When I hear this story of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in
Jerusalem and the ensuing confusion that occurs I can’t help but think that
this is a parent’s worst nightmare, at least it’s one of mine. I mean, TJ is with me and then suddenly he’s
gone! And now to some degree the
situation that is presented by the author of Luke seems pretty unlikely, but
I’m here to tell you that I have seen this happen.
So my father and grandfather were Shriners and generally our
summer vacations would be to some Shrine convention in the southeast. There was one family who would travel with us
who had, like, eight kids. We had all
stopped for breakfast one morning and when we went to leave, they realized that
two of their kids weren’t with them, but figured that they had just ridden with
another member of our group. So about an
hour and a half later, we stop for gas or something and they realize that,
oops, they left their kids at the Denny’s about 100 miles back.
Now this portion of Luke is not meant to be representative of
parenting failures throughout the centuries, but it does show us that Jesus
experienced things that could happen to any kid. Kids get left behind in the rush and chaos of
traveling. Parent’s get frustrated with
their kids for driving them crazy, and really, after three days of searching, I
have a feeling that the exact words used by Mary have been slightly edited for
younger ears.
Jesus was a teenager who was trying to assert his
independence. Jesus was acting, in many
ways, like any other teenager. This
story about Jesus reminds us of two things, first that Jesus really was human,
and second, that Jesus was very grounded in the Jewish scriptures.
Let’s look at the humanness of Jesus first. It may seem obvious that Jesus was human, I
mean, we confess it every week when we recite the creed, and when you read or
recite the Nicene Creed, it becomes even more obvious that this dual nature of
Jesus is a core component of our Christian belief. Yet, I think it’s easy to succumb to thinking
of Jesus as perfect and godlike and to forget that this same person who healed
the sick and raised the dead also had to eat food and drink water. This is same person who on the cross cried
out, ‘I thirst!’ This story about Jesus,
which is really the only one in the gospel’s about Jesus that takes place
between his infancy and the beginning of his ministry almost twenty years after
this invites us to open up our imagination, our theological imagination, and
wonder about the person of Jesus and what he experienced, how he lived his
life, what that life was like for him and others around him during the time
leading up to his, very brief public ministry, which was anywhere from one to
three years depending on how you read the various gospels.
What were his friends like?
Did he have a girlfriend? What
was it like to be Jesus and experience hunger?
Did he ever experience unemployment?
We know that he experienced grief.
What was his reaction to the constant oppression of the Roman Empire?
I ask these questions not be disrespectful or sacreligious
but because as we think about how Jesus, entirely human, experienced the same
pains and challenges of everyday life that we do, it starts to make us think
about the miracle of the incarnation.
And that’s really what the Christmas season is about. It’s about the God who became flesh and dwelt
amongst us, experienced the same things we dod, suffered like we suffer,
laughed like we laugh, hungered like we hunger.
I heard somebody the other day suggest how crazy God’s choice to become
human really is considering all the junk that we have to deal with in this
life. To chose to become human in a situation
where Jesus is part of an oppressed minority group that is marginalized and
abused. Where poverty and hunger are a
way of life. That God became incarnate
amongst these people tells us about the nature of God, about a God who cares
for the oppressed and marginalized, a God who cares for the poor, and sick, and
hungry. A God whose love is abounding.
The simple humanness of this story, that it is something that
we can all in some way relate to, either as the teenager struggling for
independence or the worried parent only serves to remind us that this Jesus who
would go on to be revealed as the savior of the world, as God incarnate, was
also human just like us.
In addition to displaying the humanness of Jesus, the author
of Luke is reminding us of just how truly Jewish Jesus really is. It’s something that can be somewhat easy to
forget. I mean, I don’t think any of use
define ourselves as being Jewish today despite the fact that Christianity grew
out of a sect of Judiaism.
But the more important thing about Jesus’s Jewish identify is
that it if fundamentally links the Christ of the New Testament with the God of
the Hebrew Bible. Through Christ we see
a continuation of the story that is first revealed to us through the Torah and
then through the remainder of the books of the Hebrew Bible. I think that if we are honest, we will all
admit to at some point or another saying, yeah, I love Jesus, but I have a lot
of problems with the ‘Old Testament God’ and all that ‘anger and wrath.’
A lot of times we tend to misread the Hebrew Bible and we
start to think of there being two separate God’s. And there is a word for this, and it is Marcionism. And we all are, at times, a little bit like a
man who lived in the second century named Marcion who rejected the God of the
Hebrew Bible and believed the Jesus was sent by the true God to save us from
the evil God of the Israelites. Now I’m
not suggesting that we’ve gone that far in our thinking, but there is a bit of
‘minor’ Marcionism in all of us.
I bring that up not just to give a history lesson, but to say
that reminder of Jesus as being so firmly rooted in Jewish life and practices,
making the pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem during Passover ever year,
possessing such wisdom and insight about the Torah that even the priests of the
Temple were amazed reminds us that Jesus was not just culturally Jewish, but
that he was fully and completely Jewish.
And because of that completeness, we begin to understand that
the incarnation that we celebrate, that radical notion that God would become
human, is not something crazy and new, but that it is a continuation of the
story of the relationship between God and creation.
In Christ we are reminded that the same God that created the
heavens and the earth, the mountains and the seas, the birds and the fish is
the same God who made a covenant with Abraham, and a promise that all people
would be blessed through the people of Abraham.
Jesus is the continuation of this story, the bringing of salvation to
all people, a fulfillment of the promises of God. It’s not something new, it’s part of the way
God had always acted and it’s part of the way that God still is active in each
of our lives today.
The God of the Hebrew Bible is revealed as a God of abundant
love, mercy and grace who chose the people of Israel and in doing so chose all
of creation. So the incarnation of Jesus
as the appearance of the grace of God in this world is exactly the kind of
thing that a wildly loving and all-forgiving God would do.
So as read of a 12 year old Jesus, hanging behind in
Jerusalem, driving his parents crazy, we remember that the Jesus that would
later die on the cross is not just God incarnate, but is also very much
human. Jesus’s suffering at the cross is
a reminder that God truly understands our own suffering and that when we are
filled with grief or sorrow or loneliness or pain, that God is fully present
with us at the moment, holding us and comforting us because God knows that pain
and has experienced that pain.
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