Losing Jesus

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26; Psalm 148; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52

“His mother said to him, ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ He said to them, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ But they did not understand what he said to them.”

It is a little odd to read today this story from the childhood of Jesus, only one day after Christmas. Jesus is already twelve years old, it seems like it was just yesterday that he was born! They grow up so fast!

But there is also so much in this story that’s very easy to relate to. If you’re a parent and you’ve ever lost track of a child, even for ten seconds at the supermarket, you know the terror and panic that Mary and Joseph must have experienced.  And it’s utterly believable that a child, when found safe and sound, is completely clueless about the anxiety that their parents or their caregivers felt about them. “What are you worried about?” And Mary and Joseph were hardly the first or the last parents ever to hear their twelve-year-old child speak and say, “We do not understand what you are talking about.”

That’s the thing about children – they are still young and inexperienced and have so much yet to learn, and yet they have minds and wills of their own. It is a never-ending source of wonder and amazement as they express their own insights, their own feelings, their own developing personalities, each of them unique and precious and delightful. And that means there are also awkward moments, and whole awkward seasons, and times of anxiety and worry and confusion.

Even Jesus, God made flesh, was a human child – had to grow and learn and develop as each one of us does. It’s easy to imagine the Son of God as a child prodigy teaching Torah to the learned rabbis at the Temple; but it’s good to remember that there were the awkward moments too, the times of tension and worry and confusion and grief. That is part of the Christmas story too, because it’s part of the human story, something all of us who have children or who are around children or once were children can relate to.

But there’s another aspect of this story which, I think, is also easy for many of us to relate to, that is harder to acknowledge and to talk about. Every year, Luke tells us, the parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem every year for the Passover. They were devout people, who celebrated the religious holidays of their people like so many of us do, year in and year out. And then, one year, after the religious holiday was over, as they were heading back as they always did to regular life again – suddenly they realized, they have lost Jesus! They thought they knew where Jesus was, they thought they were doing everything right, and then – in an instant – they realize Jesus is not there!

Have you ever had that feeling – that you thought you knew where Jesus was, that you thought you knew the place of God in your life, that you thought you were doing everything right and all was well with the world and then suddenly you realize – Jesus is gone! God is not here! How did this happen? I think a lot of us have had that experience. This is what happens when you have a living a God, a God who does things without our permission, a God who is farther ahead than we are and who we don’t fully understand, and suddenly – poof! God is missing, Jesus is not where we thought he was. And like Joseph and Mary, we are thrown into a panic. How could this have happened? What went wrong? More importantly, where is he?

And when, after a three-day frantic search, they find Jesus again – he is different from the child they thought they knew. He doesn’t apologize for making them worried and anxious. He says things they don’t understand. They’ve found Jesus again, but it’s not the same as before. Mary and Joseph thought they knew all about Jesus; they even had the benefit of visits from angels to tell them what to expect. But then they lost Jesus, and when they found him he seemed to have changed – and so they had to reassess, reevaluate, reconsider what they thought they knew about Jesus.

We lose Jesus, then we find Jesus, then we rethink Jesus. That happens to all of us too. Just when we think we have Jesus figured out, he up and does something different that we did not expect. And then we have to rethink things – as Luke tells us, after finding Jesus again, Mary goes over these events in her heart, trying to come to terms with what she is learning about Jesus, about God, about faith.

To lose God – or, to be more precise, to lose one image of God, one concept of God, a way of relating to God that worked in one season of our lives but now suddenly no longer does – and then to find God again, and be changed in the process – this is what growing in our relationship with God looks like. It has its moments of panic and confusion. It has its moments when we fear we’ve completely messed up and lost everything. It has its moments of relief when we find him again. It has its moments of anger – How could you have done this to us!! It has its moments of reflection and pondering and rethinking.

None of this is easy for any of us when we experience it. But just as Jesus does not apologize to Joseph and Mary for what he put them through, Jesus does not apologize to us either when he provokes us to think we’ve lost him. Because, as Brian Zahnd says, “Christ is found by those who seek him, not those who presume [they already have found] him.”

As we celebrate this holiday season, with all of the pressures and the tensions and the anxieties that are around us, we also might well wonder where is this Jesus, where is this God who supposedly showed up two thousand years ago in Bethlehem but feels pretty distant right now.  This story reminds us today that sometimes the disorienting experience of losing Jesus can become the best holiday gift we can receive. Because it rouses us from complacency and gets us back on the road of searching for Jesus. He has promised that those who ask will receive, that those who seek will find.  Trust the promise, don’t stop seeking, and know that however terrified you may be by God’s apparent absence right now, God has not forgotten where you are, and although things may never be the same again, in God’s good time you will find God again and all will be well.