In the meantime...

In The Meantime…

Luke 2:52

This morning, I want to swing wildly toward speculation.  Last week, we met the boy, Jesus, at the temple, wowing the religious authorities with both his questions and his answers, and infuriating his parents who were worried sick after not being able to find him for three days.  No one bothered to write down the questions or the answers!  What’s up with that?  Instead, Luke gives us a story that heavily foreshadows the end of Jesus’ life.  Then, he tells us in our text for this morning, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.”

That ending always reminds me of the movie, “Cast Away,” when after meeting Tom Hanks and seeing his life at FedEx, after watching his plane crash into the ocean, after seeing him bungle his way through learning suvivial skills (“Fire! I made fire!”), the screen goes black.  What we see next is a chisled, heavily bearded, loin-cloth wearing survivor, expertly spearing fish.  What happened in the middle of that story?  How did he survive? It’s three years later and the whole game has changed.

In the Gospels, the best we get to do is acknwledge that Jesus was twelve when he visited the temple and he is thirty when he leaves Nazareth behind.  All Luke tells us is that Jesus got wiser and that God and the people around Jesus recognized that this was a good man.  Ya…but what happened?  What was he learning?  What was his life like?  In the end, when it was time to leave, what was he going to miss the most?

Lots of attempts have been made to fill in that 18 year gap.  One strand of articles that you can trace if you want argues that Jesus actually became a rabbi during that time.  All Jewish boys would have been expected to be steeped in the Torah.  The boys who were exceptional students would have been encouraged to stay with their studies and become religious leaders.  What if that’s what the temple story was telling us…that Jesus was an exceptional student and would have been singled out for further study?  Some even argue that when Jesus’ began his ministry and called the first disciples, they followed him not because he was charismatic and irresistable but because he was a rabbi and his calling would have not only had a religious authority but also might have promised an elevation in social status and social class for a follower.  

This is an interesting theory but it is a theory without evidence.  The Gospel writers tell us what they think is important for us to know and the notion that no one would mention that Jesus was a rabbi seems a little far-fetched.  Also, the notion that the disciples were in it for a boost in status and class seems hard to accept since, pretty much right away, they were living the life of the poorest of the poor, traveling from town to town, depending on the kindness of strangers for their support.

Why would this theory arise?  I think there has always been a need—and a real basis—to remind ourselves that Jesus was Jewish.  In a world where Christians have sometimes been ruthlessly anti-Semitic, it is crucial that we feel the real kinship as followers of Christ that we have to the faith which Jesus, himself, followed.  Here’s the thing, we already know that Jesus was raised in a religiously devout family.  They went to Jerusalem every year for Passover.  Only those serious about their faith would have done that every year.  As an adult, when Jesus returns to Nazareth, he returns to his home temple and he’s a known person.  While no signs support Jesus being an actual rabbi, a number of signs point to him being a practicing, devout Jew.

There is another theory that Jesus left Nazareth for twelve years and traveled in the the eastern world.  This is a realtively recent theory and pretty marginal in terms of any real evidence.  I  have to admit that the notion of a “well-traveled” Jesus who would have had an appreciation for the breadth of people and even for other religions is appealing.  Still, that kind of travel would have been pretty extraordinary for a guy from a “hick” place like Nazareth.  And at a human level, have you ever met anyone who was well-traveled who didn’t tell the stories of those other lands and other people to shed light on where they now stood?  Yet, in the Gospels, Jesus mentions such things.  Also, probably the one time when the tables were really turned on Jesus by anyone was when he met a foreign woman who stood up to him.  The encounter seems more like a first encounter with a foreigner than the conversation of someone who was well traveled.

Here’s what I think.  I think Jesus lived the vast majority of his life in a particular place with particular group of people.  That place was Nazareth, as I mentioned earlier, a “hick” town, the kind of place where unless you’d been there, there was no reason you would even know about it.  (I remember my time working with two churches in Wisconsin.  Tracy came to visit.  She took one look at the town and said, “We could carpet this place!”) No one who wasn’t from Nazareth would have thought there was anything special about Nazareth.  If you lived there though—just like if you lived in any other small town in human history—it would have been sacred.  I think part of Jesus’ work before his ministry began was to fall in love with a place and with the people that made that place sacred because this was a part of what made the world worth loving.

