Jesus at Twelve

Jesus at Twelve

Luke 2:39-52

So, for three weeks, we have listened to the stories of people who looked at a baby and saw the face of God.  The wise men, Simeon, Anna…none of them heard Jesus speak a single word or do a single miraculous thing.  True, they were in the right place at the right time, each for their own reasons.  Still, though, in a few decades, lots of people would be in the right place at the right time and have no idea who Jesus of Nazareth really was.  They looked into a baby’s eyes and saw the one who would change everything.  That’s amazing… The faith that they practiced came to life in an instant.

Then, twelve years passed.  Luke tells us that Joseph and Mary took their beloved son, Jesus, back to Nazareth in Galilee.  They settled back into their life.  Jesus grew and became strong and wise and God’s grace was upon him.  And we know nothing else about that time…

Except we do, right?  We are human beings. Built into our cellular memory as selves are some of the most basic early experiences of being held when we cried, of being fed when we were hungry, of being washed and made clean.  Anyone who thinks those growing years were incidental for Jesus has lost touch not only with their humanity but with the heart of the ministry to come.  Is it that hard to read backwards from a man who urged his followers to comfort those who mourn and feed the hungry, who showed up at the banks of the River Jordan where people were being washed and made cleanclean to a child who tangibly and concretely received love in such forms, himself? Isn’t that what love meant first in our lives?  Wasn’t that our first experience of faith—the belief that care and love would come?  Isn’t that the core horror of hearing the stories of children who lack even those most basic things?

Thinking past infancy, we can imagine a few other features of those growing years, too.  Are you still young at heart enough to remember what pure delight felt like?  For me, it was the click of the light switch when I turned it off and on, and off and on, and off and on again—until, ultimately, I received my very own light switch for Christmas to carry with me wherever I went!  For me, it was the joy of digging a hole, of getting really dirty and then filling the hole back in—and, the dreaded bath that would follow.  It was going through those encyclopedic years when we could memorize every dinosaur’s name or every baseball player’s batting average or, eventually, our multiplication tables for school.  I remember sitting at 5:30 in the morning, watching the test pattern on the t.v. screen and waiting for “My Friend Flicka” to come on.  Why?  I loved that test pattern and I loved “My Friend Flicka.”  

Childhood wasn’t about what everyone thought of you.  Concerns about being “cool” would arrive later.  Childhood was about the big wide world of interesting things—birds and stars and sports and bikes—and the insatiable urge to absorb as much of that world as possible.  The greatest strengths of childhood are curiosity and the ability to immerse ourselves in a moment, all the products of minds that are as flexible as they will ever be.

Now, I am not saying that Jesus loved that test pattern or loved baseball, either.  What I am saying is that I believe that Jesus, in those early years, fell in love with the world and fell in love with life.  Like every other child who is loved enough, his world would be loving and caring and compassionate first, long before cruelty and danger ever entered in.  When that’s the case, that default setting of love and compassion becomes the very basis of the vision of the kingdom that Jesus would present decades later—the way the world would work if it worked the way that God intended.  Jesus’ vision resonates for people who had the gift of being loved and cared for themselves as children.  

For all of those who would have us skip over these years, I would simply remind you of this.  There would come a day when Jesus’ own disciples would try to keep the annoying children away from him.  He would see those children and say, “Let the little children come to me!”   And he would remind everyone within earshot, “If you are to enter the Kingdom of God, you must become like a child.” You are not to become childish:  we all remember throwing the tantrum in the grocery store aisle. No…the job is to become child-like:  curious and flexible and full of joy and delight and willing to love and be loved in return.  At the foundational level, we are called to live with a heartfelt, deep-down level of trust about the nature of God’s world. 

Then, you turn twelve.  Do you remember that?  Twelve was when the world got complicated.  At twelve, I was about six feet tall and thoroughly uncomfortable in my own skin—the only kid in school who could get his boots mixed up with the janitor’s on a cold winter day.  At twelve, I discovered girls—need I say more about the complications that ensued?  At twelve, my family began to cease to be the focal point of my universe and when asked what I thought, I searched for my answer rather than my family’s answer.  For better or for worse, I began to become my own self, sometimes despite my best efforts.

At twelve, Jesus got lost in Jerusalem.  If you learn the nature of the trip, you won’t be surprised.  If you lived close to Jerusalem and your were Jewish, you were expected to go to the temple in Jerusalem several times a year.  One of those times was Passover, the remembrance of how God delivered the people from slavery in Egypt and the last of the plagues that made that possible.  If you didn’t live close, you were expected to make the trip once in your life.  Jospeh and Mary did not live close.  However, they went every year.  In other words, Jesus wasn’t just a little Jewish.  He was a devout Jew.  (I am always surprised when people are shocked by this:  “Jesus was Jewish?”  Uh…ya!”)

