Luke 2:41-52, from the First Sunday after Christmas.
Given the things Jesus would do and say during the life ahead of him, we should not feel surprised that the very first things he says and does in the Gospels are weird and offensive.
Jesus is 12 years old in Luke 2:41-52, and he and his parents have made their annual trek to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, a holy time on the Jewish spiritual calendar that commemorated God’s deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It of course would be during another Passover some 30 years later that Jesus would trek to Jerusalem with his disciples to share a Passover meal with them before his arrest, execution and resurrection.
But once this Passover from Jesus’ boyhood is over, his parents, Joseph and Mary, pack up and leave town with their friends and family, assuming the young Jesus had the sense to join the caravan before its departure. But when they go looking for him that night, they find he is missing. A hasty return to Jerusalem and a frantic, three-day search follow, after which Joseph and Mary finally find Jesus sitting in the Temple, happy as a clam and utterly oblivious to their distress, wowing the teachers with his wisdom.
Appalled, Mary gives him a well deserved scolding. “Son, why have you treated us like this?” She demands. “Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
Jesus, ashamed of himself, apologizes for the distress he has caused his parents, admits he got carried away, and promises never to do it again, right? Wrong. In a move that fans of the “What Would Jesus Do?” slogan might have difficulty explaining, Jesus scolds his parents right back.
“Why were you searching for me?” he asks. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”
Why, indeed? A boy of 12 goes inexplicably missing for half a week in the aftermath of a patriotic celebration in an enemy-occupied city, and the first thing his mom and dad were supposed to assume is that they could find him hanging out, safe and sound, in the first century equivalent of a seminary classroom? And right in front of the adoptive father who has raised him for 12 years and who has been looking high and low for him all this time, imagining every sort of terrible fate that could have befallen him, Jesus has the nerve to talk about being in the house of his father – that is, his *real* father.
I’m frankly surprised Mary and Joseph didn’t wring his ungrateful neck.
And in case you are tempted to dismiss Jesus’ reaction as that of an impetuous tween, consider how, as a full-grown man in the beginnings of his public ministry, he responded in Matt. 12:48-50 when told that Mary and his brothers had come to speak with him:
“‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'”
There are times when Jesus calls us to imitate him. Having washed his disciples’ feet in John 13:4-11, Jesus tells his disciples to serve one another as he as served them. And a few verses later, in John 13:14, he commands them, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
But there are other times – and this week’s passage is one of them – when we must remember that we are Christians, not the Christ, and that Jesus is our king, not our peer. We don’t always have the right to act like he did.
Toward the end of C.S. Lewis’ story, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” as the coronation festivities for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are winding down, Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in the story, quietly goes missing. But the children, Lewis writes, said nothing about it, having been warned by Mr. Beaver that such was Aslan’s way.
“‘He’ll be coming and going,’ he had said. ‘One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down – and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quote all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you musn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.'”
Not like a tame lion at all. And, to echo something else Mr. Beaver says about him way back at the start of the story, not safe, either. An honest reading of the Gospels reveals a Jesus with sharp elbows and an even sharper tongue, a man who could be achingly compassionate in one moment and seemingly heartless the next, radically inclusive toward some people and coldly confrontational toward others.
Which raises some possibly hard questions for you and me. Is the Jesus we know tame and safe? Or does he at least occasionally offend and frighten us? If our relationship with him isn’t at least a little bit uncomfortable at least some of the time, might it be that we don’t know him quite as well as we think we do? When he speaks harshly to the Pharisees, do we cheer him on without considering how much we have in common with them? When he commands us to turn the other cheek or respond in love to hatred, do we assume that we always do? When he says that the first will be last and the last, first, do we figure that we, naturally, are the last who will be first, not the first who will be last?
If you area a saint already, perhaps so. But if not, perhaps your best life still awaits you – the life Jesus is waiting to give you, if only you will let go of the one you are holding onto so tightly.
Next week: Epiphany of the Lord
