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A Difficult Child? Text:
Luke 2:41-52 Before the First Sunday after The Epiphany became the mini-festival of The Baptism of Our Lord, this Sunday served to wrap up “The Infancy Narrative” of St. Luke's Gospel. Advent and Christmas, of course, are devoted to the predictions and the fulfillment of the nativity, the incarnation and birth of the Son of God, the Son of Mary. Before we get to Jesus' active earthly ministry beginning with his baptism by John, however, Luke takes us, at first, eight days beyond Christmas when the infant Lord came to His Temple for the circumcision and Name of Jesus, and then twelve years later when the pre-teen Jesus returned to His Temple, as was their annual custom, at the Passover. In Luke's Gospel everything begins and ends and revolves around the Jerusalem Temple. This is the Lord's temple as we heard in our first reading where “the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord,” established as “a place for [Him] to dwell in forever” [1 Kings 8:6-13 (ESV)]. This is the Lord's temple. Since Jesus is the Lord it belongs to him, it is quite literally his temple. This is the Lord's temple where the Lord dwelt and could be found. It always pointed forward to its fulfillment in the coming of the Messiah, the Lord himself. With the coming of Jesus in the flesh, however, the Lord is to be found no longer in a temple built with hands but in the temple of the Body of Jesus. All the animal sacrifices of the ancient temple find their fulfillment in the sacrifice of his Body on the cross. From now on no one comes to find God the Father except in and through the Son, Jesus.
Our Gospel picks up this theme of “lost and found” for this very purpose. Mary and Joseph had taken Jesus with them every year, for twelve years now, to the Jerusalem Temple for the Passover. The drama of this particular trip is that, on their way back home, they discovered that they had lost Jesus! Notice they had lost Jesus, but Jesus wasn't lost! He was exactly where he was meant to be, in His Father's house. The Jerusalem Temple was the place of his destiny from the beginning, even when he was twelve years old. In fact the word Luke uses when he writes that Jesus “stayed” or “remained” behind is part of Luke's vocabulary for the presence of God. The significance of this little episode is that in Jesus God has come home to the place where he will accomplish salvation.
Throughout the Christmas story, the infancy narrative concluding now with the twelve-year-old Jesus, there have been hints of his destiny. The shedding of the few drops of blood at his circumcision foreshadows his bloody death on the cross. St. Matthew's account of the wise men includes the gift of myrrh, foreshadowing his burial. In our text today the fact that Mary and Joseph, after searching diligently and anxiously for him, find him “after three days” points forward to his resurrection “on the third day.”
The very first words of Jesus recorded for us here demonstrate his awareness of just Who He is and what He came to do, his identity and his destiny. When Mary makes the little slip referring to herself and Joseph, saying, “your father and I have been searching for you in great distress,” Jesus speaks of God as his Father and the temple “my Father's house.” Furthermore is the language of necessity. Don't miss the importance of the little word “must,” as he says, “I must be in my Father's house.” Only two Passovers are mentioned in Luke's Gospel, here at the beginning before Jesus' active earthly ministry and at the end of his life on the night he was betrayed. Only Luke describes the Last Supper as the day “on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed” [Luke 22:7 (ESV)]. Jesus clearly identifies himself as the Son of God come for the necessary and crucial mission of his vicarious suffering, death, burial and resurrection. In the same way it is necessary for you to make this same identification and confession for your own salvation.
Notice that Luke tells us Mary and Joseph “did not understand the word he spoke to them.” This too is a major theme in Luke's Gospel written for the very purpose, as he said at the beginning, “that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught” [Luke 1:4 (ESV)]. Faith is not just “knowing the facts” but, on the basis of the facts, having certainty, a spiritual understanding that results in saving trust and hope. Recall how twice when he clearly told his disciples of his coming suffering and death, “they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, so that they might not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about this saying” [Luke 9:44-45 (ESV)]; and later, “they understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” [Luke 18:34 (ESV)]. Saving faith, true spiritual understanding, happens only when the Lord “opens our minds to understand the Scriptures” [Luke 24:45 (ESV)] as he did with the two Emmaus disciples and all the disciples after his resurrection.
Jesus
wasn't a difficult child in the sense we usually use that term. He was not only
obedient to God according to the First Commandment but also entirely submissive
to his earthly guardians according to the Fourth Commandment, increasing “in
wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” This introduction to the
gospel of our Lord's saving mission has in it all the important themes that
will be played out in his life leading to his goal and destiny as the Passover
Lamb of God sacrificed to release the world of sinners from death, reconciling
man and God in his own body. The “difficulty” is only in this: God's gift of
faith that alone can make the proper identification of Jesus as the Son of God
whose suffering, death and resurrection sets us free, justifies us and gives
us eternal life. As we say in the little catechism, faith is not only difficult
but impossible on our own power for, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason
or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him; but the Holy Spirit
has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept
me in the true faith.” Therefore let us commit ourselves all the more to the
means by and through which “the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and
sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ
in the one true faith,” namely the preaching of the Gospel and the administration
of the holy sacraments as we say in the Augsburg Confession: “To obtain such
faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments.
Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith,
where and when he wills, in those who hear the gospel. It teaches that we have
a gracious God, not through our merit but through Christ's merit, when we so
believe. On this day, one last time we wish you a Merry, Blessed Christmas as you now follow our Lord, Savior and King to his cross and open tomb, in his Holy Church, in which “he daily and richly forgives all my sins and the sins of all believers. On the Last Day he will raise me and all the dead, and give eternal life to me and all believers in Christ. This is most certainly true.” ___________________
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