In fact, Joseph and Mary and a host of their friends and their friends’ children and other members of the community would have traveled together.   Why? They would travel together because this was a dangerous trip.  There were robbers along the way.  The bigger the group, the less likely the danger.  Which means, that two things must have been true for Jesus.  First, how much fun would those kids have had together, playing tag or throwing stones along the way? Second, I grew up in a relatively small, safe place.  I remember what it was like to go someplace big and potentially dangerous.  It was enough to change one’s world.  Travel must not only have expanded Jesus’ world but made it more complicated, as well.

Everyone travels together.  There is joy along the way.  It’s almost like a big parade to Jerusalem.  (Ring any bells, anyone?)  They get to Jerusalem and all goes well.  They enjoy the Passover feast.  They head a day’s travel home.  Then, it dawns on Mary and Joseph that they haven’t seen Jesus for quite a while, maybe all the way back to the day before in Jerusalem.  They ask around, “Have you seen our son?”  “No…not for a while.”  No one knows a thing.  So, they head back to Jerusalem, searching for Jesus all along the way.  They are trying to follow him and that choice to search for him is putting them at risk.  The big group is long gone.  So, they were a day out before they realized he was gone.  They travel a whole day back to the city.  Then, they search high and low until they find him on (Are you with me here?) the third day in the most surprising of places.

They don’t find Jesus playing with other kids.  They don’t find him in the market, trying out the latest foods.  They find him at the temple, talking with the religious authorities.  Like many self-respecting fathers, Joseph apparently says nothing.  (Dad’s—haven’t we all been there and done that?) Mary has no problem finding her voice:  “How could you do this to us?”  In this single moment, Mary cements her place in the heart of every parent who has ever been driven to the point of exasperation.  “What were you thinking?” we ask.  Then, our child says, “I dunno…”

Jesus says something else.  He says, “Did you not know that I would be in my Father’s house?”  Where else would I be than here?  This is my home—which is a super weird thing for a twelve your old kid to claim about church and about God, right?  Then, Luke tells us, Jesus shuffled over to his parents and headed back to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them from that point on.  (Although, having been thirteen once myself, I have my doubts, even when we’re talking about the son of God.)

Now, I want you to consider two things with me.  First, think about Joseph and Mary.  There had been cosmic fireworks and angelic prophecies at their child’s birth.  Vistors came from near and far and long before that they each received their own messages delivered by angels.  This was not normal!  At eight days, a really nice man and an elderly woman came out of nowhere to separately declare that their baby was going to save the world.  Then, months passed and the visitors from the East came, saying that their child was the newborn king of the Jews.  All of this was strange and mystical and full of spiritual power until twelve years later, having mulled all that stuff over, again and again, maybe they began to wonder if it had happened at all.  The years can make us doubt pretty much anything, right? “Gosh, that was so long ago…”

But here’s the deeper thing.  The more they raised Jesus and loved their son, I wonder, did they wish they might have just heard all those things wrong?  After all, if you were going to overthrow the Roman occupation, you were going to be in mortal danger.  What if Mary and Joseph, like all the rest of us parents, loved their child so much that all they wanted was for him to be okay, for him to have his own life and loves.  After all, years before, that man, Simeon, had told Mary that this child was going to grow up and break her heart.  The truth was that all Jesus, her beloved son, ever did was make her heart soar, at least until that day in the temple.

That’s the second thing… Stop and realize how this story is, in it’s own way, a preview of the Easter story.  There was a parade from Nazareth to Jerusalem.  Jesus’ ministry would walk a similar path over the course of three years.  He and his disciples would arrive, like his family and friends years before, just in time for the Passover feast.  We would call that Palm Sunday.  In Jerusalem as a child, Jesus would sit and chat with the religious authorities and amaze them with his questions and answers.  Years later, maybe even some of those same authorities would hold Jesus and be threatened not just be what he said but by who he was, threatened to the point of putting him to death.  Prior to his death, his disciples would scatter, not unlike the scattering that happened when Jospeh and Mary headed back to Jerusalem.  Finally, his closest followers (the faithful women) would search for him and find him in the most surprising place—a garden, outside a tomb.

On Easter morning, Jesus would look those women in the eye and ask, “Where else would I would be?  I told you, after three days, I would rise again… I wasn’t lost.  I’ve been here the whole time.”