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"After the Candles Are Extinguished" | Luke 2: 41-52 | December 28, 2003 |
This made excellent sense to the child, who was then willing to ride on knowing that the baby Jesus was going to be taken care of.
This story illustrates a phenomenon that experts in cognitive development (and faith development) have documented. Young children live in a world of “concrete operations.” They have not yet developed the conceptual capacities to understand the difference between a pageant and real life, between a symbol and an idea. As far as the little girl was concerned, baby Jesus had literally been born in that church. She had seen it with her own eyes, and no amount of adult explanation was going to alter her belief. She had constructed her own story line for what happened when the candles of Christmas eve were extinguished. We have very little in our Bible about what happened to Jesus between the time he was born to the time he begins his ministry. Only a few incidents involving Jesus prior to his baptism by John are found in the New Testament Gospels: the birth narratives in Luke and Matthew, the visit by the Magi in Matthew and the subsequent flight to Egypt by Mary, Joseph and Jesus, and then this story in today’s lectionary reading of his pilgrimage to the Jerusalem Temple as a twelve-year-old. Most ancient biographies typically tell stories about the precocious behavior of the hero. Recall the stories of the young king David as a shepherd fending off wild beasts as a boy shepherd. Many early Christians were naturally curious to learn the details of Jesus early life. Some of the stories that circulated are gathered in a work called “The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” a work that did not make it into the Canon of official texts. (You may have noted the recent interest in some of the non-canonical works like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Nazareans, the Preaching of Peter among others.)
In the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” we have stories of the child Jesus. In one he has made some little birds out of clay but has done so on the Sabbath. When one of the elders of the town goes to Joseph to criticize Jesus for violating the Sabbath, Jesus claps his hands and the birds fly off. There are stories of Jesus using his divine powers to both harm and heal playmates and teachers and one story reads:
“When he was six, his mother sent him to draw water and to bring it into the house, giving him a pitcher. But in the crowd, he had a collision; the water jug was broken. Jesus spread out the garment he had on, filled it with water, and bore it to his mother. When his mother saw the miracle she kissed him, and she kept to herself the mysteries which she saw him do.” In another story he stretches pieces of wood to the specifications of his carpenter father. But none of these stories made it into the canon. Let us look at the one childhood story that did make it. Jesus goes with Mary and Joseph to Jerusalem as a good devout Jewish family making the annual Passover pilgrimage as commanded in the Torah (Deut 16:6). Considering that a trip on foot from Nazareth to Jerusalem would take about four days, this was no small accomplishment.
Verses 43-45 present a challenge. “When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.” How could a mother and father have failed for an entire day to notice the absence of a child from their entourage after their departure from the feast? We however live in a era when parents sometimes drive away from an interstate rest stop with no Tommy in the backseat of the SUV, so perhaps such oversights happened in antiquity as well. The usual explanation is that there was probably a whole delegation of relatives and friends from Nazareth and that it was natural for Mary and Joseph to assume that their son, on the verge of adulthood, was with others in the group.
At any rate, after a three day search (doubtless put in by the writer to adumbrate the days in the tomb) the frantic parents find Jesus in the temple in discussion with the scholars there. For artists and other traditional interpreters through the years this encounter of the sages with the child is the high point of the narrative.
The Mafa people of northern Cameroon have produced a series of paintings of the life and parables of Jesus using the familiar African images. The painting of “Jesus among the Teachers” represents Jesus as a small African boy who, with his dark complexion is outlined completely by a wonderfully radiant bright light from the sunshine outside the building. Jesus is on his knees seated at the feet of the African temple teachers who are in a room architecturally simple except for a lone arch and column. Two of the temple teachers are seated on stools facing Jesus. Three other teachers are standing behind the two seated. Unlike many paintings of this scene, Jesus is listening to the teachers. But he also intrigues them. The face of one of the teachers is absolutely bursting with love for and amazement at the boy who sits in front of them. These teachers have taken this little boy under their wings, and they look at Jesus with great expectancy. (http://www.jesusmafa.com/anglais/imag5.htm) When Mary and Joseph find Jesus there is a somewhat sharp exchange that those of us who have raised teenagers, or were teenagers may recognize.
