Luke 2: 41-52

Letting Jesus be a Boy today | 1st Sunday after Christmas, DEC. 26, 2021 | A Sermon based on Luke 2: 41-52 (RCL) | by David Zersen |

¹Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. ⁴²And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. ⁴³When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. ⁴⁴Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. ⁴⁵When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. ⁴⁶After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. ⁴⁷And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. ⁴⁸When his parents saw him they were astonished; and 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.” ⁴⁹He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” ⁵⁰But they did not understand what he said to them. ⁵¹Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. ⁵²And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.

LETTING JESUS BE A BOY TODAY

If you’ve ever tried to find some information about the boyhood of Jesus, you’re going to be stuck with today’s Gospel lesson. Why is that? Most theologians assume that by the time the Gospels came to be written, the writers were interested primarily in the so-called “salvation story”. In other words, they wanted to describe what Jesus came to mean for us in terms of his death and resurrection. Those events are important because they explain how we are freed from sin to live a changed life and how we are freed from death to live eternally with God. Those teachings form a very significant part of the Gospel narrative.

Of course, there is also a good amount of reportage about Jesus parables, his miracles, his conflict stories and his teachings. There’s even some reportage about his birth in Matthew and Luke. But when it comes to learning what Jesus did before he was thirty, we are left with guesswork. Did he work in Nazareth in Joseph’s carpenter shop? Did he do odd jobs in local villages? Did he practice preaching and teaching on his siblings as some pastors have been known to do? We know nothing—except today’s text! And that’s why we should spend some time with it.

Many artists have understood how important this text is for us and have tried to illustrate the scene. Almost all of them focus on one sentence: The teachers in the temple were amazed at what he said! My favorite image is one by He Qui, a living Chinese artist who now resides in the U.S. He uses brilliant, sometimes iridescent colors, Oriental eyes and clothes, and peculiarly juxtaposed body positions to attract the viewer’s attention. But he also focuses on this one aspect of today’s text, that the teachers were dumbfounded by the questions that Jesus asked them. And down through the centuries, although the text doesn’t specifically say it, this has been interpreted to imply that Jesus had otherworldly knowledge. To use a theological term, it is just more proof that Jesus was omniscient, all knowing.

I’d like to suggest that coming down from the great event of incarnation at Christmas we see a bit more in this text than is traditionally allowed. After all, we confess in the Nicene Creed that Jesus was not only true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, but also true man, born of the Virgin Mary. Yet we spend very little time exploring his humanity, his childhood, his “growing-up years”. That has a great deal to do with what the biblical record allows us to do. However, given the precious little that we do have, let’s let the Gospel lesson for the Sunday after Christmas spend some time with us.

First, it should be mentioned that there are a number of so-called apocryphal (meaning “hidden”) writings about Jesus and early Christianity which were never deemed worthy of being included in the canonical or accepted scriptures for the New Testament. Among these is The Gospel acc. to Thomas, written in Coptic (ancient Egyptian script) as late as 250 A.D. and discovered in Egypt in 1945. It purports to report on the life of Jesus between the ages of five and twelve. Many of the stories show that Jesus was an obstinate and mean-spirited child who performed miracles to deceive or hurt people. This Gospel has always been rejected by scholars in the early church as well as modern scholars as a heretical post-New Testament scripture intent on filling in the gaps in Jesus’ recorded life. We are therefore left with today’s text as the only record of Jesus’ life between infancy and his public ministry.

What can we learn from this text? Quite apart from the Johnny-one-note lesson that artists have taken from today’s Gospel, I think it’s worth reflecting on four different takes on the story.

First, Jesus was a child in a pious family that made the four-day trip to Jerusalem at Passover. This year he was twelve and probably went up for his bar mitzvah with the women and children, but returned with the men, symbolic of his having become a man. Second, they went with family and friends, probably a lengthy procession. On the way back, the parents of Jesus were a full day into the journey when it was discovered that he wasn’t in the crowd. Third, they searched for three days in the crowded city to find him and, at last, discovered him listening to the rabbis talking and even asking them questions. Finally, there was a family squabble as the parents and their son expressed their reasonable differences about worry and wanting to feel grown-up. He does go home, we’re told, and pays attention to his parent’s wishes. And Mary, we learn, remembered this setting. Perhaps it was one of the memories she reviewed at the foot of the cross.

There isn’t too much in this story that gives interpreters the cue that this is the point when Jesus knew he was “divine”. He asked some difficult questions and the rabbis were impressed. He told his parents that he was spending time in his “father’s house”. That doesn’t have to be a slap at Joseph or a reference to the one who was Jesus’ divine father. Jesus would regularly teach his followers to call God their father as well. Think of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s interesting to compare this example of Jesus precocious nature with TVs “Young Sheldon”, for instance, or the chess whiz in “Searching for Bobbie Fischer” or the lead in “Little Man Tate”. Child prodigies populate our biographies of musicians, physicists and even theologians! I would love to remember this image of Jesus as a very human and very smart young man destined for great things rather than just a whiz kid who always had direct contact with his divine Father.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t accept Jesus as God’s “one and only” (“monogenes” 1 Jn. 1:18) son, the second person of the Trinity, the divine Redeemer, etc. It does mean that I cherish the human nature of Jesus and love this text as one of the few that allows us to embrace the boy becoming a man, the child squabbling with his parents, the obedient son who goes home to be a good boy and the precocious child who surprises learned people with insights many of which he may well have gleaned from his pious parents.

What does such a focus on Jesus’ human nature do for you and me? It helps us with the doctrines we have been taught to accept. Jesus is not the “untouchable” one. He is, in fact, our Lord and Savior. He has in fact, as Luther wrote, “purchased and won me from all sin and from the power of the devil” (Second Article of the Creed). But, he was also born of a woman (Gal. 4:45), temped in all things, just as we (Heb. 4:5) and died as do we (2 Cor. 5:15). And having just celebrated Christmas, the incarnation of the Son of God, let us also remember John’s own telling of the essence of the Christmas message, that the “word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

I love the fact that this Gospel lesson, if we let it, allows Jesus to be a boy, a child, a young man among us. It allows us to experience his humanity and to know that he like us was born to experience the love and concern of parents and the challenge to find the purpose and meaning into which we are being called. Let this story on the Sunday after Christmas remind you that the Incarnation’s meaning at Christmas, the meaning of the Word becoming flesh, can fulfill you personally and humanly. It can fulfill you as you seek to identify with the same Jesus who walked the roads of Galilee and taught us to call God “father”, “Abba”, just as he did.

Let Jesus be a boy today.

—

The Rev. David Zersen, D.Min., Ed.D.

President Emeritus, Concordia University Texas

Hymn: “O Jesus Once a Nazareth Boy”