Jesus was also a part of a family in those years.  Jesus was the first-born son of Mary and Joseph.  There are four other brothers and two sisters who are mentioned.  So, Jesus was the oldest of seven children.  As the youngest of three children, myself, growing up in an Irish Catholic town, I was always jealous of those bigger families.  When I spent time in their homes, I saw how everyone had to work together, everyone had to share things, everyone had to compromise.  There was a lot of stucture to how things were done because othewise there would just be a whole lot of chaos.  It makes sense that Jesus would quickly call disciples in his minsitry because he would have been used to having people around. We love the people with whom we live every day, especially the people who are given to us as brothers and sisters.

Growing up, Jesus also clearly had good friends, the kind of lifelong friends that you make in a small town.  How do we know this?  Think of that story of his family returning from Jerusalem.  They walk for a day without noticing that Jesus is missing.  How does that happen?  It happens if you are used to your son being off and playing with his buddies.  In one of the Gospels that didn’t “make the cut,” a story is told of Jesus and his friends coming across a dead bird.  Jesus brings the bird back to life—a miracle story.  The real miracle, though, to me, is that, like me, Jesus would have had great friends in his early life, which, of course, is one of the best gifts we can get. If we can’t put “loving our friends” in the box of things that are best in this life, then we need new friends, right?

Jesus also undoubtedly worked. Because his father did skilled work as a carpenter, Jesus probably knew the satisfaction of creating something with his hands.  When we talk about a carpenter in those days, we’re not talking about a home builder.  Most of the homes would have been built out of mud and clay and straw.  We’re talking about building furniture—things that are useful, that make someone’s life a hair more comfortable and might make a home more beautiful.  We are also talking about someone who would know the satisfaction of fixing things.  “Here’s a need. What might meet this need?” “Here’s something that’s broken?  How might this be fixed.” If you think about it, such “hands on” satisfactions are pretty parallel to the work he would later do.  He would become the man who would fix broken bodies.  He would become the man who would say, “This is my body, broken for you.” Doing good meaningful work is another thing worth loving in this life.

In Jesus’ day, a life span was an uncertain thing.  As many as 30 percent of children between birth and ten-years-old would die.  If you made it to age twenty, you probably could expect to live another twenty or thirty years.  Knowing this, two things are likely.  First, it’s likely that Mary and Joseph might well have had more than seven children and lost a few.  This is just what the odds suggest.  If this was true, then Jesus, as the oldest, would have lived through heartbreaking losses.  He would have seen the grief on his parents’ faces.  He would have felt that grief, himself.  The man who would one day weep over the loss of his friend, Lazarus, would have known how to cry like that because he had cried before.  He also would have learned as we all do when we face our grief that life is short and precious.

Scholars think that Joseph would likely have died when Jesus was in his twenties. While Mary and the siblings all are either present at points or their presence is suggested, Joseph just disappears.  The reason, I think, that this matters is that, if Joseph died, as the oldest son, Jesus would have become the head of the household and carried the weight of the rest of the family’s needs.  If Jesus was taking a full tour of what is worth living and loving in this life, then spending time as an adult, carrying adult responsibilities, would need to be a part of that tour.  It’s also a crucial part of knowing that there would have been real pain in leaving that life behind.

As I have pointed out plenty of times, only two of the four Gospels offer accounts of Jesus’ birth and the days immediately after.  Only one of the Gospels offers us an account of Jesus as an older child.  Clearly, what the Gospel writers want us to know is the story—as they each, uniquely tell it—of Jesus’ ministry and death and resurrection.  Still, there are suggestions.  It’s possible to speculate and here’s why that speculation matters.

To me, the only way that Jesus could get to the place where this world is worth dying for is if he spent his life before that ministry falling in love with this world.  I think he was acutely aware of how much family and friends and particular places and meaningful work and children having a chance to be children mattered.  I think that’s why people living as if such things didn’t matter was so offensive to him.  I think having seen the best of what faith could be in his home and in his home synagogue, it drove him crazy to see religious leaders turn people away from loving this life and focussing those people on other, lesser things.  

If Jesus came into this world because God so loves this world, then we shouldn’t run from imagining just how much Jesus must have grow to love this world, too.  Jesus didn’t come to pull us out of this world and into some afterlife.  Jesus wanted us to learn to love life and to lead a loving life, ourselves.  If you have learned to love life, too—the gift of a loving family, the value of work, the joy of play, the satisfaction of fixing what’s broken and creating something entirely new—then we are well on our way to living in Jesus’ way.