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Eve of Epiphany
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.
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The Second Sunday of Christmas
Eve of Epiphany
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 2:41-52
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 2:41-52
✛
Jesus: God, Man, Lost
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The point of this gospel story is that Jesus was always God; there never was a time when he was not the divine Son of the divine Father. Here he is: a boy of twelve, going with his parents Mary and Joseph to Jerusalem for the annual festival of the Passover. But he stays behind, on his own initiative, to dwell in the temple and converse with the teachers there as a bright and friendly child. When his parents find him, he says something they do not understand, even as he has done something they do not understand: he is about, he must be about, the house, the business, the things of his Father.
This sort of story illustrates an old saying, “The child is father of the man.” Jesus didn’t grow up into being God, he was God already even as a boy. The story makes this point suggestively by numerous significant details; here are a few of them: It is a story of the parents finding the boy on the third day, even as Jesus the man will be found by his disciples to be alive after his crucifixion on the third day. It is a story of going to Jerusalem, even as the arc of Jesus’ adult ministry as a whole will be shaped, by Saint Luke, as one long trip to Jerusalem. There are harsh words uttered by the boy to his mother: Why were you looking for me? Did you not know? The man Jesus, according to Saint John, will confront his mother at the wedding in Cana with similarly sharp words: Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour is not yet. With these details and many others the child is shown as the father of the man.
Again, the point: Jesus was always God; there never was a time when he was not. He didn’t become God’s real and true Son at his resurrection, nor at his baptism, nor by a process of childhood maturation. He was God when he was the little boy visited by the wise men. He was God when he was the babe in swaddling clothes in the manger. He was God when he was the just-conceived embryonic being in his mother’s womb, tinier than the head of a pin. For his entire earthly career, Jesus was God.
But this is a truth we are not able to understand—a point that the story, interestingly, also makes.
Consider its depiction of Jesus. He is at this stage of things a very bright boy, and everyone in the Temple is impressed by his understanding. Why then doesn’t he anticipate his parents’ anxiety at his absence? Why is he, as it were, surprised at their incomprehension at what he is doing? If he is so smart, why doesn’t he know that—and if he is so good, why doesn’t he do something about it?
Or we can turn to Mary. The angel came to her and spoke; she knows who Jesus is. She knows that Joseph is Jesus’ guardian and for earthly appearances his father but she also knows that she gave birth to Jesus as a virgin. Which is to say, she knows that God is Jesus’ Father. Has she forgotten all that? Why does she not understand when Jesus is in the Temple as a boy, seeking to be in his Father’s house and to be doing his Father’s business?
I believe we are meant to have these questions. For this gospel story seems to be constructed so that when we read it we will say, “I don’t understand.” And for further confirmation, we have within the story Mary and Joseph who do not understand. In short, the story is a sign to us not only that Jesus was always God but also that we do not understand what it is for a human being to be God.
+ + +
There is, however, one thing that I think I do understand, and that is that the parents of Jesus lost him. I’ve lost a lot of beautiful and precious things in my life. Sometimes they are just taken away, like the loss of the beauty of a flower, which is here today but, when tomorrow comes, gone. Other times they are lost through my own fault, like all those orchids that I have drowned to death. My wife had a recurring bad dream, when our son was a newborn, that she had gone to the grocery store and come home with sacks and sacks of food but had forgotten our son, left him behind, lost him. We know, I think we all know, what it is to have something of surpassing value and to fall short of the trust that was bestowed upon us.
So they left Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph did, and they did not know they had left behind the most precious thing in the universe. I think I know what that loss means, and perhaps you do too.
+ + +
So here we are, human beings who know what it is to lose things, valuable things, who are faced with this other human being, Jesus, who is and always was not only human but God. Now you might think that, if we can’t understand this, then there’s nothing we can do—but that’s wrong. Even though it’s beyond our understanding, we can ponder (and wonder) that there is someone human just like us, who is, unlike us, God.
Start with some basic questions. Did Jesus ever get hungry? Yes. Did he cry as a baby? I think, probably. Did he, as we say euphemistically, have to go to the bathroom? Yes. So was there, as we say, toilet training? Again, yes. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but may I at the least flag for your private contemplation the detail that the boy Jesus in today’s story is twelve years old. Jesus would have gone through the physical changes of adolescence.
There is nothing unchristian to thinking about (and wondering at) the physicality of this human being who is God. He was God when he was hungry, God when he was sleeping, God when he was growing, God when he was at puberty, God in his adulthood. There are some things that he did not do. He did not marry, for instance, nor did he use a computer. But there is nothing in our life that is alien to him.
At every stage of our own life we can ponder that God was human like us. This is what Mary did. I speak of Mary, because after this scene we never see Joseph again. Tradition depicts him as an older man who met his death prior to Jesus’ mature ministry. But Mary was there, not only at the beginning, but at the end. She pondered the angel’s words, the shepherds’ words, the words spoken in the temple by Simeon and Anna. She pondered these harsh words today, the first recorded words of her son, “Did you not know that I must be about the things of my Father?” She held in her heart the miracles and the future words of her son, including his words about the priority of faith in him—blessed are those who hear the word and believe! She took in his suffering on the cross and watched him expire. She held in her heart the memory of holding his dead body in her arms. And when the word came from the other women that the tomb was empty, and when the Spirit came upon those in the upper room, Mary had the heart to take it all in.
+ + +
It is impossible to comprehend that the human named Jesus was always God. But it is not hard at all to take these things into your heart, and to hold them there. We today are like Mary and Joseph, returning from Jerusalem, going back to everyday life. Despite our incomprehension, there is in our hearts something we can keep remembering, and pondering, and treasuring. We have lost many things. But the most important thing is still there, still with us.
Thanks be to God!
