Doing Your Father’s Business

     Luke 2: 41-52

 

 

          There they sat by the curb. They looked like lost sheep. They were my lost sheep. When I was a single parent, I drove my three older children to and from school every day. I was trying to juggle a law practice and make a living and also be a good parent. I remember a couple times when I lost that battle badly.  I arrived at school an hour late to find my three children huddled up, waiting for their dad. I felt like the world’s worst parent. What can you possibly say to your children when you are an hour late?

          I have some old friends who had three children close together. They used to travel to Illinois to visit her parents. On one such trip, they stopped as usual to get gas. They were a couple hours down the road when they realized they were one child short. Imagine how they felt, racing back to that gas station to find their son. This was before the age of cell phones, and all they had was a good sense of geography and a lot of prayer. Everything turned out fine, but think of how much they worried until they saw him again.

          It happens, Life comes at us fast, and sometimes, one parent thinks the other parent has it covered, only to find out that things are not quite as they appeared. I suspect that I and my friends are not the only parents to drop the ball. Has something similar happened to you?

          In fact, it even happened to the Son of God. Of course, at the time, he was also the son of Joseph and Mary. While his heavenly Father never lost him, his earthly parents did. And not for an hour or even a few hours, but for 3 days!

          The second chapter of Luke’s gospel is loaded. We have the Christmas story, but that is only the beginning. Eight days later, baby Jesus is presented at the temple as is the custom, and old Simeon gives the blessing and the announcement that he has seen God’s salvation. Anna the prophetess also gives her blessing. Then the family returns to Nazareth. But Luke is not through. He fast forwards twelve years ahead to give us our only gospel glimpse of Jesus as a boy. It is a telling picture that Luke paints for us.

          Faithful Jews in first century Israel tried to get to the Temple in Jerusalem at least three times a year for the big feasts of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. It was no small feat for Mary and Joseph. It was sixty five miles from Nazareth to Jerusalem. That was normally a three day walk.  So for Mary and Joseph and their family to get to Jerusalem for the Passover Feast was a big deal. In this story, Jesus was 12 years old. He may well have had siblings by then, and that would have only made the trip that much more difficult and expensive. It was the custom of the time to journey in a caravan where men and boys traveled together and women and girls, or small children, did the same. A 12 year old boy might have been included in either group.

          Perhaps it was because of Jesus’ middling age that there was some mix-up. It could be that one group thought Jesus to be traveling with the other. Whatever the reason, Mary and Joseph were a day’s journey away from Jerusalem before they realized that Jesus was not with them. Making their way back to Jerusalem took another day and it took a third day to locate Jesus. Three days without the knowledge of their son’s whereabouts, and no missing person’s bureau to report to, no organization to help them hunt, no communications network other than word of mouth.

          Where would you look for your child? If he or she were gone for three days and was last seen in a city flooded by tourists for a feast, where would you look? Of course, you would retrace your steps, but after that fails, then what?  You would look up kinfolk if there were any, but what then? Look in alleys? In the seedy parts of town? Where would you look to find your child?

          Apparently, the temple was not the first place that Mary and Joseph thought of. Perhaps in light of what we now know, it should have been, but Jesus’ earthly parents did not connect that way with him just yet. He was their son. He had done nothing of which we can read to show himself to be the Son of God. There was no apparent reason to seek a twelve year old boy in the temple. But on this trip, if not before, that all changed.

          When we read Luke’s account of Jesus in the temple at 12 years of age, we can easily feel the angst of his parents. Verbs like “astonished” and “distress” and “did not understand” are used to describe their reaction. You know they were worried sick. And then, after a day’s searching all over Jerusalem, they found him in the temple of all places. If your twelve year old son were lost for three days, would you come to this church to look for him? You too might be astonished if you found him here discussing theology with the pastor and the elders, and showing quite a bit of knowledge as well.

          Jesus’ statement to his mother brings the change into focus. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” The King James translates the line as “wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? Just like that, the line has been re-drawn. The importance of Jesus’ lineage is now shifting right of front of their very eyes. Jesus must now be about his Father’s business and he isn’t talking about carpentry.

