postID: 7062; title: The Second Sunday of Christmas
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Second Sunday of Christmas
O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully restore, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2016-01-03 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1245
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2016-01-03 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2016-01-03postID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7062; date_type: variable; year: 2016
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7062
displayDates for postID: 7062/year: 2016
Array
(
[0] => 2016-01-03
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2016-01-03 with ID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
The Second Sunday of Christmas
Array
(
[date] => 2016-01-03 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1245
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2016-01-03 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2016-01-03postID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7062; date_type: variable; year: 2016
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7062
displayDates for postID: 7062/year: 2016
Array
(
[0] => 2016-01-03
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2016-01-03 with ID: 7062 (The Second Sunday of Christmas)
The reading_id [73512] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Luke 2:41-52
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 2:41-52
✛
Boy Jesus
Array
(
[0] => 60757
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60757
)
] (reading_id: 73512)bbook_id: 60757
The bbook_id [60757] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
A man was talking with a friend and their conversation went naturally to his home life when he was a boy. Where did he live? What were his parents like? How was school? These are questions that come up naturally as a friendship develops. They also come up naturally as one gets to know Jesus.
Most of us meet Jesus first, I think, at the cross. It is because he was the victim of the grossest miscarriage of justice of all time—because of that, and only because of that—that he commands any attention from us today. What we learn is that this miscarriage of justice was, in an unexpected way, the reinjection of justice into the universe. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it is identified as the “deeper magic” that underlies all things: that when an innocent victim voluntarily submits himself, turns himself over, to the forces of evil, those evil forces are themselves overthrown. Satan thought he had his clutches upon Jesus—but Jesus, to Satan’s undoing, turned out to have something about him that was stronger than death.
There we meet Jesus, on the cross, the innocent one who, stronger than death, offers us new life. But what is the content of that new life that the risen Jesus offers us?
To learn about new life, we go back in time, back from Jesus’ death to his public ministry. We study the parables, the healings, and Jesus’ actions in calling and shaping his disciples. Our study of Jesus’ teaching and ministry is how he draws us into the new life, which turns out to be all tied up with him.
—With the result that, the more we learn about Jesus, the more we want to know. Jesus becomes a friend. As with any other friend, at some point we want to know what it was like for him growing up. “I know who you, Jesus, are now; but who were you when you were a boy?”
Here’s what Saint Luke tells us, in the twelve verses of today’s gospel. Jesus had religious, observant Jews for his parents. The family walked each year to Jerusalem for Passover, a distance of four or five days. Luke here speaks of Jesus’ “parents,” not referencing Jesus’ virgin birth and thus his odd standing vis-a-vis Joseph. They are just “parents,” seemingly ordinary. And in this story from Jesus’ twelfth year, they are ordinary parents in another way. When they set out to return home and, after a day, discover Jesus is nowhere in the traveling party—they had assumed Jesus was with others, which was perfectly normal, since no one had yet invented “helicopter parents”—they return to Jerusalem, another day’s walk, and then spend a third day looking for him, finding him at last in the temple. When they find him, they were, quote, “amazed.”
Consider the tonal character of this amazement. “Son,” his mother says, “why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” It sounds like a reproof to me. Jesus had parents who disapproved of this thing that he had done. He also had parents who put their disapproval in terms of his treatment of them: “why hast thou thus dealt with us?” And once more, this time in Mary’s own words, Joseph is spoken of simply as Jesus’ “father.” Of course they knew (they could never forget!) how Jesus came into the world: the angel, the virgin birth, the shepherds, Simeon, Anna. Yet a dozen years on, and Mary says “thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing,” as if to say, ours is an ordinary family, and you should be an ordinary good lad, you should not cause me to sorrow.
Those were Jesus’ parents when he was a boy. And what was it like for Jesus? On this occasion, he was in the temple in the midst of the teachers of the Law, listening to them and asking them questions. These teachers of the Law—Luke calls them “doctors”; think, “PhDs”—they are “astonished” at Jesus’ “understanding and answers.” There is no suggestion of Jesus arguing with them; there is no hint here of his future disputations and disagreements with the scribes and Pharisees. There is just conversation, Jesus listening and questioning and answering, and the doctors astonished.
Why was he there? He asked Mary and Joseph didn’t they know that he had to be, quote, “about my Father’s business?” We might translate that “business” as “house”; Jesus was saying he had to be about the business or in the house (but here’s the point): of his Father. Yes, Luke has just referred to Mary and Joseph as his parents, and Mary has just said “thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing,” but Jesus says he is about the business, in the house of, “my Father.”
What was it like for Jesus as a boy? He knew who his real Father was, and he knew that he had work to do that pertained to that Father, and that the work he had to do would be taking him to Jerusalem. He knew all this, and on one occasion—one occasion!—this destiny of Jesus caused him to correct his mother’s speech; but for the rest, his childhood was simply and normally human. From the temple, Jesus went back home with them to Nazareth. If we had known him then, we would have seen an ordinary family, ordinary but without sin, a good boy, with good parents, but (other than that ordinariness) nothing special. Jesus was subject to them; they knew who he really was, and yet they were his parents. Jesus, obedient, grew in stature and wisdom and was subject to them until such time, a couple of decades later, when he went forth from his home and called his disciples and filled his days with, sometimes, crowds of people, teaching and healing them as, finally, he made his way back up to Jerusalem, back up to that place where, obedient to his Father, he submitted voluntarily to a torturous death.
Jesus’ boyhood illuminates the friendship we can have with him. Jesus will never be exactly like us: he will always have that one he calls “my Father.” Jesus, that is to say, is uniquely the Son of God. And yet he is exactly like us: there is nothing about Jesus that is anything except full humanity. The love we feel when he looks at us is a love that reaches out, man to man, human to human, with complete acceptance and at the same time total demand. For those who would dare risk intimacy with God, it is good that Jesus was a boy, it is good that Jesus is human, good also that Jesus is the only Son of the Father, good that we can be challenged by him to friendship. Do we not know that he must be about his Father’s business?—the business of making it possible for us to be his friend.
