Luke 2:41-52 "The Comma?" Scott Hoezee

As we have once more experienced just this month, the church spends nearly four whole weeks getting ready to mark the birth of Christ. The just-completed Season of Advent directs our attention to what it means that the Son of God arrived in this world through the womb of a virgin named Mary. The whole celebration and observance climaxes on Christmas morning when we pull out the stops to shout our hallelujahs over the birth of the one called Jesus and known as Immanuel.

From the first Sunday of Advent until Christmas morning, something like twenty-six days pass. The next major event on the church calendar is Epiphany, which comes up on January 6 and which we will celebrate here at Calvin Church next Sunday already. Epiphany usually focuses on the baptism of Jesus by John and so launches our annual look at the public ministry of Jesus, leading up to Lent. So between Christmas Day when we celebrate Jesus' birth and Epiphany when we mark his baptism, there is exactly one Sunday usually, and this year that one Sunday is today. But think about that for a moment: we spent almost an entire month getting ready to mark the birth of Jesus. Just the birth. Now we have this Sunday alone to ponder the next thirty years of Jesus' life! A whole month is devoted to his birthday, just one Sunday covers the vast majority of his life.

Isn't that curious? Of course, there are reasons for this. A big reason is that the passage before us this morning is the only story in any of the four gospels that covers an event somewhere between the Christmas story of our Lord's birth and his appearance with John at the Jordan River some three decades later. Even if we wanted to devote more time to the life of Jesus leading up to his baptism, we probably couldn't do it for sheer lack of material to go on! Even the great creeds of the church have very little to say about the life of Jesus. In fact, as many people have noted over the centuries, the Apostles' Creed is remarkable in that it doesn't make so much as a passing reference to even the public ministry of Jesus. The Creed we all know so well goes from "born of the virgin Mary" directly to "suffered under Pontius Pilate." Apparently the life up until his baptism and even his ministry following that baptism are contained somehow in the little comma between those two clauses in the Creed.

Despite that oddity, we do, of course, devote much of any given year to looking at the ministry of Jesus. It is difficult to say why the people who put the creeds together did not at least mention the fact that Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, performed miracles, told parables, and taught his disciples how to pray. After all, although we are saved through the death and resurrection of Jesus, most of our Christian living is based on the example and instruction of Jesus in everything he said and did leading up to the cross. We need that ministry of Jesus!

But what about those first thirty years of his life prior to the formal beginning of his ministry? In this case, even the Bible has reduced that long period of time to a kind of comma that comes between his birth and his baptism. This last portion of Luke 2 is all we know, and it's frankly not a lot, covering as it does a single incident. Of course, as some of you know, there were apocryphal gospels floating around in the earliest days of the church. Some of these books, later judged to be inauthentic by the church, are filled with tales purported to be from the childhood of Jesus. Mostly, though, these are silly stories that hardly rise above the level of an old episode of that TV series Bewitched. Jesus is shown as the Wunderkind who does funny things with his supernatural powers like turning some mud pigeons he had made into real birds. Other of these tales show Jesus turning a bunch of children into goats after they had teased him or performing a little household razzle-dazzle to help Mary get the cleaning and cooking done in record time.

But there is no point to such tales, which is in part why the church rejected them long ago. Out of all the various childhood stories that had floated about concerning Jesus, only this one of the twelve-year-old Jesus at the Temple got into the canon of Scripture. Many scholars regard this story as inauthentic even so. Some doubt that Jesus had this sense of divine calling to his Father's business so early on in his life. Others allege that at bottom, there is no difference between a story in which a sixth-grader dazzles professional theologians and those other stories in which a child performs magic tricks with his miracle-working abilities. In short, many scholars think this passage is silly and untrustworthy.

This morning, however, I'd like us simply to ponder this story on its own merits, accepting its proper placement in Luke's gospel. Luke was a careful fact-checker and historian, so he at least must have concluded this was one childhood story of our Lord that passed muster and so could be included in the gospel. Let's admit, however, that this story may raise more questions than it answers.