         Maybe this is why Luke’s story is here. It is the only place it is told, the only glimpse in the New Testament that we have of Jesus as a boy. And even in that one snapshot, Luke picks a time of transition. We don’t find Jesus playing or working or even in school. Or do we?  

          Jesus is moving, right in front of our very eyes, from boy to man. Perhaps in a kindness from God himself, Mary is deprived of her son for three days as a sort of preparation for what is about to happen. When she is re-united with Jesus, he is not the same boy who went up to Jerusalem just a week ago. Now, he must be about his Father’s business.

          I get cold chills thinking about the exchange that went on at that moment.  There is the relationship between Jesus and his parents, particularly his mother. It is still tender and obedient and Jesus’ remarks bear that out.  There is also a relationship between Jesus and his heavenly Father. Jesus now clearly has an awareness that he is literally God’s Son, and he is proving that by his presence in the temple. So many emotions were at play. So many revelations were happening. All could have been anticipated, but now here they were. Mary and Joseph can hardly deny that they have a special child indeed. And now, in an instant, everything had changed and it would never be the same.

          The words uttered here by Jesus are his first recorded words. This is the first time we hear him speak. We will not hear him again until he begins his ministry at age 30. It is a short story with little detail. We don’t know where Jesus stayed or how he got by those three days alone. We only know that he was in the temple talking about God and scripture. The story is a glimpse into his life and only a glimpse. It forms a sort of bridge between the events of his birth and his adult ministry.

          Mary are Joseph were perplexed. Luke tells us that they didn’t understand. Here was Mary’s son, telling her he had to be about his father’s business. Kenny Rogers and Wynona Judd recorded a haunting song in 1986 which asks the question: “Mary, did you know.” The song reminds us of all the hopes and dreams that the baby Jesus carried on his tiny shoulders. Mary, did you know? Here, the answer is clearly No, Mary does not know. When the shepherds tell Mary of the tidings of the angels, she “treasures up all these things, pondering them in her heart” [2:19]. When young Jesus tells her he must be about his Father’s business, she “treasures up all these things in her heart” [2:51]. Mary parked these windows of revelation away, waiting for the day when she would understand more. She knew only that she had played a part in the delivery and raising of the Son of God. More than that, she did not know. On that day in the temple, she watched as her oldest son began to claim his destiny and she didn’t understand where it would take him and what it would mean.

          Perhaps what Mary saw most clearly was that not only was her child becoming an adult, but that he was called, called to something greater than manhood. He was called to be about his father’s business, and his father was God himself. And yet as we witness the budding knowledge in the boy-man Jesus of his divinity, we cannot forget that this was happening to someone as human as you and me. He was called. Mary saw that. She didn’t fully understand it, but she saw it. I suspect Joseph did, too. Luke makes it clear to us that Jesus went back home with Mary and Joseph and that he was obedient to them and honored them. But something had changed, and Luke takes note of it.

          It was to be eighteen years before we hear Jesus speak again, and then his conversation is with John the Baptist during his baptism. How many events transpired over those eighteen years of preparation? How many more things had Mary laid up in her heart to treasure and ponder? The Bible does not give us these answers, but in some part, they lie in our own experiences. As surely as Jesus was both sent and called, it is that same Jesus who now calls us. We children of God are not called to save the world. That is a God-sized job. But each of us is here for a purpose. To what are you called?

          Of course there is much more to the life of Jesus than just showing us the way, but if the life of Jesus instructs us in nothing else, it certainly instructs us to be about our Father’s business, to be found in our Father’s house, and this alone is a lesson for the ages. He came for us. He died for us. He lives for us.  

          Sometimes it may take breaking away from the safety of the caravan and even home and hearth to find our way, but God is there, waiting for us. Jesus didn’t run away from home. Far from it. He just began to show his calling. Luke says that “he increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”  That can happen to us as well. We need only to answer that voice within us. It’s there. Listen to it. Let us, too, be about our Father’s business.