Finding Jesus? Or Being Found by Jesus? (December 29, 2024)
1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26; Psalm 148; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52
When Joseph and Mary did not find Jesus, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.
So today we have a gospel story about Jesus as a child. It seems like just a few days ago Jesus was a holy infant so tender and mild, but now he’s almost a teenager, and he’s not so tender and mild any more – he’s tough and spicy! And in many ways it is a strange story.
Luke’s gospel is the only one to tell us this story, and indeed this story is the only information in any of the gospels that tells us about Jesus between his birth and his arrival at the Jordan River as an adult to be baptized by John and begin his ministry. The gospels really don’t tell us anything at all about the personal or private life of Jesus.
In part, that’s just because ancient texts almost never try to get inside the heads of the characters. In the Odyssey or the Iliad, Homer never tries to show us what it’s like to be Ulysses. The Old Testament tells us about the words and the deeds of people like Moses and David and Isaiah, but they never try to convey the inner thoughts of these characters. What was it like to be Moses? We can guess, but the Bible just isn’t interested in the psychology of the people it describes, the way a more modern novel or movie might try to portray.
The gospels do tell us that Jesus was fully human – he was born, he ate, he slept, he was part of a family. He had feelings of warmth and tenderness and compassion and sorrow. Presumably – although it’s never discussed – he went to the bathroom, got colds, played games, laughed at jokes. Our passage today tells us that Jesus “increased in wisdom” as he grew up – which means there was a time when he had less wisdom than he did later – and that he was obedient to his parents, even when – like most children do, at some point – he thought he knew better than they did.
Yes, Jesus was completely and fully a human being, but how does also being divine affect that? Did Jesus always know and understand who he was, or did he have to slowly figure it out over time? And what was that like? How did that feel? The gospels really tell us nothing about this. And that’s not only because ancient texts didn’t try to get inside the heads of their characters. There are some things we just aren’t meant to know.
There’s an old story – I’ve probably told it before – about a student of Martin Luther’s who once asked him, “Dr. Luther, what was God doing before God created the world?” Luther paused for a moment and said, “Probably making hell for people who ask stupid questions like that.” (Luther had many strengths, but he was never known for his patience.) We don’t know God in God’s self, because God is God and we are not. God is the creator and we are the creature, and wanting to be inside God’s mind and understand everything about God can be a way of not accepting our status as created and limited and human.
God reveals what we need to know about God’s self to us above all in the humanity of Jesus – where we see God’s humility, God’s passion for people’s thriving and flourishing, God’s special concern for the least and the lost, God’s mercy and compassion and forgiveness, God’s power over the forces of evil and darkness and death, God’s steadfast commitment to fulfill promises and renew all things. That’s what God wants us to know about who God is. Our curiosity to know more – what was God doing before creating the world, when did Jesus know he was God – Luther’s insight was that this curiosity is more likely than not to get us into trouble. It is better for us to mind our own business about such things.
And that’s true of this one little story that Luke tells us about Jesus at twelve years old. Luke doesn’t really tell us anything about what it was like to be both the eternal Son of God and a twelve-year-old boy, as curious as we might be about that. Instead, Luke is trying to show us through the life of Jesus who God is for us, in this story as in every other story in the gospels.
One of the things Luke wants to show us is that Jesus was formed as a part of the Jewish people. Jesus is raised in a religious family; his parents travel to Jerusalem each year for the Passover. Jesus grows up experiencing the Temple; he is at home there, listening to the teachers, asking them questions, sharing his insights. He is a part of the conversation of the people of Israel about their God, who is his God, who is his Father. This is what shaped the humanity of Jesus – the Jewish experience of the liberation of the Exodus from Egypt, of the Law of Moses as a gift and a way of life, of exile and return, of hope and promise. He learned all of this at his mother’s knees, it is part of who he is. God’s self-revelation in Jesus is part and parcel of God’s self-revelation to Israel.
Another part of what Luke is showing us can be seen when we look at this story as the mirror image of another story found only in Luke’s gospel, near the end of the gospel. The parallels between the two stories are so close that I think Luke must have wanted us to see them together. In today’s story, two people – Joseph and Mary – have gone from their hometown of Nazareth to Jerusalem for the Passover. In the other story, two disciples of Jesus, one named Cleopas, have also gone from their hometown of Emmaus to Jerusalem for the Passover. In today’s story, Mary and Joseph begin their journey home and travel a whole day, thinking Jesus was with them, but he wasn’t. In the other story, Cleopas and his companion begin their journey home and travel a whole day, thinking they had lost Jesus on Good Friday, but Jesus was with them the whole time.
In today’s story, Jesus is actually in the Temple, in conversation with the teachers of Israel, asking questions, listening, understanding the arc of the Hebrew Scriptures that tell the story of God and God’s people. In the other story, the risen Jesus walks with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, in conversation with them about those same Hebrew Scriptures, showing them that if they understood the God revealed in the story of Israel, they would see that of course God would come in power through the cross, through faithful service in hope of resurrection, through love and forgiveness and mercy.
And in both stories, it is on the third day that the disciples, after much confusion and distress, finally figure out what has happened. In today’s story, Mary complains to Jesus – we thought you were with us, but you didn’t come with us, why did you do this to us? – and she does not understand Jesus’s response. In the other story, Cleopas and his partner invite their talkative stranger to their home, and when Jesus responds by taking over their dinner table, taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it to them – and with this response of Jesus they understand that he is risen, and that they have known him in the breaking of the bread.
Isn’t that always the way it works with Jesus? When we think we know him, when we think he’s with us, when we think we’ve got him under control, he’s not there. And if we complain to him about it, his answer is hard to understand. And when we think he’s left us, when we think we’re lost and on our own, but we’re willing to have our minds opened and to take a risk and offer a stranger hospitality, suddenly we find he’s been with us all along, and at last we do understand. Joseph and Mary had to learn the lesson every parent has to learn: children are not ours, they are their own persons, we cannot control them, we can only offer them hospitality for a while. Before you know it they do what they want – and if you’re lucky, you develop a relationship with them not as children but as people.
It's the same with God. God came among us at Christmas as a human being, as a vulnerable child, full of needs and demands. But that does not make Jesus ours. We cannot control him. He is always about his Father’s business; he is always acting in ways that surprise us when we least expect it and when we allow ourselves to be open to surprise – yet he is always completely showing us the same God that the Scriptures have always attested to. In the end, God becomes human not so that we can find him but so that he can find us. If we are willing to let him.