This is one of those tales that make Jesus appear to be so otherworldly that you would think that if this is how he acted all the time, everyone in Nazareth must have suspected he was either crazy or divine from the get-go. Yet we know that Jesus was truly human and was regarded as so thoroughly human by his Nazareth neighbors that they later had the toughest time of all swallowing the idea that he was also the divine Christ. So we don't want to lose sight of the genuine humanity of Jesus as a child (or at any other stage in his life for that matter).

Still, if Jesus was not only human but also the eternal Son of God, then surely there must have been times as he grew up and as he came of age when he would display flashes of that divinity and of the wisdom that would later be the hallmark of Jesus' teachings. That doesn't mean Jesus never engaged in mundane conversation, doesn't mean Mary never had to tell him to eat his brussel sprouts, and it doesn't mean he walked around even as an adolescent with some blank, otherworldly stare. But as God's Son, even in the midst of all that was utterly human about him, there must have been moments of "something more" going on with Jesus. This story appears to have been one of those moments.

It is in some ways a common story. Devout Jewish families like Joseph's made at least one pilgrimage to Jerusalem each year. In Luke 2 it is the Feast of the Passover that brings them to the Holy City and in this case it is the year when Jesus will become the bar mitzvah boy, formally coming of age and so being regarded as an adult. So although we regard this as a child's story about someone who today would be a middle school student, we need to remember that in that time, this would have been viewed as a story about a young man who was just a whisker away from becoming a grown-up. This is a turning point, in other words, where Jesus is pivoting from childhood into adulthood. That fact alone should let you know that there is more than a little significance to the fact that it is precisely at this maturing juncture that Jesus, for the first time so far as we know, mentions a Father other than Joseph whose work he must be about.

Maybe until this time, Jesus' "father's business" was thought to be carpentry. But Jesus seems to have interests that go well beyond that. In any event, the center of this story is something that many of us parents can relate to. Because if in some crowded public place you have ever lost track of your child, you know the heart-in-your-throat panic that rises in you so suddenly you can hardly breathe! Even if it's for just a few minutes, as happened to me with my daughter years ago in Breton Village Mall, it is enough to send you over a cliff of anxiety and worry. In that case, I should have known to check Pooh's Corner first! Mary and Joseph, however, did not seem to think the Temple was a likely spot to find their lost son. In any event, it looks to have been the last place they checked. "We've been anxiously looking for you everywhere," Mary says. Again, parents know how she said that, too. You could not be happier to find the kid back again and yet no matter what you at first say to the child, it comes out as scolding instead of joyfulness!

Young Jesus replies matter-of-factly in a way that doubtless made Joseph and Mary mad at him. Few things are quite as irritating as having a child put you through the wringer only to then act as though not only had he done nothing wrong, the fault of it all lies with the parents for being so upset to begin with. Once Jesus explains that sheer logic of where he was and what he had been doing, Luke informs us that Mary and Joseph did not understand what he was saying to them. They probably didn't try very hard, either! This may have been one of many times when Mary thought to herself, "I don't care what that angel Gabriel said to me all those years ago, this child is turning my hair gray prematurely!"

They just didn't understand. It would not be the last time Jesus would face misunderstanding from those closest to him. In fact, Jesus would be misunderstood by his family, by the religious authorities, and by even his closest disciples. He would flummox, fluster, and confound people in his parables. He would perform grand miracles but then weirdly enough would insist everyone keep mum and hush-hush about them. Over and over he would teach the disciples that the kingdom of God is a quiet, humble, and hidden reality, and yet even as late as the day of his ascension, the disciples would still be asking political questions as to when Jesus was going to kick out the Romans and re-establish Israel.

Luke 2 shows us a combination of amazement and confusion, of astonishment over Jesus and misunderstanding of him. It's like a sneak preview of all that will follow. But this incident at the Temple appears to have been rather isolated. The little P.S. that Luke tacks on at the end indicates that after returning to Nazareth, the same Jesus who in the Temple that day had shown flashes of the divine went back to a quiet life of living with his folks, doing his carpentry shop work with dad, and just generally being an obedient young man. Think John Boy Walton and you have the picture. It's not a particularly arresting or remarkable picture. And apparently it would be nearly twenty more years before anything else very noteworthy would happen regarding Jesus. Yes, the day would come when suddenly Jesus would look up from the carpentry bench, set aside his woodshaver, hang up his apron, and head out to engage in something totally different: preaching.

That day would come. But it took a long while. Isn't that curious. The church has been able to reduce the pre-ministry life of Jesus to a mere comma only because of the enormous patience of God. The very Son of God in flesh had arrived in this world. He was on the ground, on the move, poised for action ostensibly. A world in desperate need of saving was waiting for the Christ. But as it turned out, he was here for a very long time, nearly three decades, and yet still God waited. Probably that would not have been our style or the way we would have suggested things go. But if ever there were a good example of the idea that God's ways are not our ways, this is it. The very Son of God grew up in quiet obscurity, well thought of by the locals, but not known outside of that locale. Eventually, out of the desert haze and the shimmering of heat off the sand, this Jesus would emerge from nowhere to be baptized by that crazy man called John the Baptizer. What followed was a quixotic career that, by all outward appearances, ended in an ignominious failure with Mary's son stuck into the earth like some hideous scarecrow on a hill.

Yet somehow it was all "his Father's business." Somehow it all fit into a single plan. Somehow, through it all, this One would be the true Messiah whom all people would have the chance to follow right into the heart of God's heavenly kingdom. That's why I delighted recently to have a commentator point something out I had never before seen in this text. But notice that in verse 51, having been found by his parents and scolded by them to boot, suddenly it is Jesus who is in the lead. In verses 41 and 42, when this story began, we are told that they all went up to Jerusalem from Nazareth. But in verse 51 the subject of the verb becomes he, as in Jesus. He went down to Nazareth and his parents are said to accompany him. Jesus the child leads the way out of Jerusalem.

Why did Luke include this incident? Because it provides a neat frame for the larger narrative. Think of it: it is Passover time in Luke 2. That is the exact same weekend when, years later, Jesus would die and be raised again from the dead on the third day after the Passover. And it took Mary and Joseph three days to find Jesus after losing him on their way back home following the Passover. When they find him on that third day, he is doing a rather unexpected thing but when it is all said and done, the thing to do is simply to follow him. If you look at the very end of Luke in chapter 24:50, you will notice that the resurrected Jesus once again leads the way out of Jerusalem. This time it is not his family but his disciples who follow him, see him ascend into heaven, and then return to the Temple where they praised God for all they had seen and heard from Jesus.

It all fits into a larger unity that is marvelous to see. This month I spent a good deal of my Advent sermons suggesting that despite how the world very often behaves, we Christians of all people should know that at Christmas, and certainly now in these days following Christmas, it is never enough to leave the baby in the manger. Those people in society who will soon pack up their manger scenes from the coffee table and the front yard and who won't lay eyes on Jesus again until next year when they uncrate the Christmas decorations again, they have no clue what the gospel is all about.

Today's passage invites every one of us to follow Jesus out of Jerusalem and to keep on following him all the way through the twists and turns of the many confusing things Jesus will say and do. We keep following him along those long and lonely paths he walked. We stick with him through two decades of adult life when he said nothing particularly impressive at all. And finally we follow him even when his path leads not to the sweetness of the manger scene as we imagine it but to the muddy, bloody, and grotesque spectacle of a cross. Luke wants us to keep following. Luke invites us to follow him from the childhood of the boy at the Temple to the maturity of the resurrected Lord leading his disciples to Bethany. We keep following.

Is most of the life of Jesus just a kind of theological comma we can skip over? Our Christian answer is, "No, of course not!" Real human beings lead real lives. Every moment of such a life is significant, contributing somehow to the larger life lived. We don't know all of what Jesus said or did, we don't much know what he was like in all those thirty years leading up to his ministry.

What we do believe, however, is that it was in some mysterious way all about his Father's business. We don't understand it all but in trust we keep following him anyway. Blessed are those who keep following, for theirs is the glory that comes in the kingdom our Father has prepared for those who love him. We are now finished once again with saying "Merry Christmas" for another year. Now is the time to wish each other a blessed life of discipleship, of following, of seeking anxiously to find Jesus and, in so finding him, discovering a joy deeper than even the universe itself. Amen.