“Young man,” says Mary, “why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you.” This is a most understandable expression of exasperation, hurt, bewilderment and relief. (By the way–this part of the passage for today was used by Frank Stagg a long time professor of New Testament at Southern Seminary when he encountered Baptist preacher boys who had certain fundamental belief claims that they thought should not be challenged, such as the virgin birth; they also believed that the scriptures were literally true and without error. Stagg would quote Luke 2:48 “Your father and I have been searching for you . . .” and he would say, “Gentlemen that’s Mary talking and she ought to know.”)
So Mary rebukes Jesus “Why did you do this?” And the response is something like: “Why were you looking for me? Don’t you know I’ve got things to do?” I know we have so wrapped this in theological piety we may miss the irritation in the teen Jesus’ response. “Come on, Mom. I’ve got to be me!”
Here in this lesson is an indication of the truth we all know: being a parent is hard work.
Children need to find their own way, establish independence. Anne Lamott (who was in Aurora last fall) in her best selling book, Traveling Mercies, writes about her seven-year-old son, Sam. “At seven, he is separating from me like mad and has made it clear that I need to give him a bit more room. I’m not even allowed to tell him that I love him these days. He is quite firm on this. ‘You tell me you love me all the time,’ he explained recently, ‘and I don’t want you to anymore.’ ‘At all?’ I said. ‘I just want you to tell me that you like me.’ I said I would really try. That night when I was tucking him in, I said, ‘Good night, honey, I really like you a lot.’ There was silence in the dark. Then he said, ‘I like you too, Mom." It is hard to be a parent sometimes. Surely Mary thought that while she was looking for Jesus.
Someone once said that the best two gifts you can ever give your children are roots and wings. Roots and wings. So when the baptismal candle is extinguished, you try to give them roots so they will know where they come from; so they’ll know right from wrong;
so that no matter where they go in life they’ll be able to look back and remember all that you gave them. And wings–that’s the other important gift parents can give to their children–wings so that they can fly away, so that they can make a life of their own, so that they can become independent. It is not easy. Mary and Joseph had given Jesus a traditional Jewish upbringing–roots. Now at the age when the tradition says a boy becomes a man he is stretching his wings.
We all want our children to grow up–but not so quickly. Ask the young parent who has just dropped the child off for the first day of preschool. Or ask the nervous parents who watch their teenager with the brand new license drive off alone for the first time. Ask the family who sends their first child off to college for the freshman year.
M. Scott Peck says that “of the thousands, maybe even millions, of risks we take in a lifetime, the greatest is the risk of growing up . . . though many of us outwardly appear to be adults, perhaps the majority of ‘grown-ups’ remain to their death psychological children who have never truly separated themselves from their parents and the power their parents have over them.”
This may also be true of our spiritual lives. Many live an entire lifetime as spiritual children who have never grown up, never grown in faith beyond the bare basics learned as children in Sunday School. For our faith to become really ours it must be forged through the fires of questioning and soul-searching and yes, doubt.
Frankly that is risky. It’s risky to question; it’s risky to wonder; it’s risky to doubt. A character in one of Fr. Andrew Greely’s novels says, “Maybe the reason I’m so rigid is because I’m afraid that if I relax any of my beliefs the whole ball of wax will come apart.”
Not so for Jesus in today’s lesson. Even as a twelve-year-old boy becoming an adult, he went to the temple in Jerusalem where his parents found him “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” He was spreading his wings; he was probing, he was questioning until both his life and his faith became uniquely his own.
So after the candles of the Christmas stories are extinguished, the adult Jesus says, “Follow me.” to his disciples and also to us. It is an invitation to take the risk of growing up.
Amen
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2003 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |