's with us always.
With Christmas Day behind us and a new year coming soon, there's a great temptation to want to jump ahead some three decades from Jesus' birth and pick up the story when he begins his ministry as an adult.
But that would be a mistake. We'd miss a lot if we did that.
For one thing, we'd fail to notice that in the passage we read from Luke's gospel, Luke records absolutely nothing Jesus says until he's 12 years old. And when Jesus finally does speak in Luke, he seems sort of, well, full of himself.
So we begin to ask questions about what Jesus knew about himself and when he knew (or would know) what we continue to believe about him all these centuries later - that he was both fully human and fully divine and that the risen Christ is alive in the world today, showing us where he needs us to be at work for gospel values.
In the story we read today, Luke's young Jesus was supposed to be walking with his parents as they left Jerusalem after Passover and headed to their home up in Nazareth. But, instead, the clever boy stayed in the temple, baffling Torah teachers with his pungent wisdom.
Once Joseph and Mary find him there (after three days), Mary - almost shocking in her irritation - levels at him a charge of abandonment: "Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you." But Jesus is having none of it. "Why were you searching for me?" he asks. "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"
Give young Jesus this: He knows who his Father is, understands from whom he comes and from whom he receives authority to speak. It's a bold confidence that one day will get him executed by the Roman thugs who ruled the Holy Land.
Jesus wants Mary and Joseph to know that he knows who his true Father is. "Did you not know?" he asks. It's a sharp, splendid question, demonstrating the sort of cheekiness one might expect from a young god.
But notice something else that we're likely to miss if we simply read this story from Luke without thinking about what the gospel writer might be foreshadowing in the life and ministry of Jesus to follow. Did you catch how long Jesus was missing from his parents, how long he might have been - as Mary and Joseph perhaps feared - dead? Three days. And what happens some 20 years after this story? Jesus is in fact dead for three days, from the crucifixion to the resurrection, that astonishing, unpredictable apocalyptic event that changed the very genome of the world.
Was that three-day absence from Mary and Joseph when Jesus was 12 just a coincidence? You may think so, but that's not really how books about prophecy and the fulfillment of prophecy work. So we are given at least a hint about what might happen later in the life of the Messiah when we read that at age 12 he was missing for three days.
We don't know exactly what Jesus was saying or doing to wow the temple Torah teachers, but by the end of this particular event, we know we're dealing with no ordinary 12-year-old.
As the late Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown writes in his book, An Introduction to the New Testament, "The boyhood stories are designed to show that [Jesus] had these powers from an early age." And yet, as Brown correctly notes, "we are assured that Jesus was obedient to his parents when he went back to Nazareth, presumably by not provoking any more revealing incidents like that in the Temple."1
Brown also notices something important about the way Luke has structured his whole gospel, including this story of a pre-teen Jesus. And that is that the gospel contains what Brown calls "a most persuasive Christological sequence."
Christology, as you may know, is the human effort to study and decide who Jesus was from the beginning, is now and will be for all eternity. Just as we put an "ology," which means the study of something, at the end of a Greek word that means God, theo, so we put an "ology" at the end of a term that means the Messiah, the word Christ. So, in simple terms, theology is the study of God and Christology is the study - and, eventually, doctrine - of one member of the Holy Trinity.
All of which is to say that Luke's gospel starts with an announcement by an angel that Jesus is God's son. Then we hear Jesus at age 12 proclaiming that God is his Father. And, finally, at Jesus' baptism, we read God proclaiming Jesus as his "beloved Son." And that's Brown's "most persuasive Christological sequence."
Luke doesn't say it quite as directly or maybe quite as clearly as John does in his gospel. In fact, there's simply no missing the point when John writes this in John 20:31 about the stories of Jesus he has been telling: "These are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name."
Before we talk a bit about what this temple story of the missing Jesus might be saying to us today for our lives as Christ followers, let's hear a word from Jesus' earthly father, Joseph, about losing Jesus for three days. Mary, as we've noted, is quoted in Luke's story, but Joseph is not. Still, we can turn to an intriguing fictional Joseph, one who expresses what the real Joseph was feeling.
This Joseph is found in a recent book by Joe Benevento called My Perfect Wife, Her Perfect Son, in which the author imagines the story of Jesus' life as it might be told by Joseph. And the book sticks quite closely to the story as it unfolds in the Bible.
Here's what Benevento's Joseph says when the just-discovered 12-year-old Jesus in the temple says, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?":
The way Jesus said father was almost enough to break me. I knew exactly which father he was talking about and that he was finally acting out over what he heard laid upon him a few months before (when Joseph and Mary finally told him of his divine origin). It seemed impossible that this could be the same happy child I had grown so to love. He seemed instead a new person, a new man, and one who knew who he was by knowing now who I really was.2
Just think for a moment about Joseph. Benevento, in his book that purportedly was written by Joseph, captures what must have been his deep confusion about what was happening to him. He knows only that he loves Mary and does not want her hurt. So when she first told him she was pregnant, he decides to hide her away, but then is convinced in a dream not to do that, is convinced to marry his Mary and to act for all the world - that's the point, for all the world - as though nothing strange has happened.
Let's stay with Joseph for a moment and see if we can put ourselves in his sandals: The night of Jesus' birth, the bizarre events of his previously simple life roll on. His pleadings to Bethlehem's innkeepers have been ignored and - no doubt in shame and resignation - he has brought his woman to a miserable stable, filled eventually with visionary strangers.
Poor Joseph. He'd have done so much more for Mary. He'd have found a pleasant room. He'd have hired the best midwives. He'd have built with his own strong arms and hands a polished wooden cradle for this lovely baby whose origins baffled him. In short, through good intentions, he'd have edited God's disturbing but beautiful Christmas story into banality.
And so now it's for us to decide anew how to understand the Christmas story, how to understand who Jesus is, how to respond to his life and death, his birth and resurrection, his call to each of us to honor God by how we live our lives.
Maybe the first thing to do is to adopt for ourselves Jesus' assumption that his parents should have known he'd be in his Father's house. Yes, that may mean we should be in church every Sunday. In fact, that's a splendid idea.
But we also can have a larger vision for what constitutes the house of God. We should remember what Psalm 24:1 tells us, which is this: "The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it."
In other words, we are being called to respond wherever the living Christ is active in our world. Of course, we can't be everywhere that the Spirit is moving, but we can be somewhere. We can be at work loving our neighbors, feeding the hungry, housing those with nowhere to lay their heads, fixing our broken or inadequate systems of justice, of education, of politics, of environmental protection.
Do you remember the hymn, "This Is My Father's World?" The third and final verse starts this way: "This is my Father's world:/ O let me ne'er forget/ That though the wrong seems oft so strong,/ God is the Ruler yet."
Friends in Christ, the entire world is indeed God's house. And like Jesus, we should want to be here, working diligently to make sure that God's house of healing is open to all..