The 12-year-old God

Luke 2:41 Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. ⁴² When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Feast, according to the custom. ⁴³ After the Feast was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. ⁴⁴ Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. ⁴⁵ When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. ⁴⁶ After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. ⁴⁷ Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. ⁴⁸ When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you." ⁴⁹ "Why were you searching for me?" he asked. "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?" ⁵⁰ But they did not understand what he was saying to them. ⁵¹ Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. ⁵² And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.

Kids grow up awfully fast these days. It seems like one minute you are trying to encourage your child to go faster on his bicycle, to get up enough speed to stay balanced, and the next you are pleading with the same boy now at the wheel of a car, pleading with him to slow down and live. One minute you are urging a shy daughter to say hello to strangers, and the very next, you are trying to discourage her from responding to strangers on the Internet.

Jesus is growing up fast, too. Here we are, less than a week from Christmas morning, from the baby lying in a manger. And Jesus is already an adolescent wandering off on His own. Last week Jesus was “prophecy miraculously fulfilled.” This week He is questioning the teachers of that very tradition.

Our ecumenical creeds of the Christian Church hold that Jesus is “true God from true God, of one being with the Father” who was also “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary and became fully human” (Nicene Creed). In the familiar lesson from Luke, we can see both sides. Jesus, fully human, is growing up as all mortals must. In the process, Jesus has scared His parents half to death, as all teens and pre-teens do. Jesus is going to church at the temple, He is asking questions, He is listening and learning – all things we should be doing. We see the twelve-year-old Jesus fully divine with everyone amazed at His understanding and His answers. We hear Jesus declaring His unique relationship with God the Father as only God can do.

We aren’t told very much about the childhood of Jesus. Only what God in His infinite wisdom has deemed to tell us. Luke tells us of His circumcision and naming on the eighth day, and His presentation and redemption at the temple when He was forty days old. Matthew tells us of the hasty flight to Egypt to escape Herod and the return to Nazareth where He grew up as the son of the carpenter, probably learning Joseph’s trade, working side by side with His surrogate father. Surprisingly there is nothing unusual to report regarding Jesus’ childhood. People later made up some miracle stories to spice things up a bit, but the first century inspired record has nothing unusual to report.

Isn’t that unusual?

You would expect holiness to stick out just a bit, wouldn’t you? You’d expect that when the Word becomes Flesh, when the second Person of the undivided Holy Trinity makes His appearance in this world, there might be something just a bit “different” about Him. You’d expect to be able to pick Jesus out from a crowd, wouldn’t you? Yeah, there He is. Over there. The one with the glowing nimbus floating over His head. And if He didn’t exactly glow with heavenly brightness, you’d at least expect Him to be such a good kid that everyone kind of wondered what was “wrong” with Him. What’s it like to be twelve and sinless? We’ll never know. And the current crop of twelve-year-olds aren’t going to be much help.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to have a sinless twelve-year-old in the house? No, you can’t. None of us can. We’re born steeped in Adam’s sin. That’s why we baptize the little ones as soon as possible. They are born with the inherited disease of sin. Not so Jesus. His mother is Mary but His father is The Father – God. He is Adam 2.0, humanity without the stain of sin. And the weird thing about it is that nobody really notices this. His teachers are amazed at His wisdom, which seems well beyond His years, but the amazing thing is that they are amazed. For all intents and purposes, Jesus was indistinguishable from every other twelve-year-old in Jerusalem. Which is also why they lost Him.

They brought Jesus to Jerusalem that year to be taught and examined by the temple teachers. The custom was that all men had to appear in Jerusalem three times a year for the various feasts including the Passover. This was the year of Jesus’ preparation. The next year, when He was thirteen, He would be expected to take His place with the men of Israel. Ponder that for a second. Thirteen years old and considered a man. Notice that at the end of this reading it says, “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature …” Earlier in verse 40 it said, “And the child grew and became strong ...” He’s no longer a child but now a man. Twelve is the turning point.

Today we prepare our children for adolescence, for the jump from being a pre-teen to a teenager, from Middle School to High School. But in Jesus’ day, a child was not prepared for adolescence, but for adulthood. A young girl was prepared to become a wife and mother. And a young boy was prepared to join the men of Israel. This was Jesus’ last year as a child, which is why Luke records this incident. It serves to cap off this section of the narrative. Luke then picks up the story when Jesus is thirty years old and revealed in His baptism by John in the Jordan. So for the next eighteen years, He lives in absolute obscurity as the carpenter from Nazareth. You might say that holiness has dirt and splinters under its fingernails.

Though we aren’t told much on the pages of Scripture about Jesus as a child, we can read between the lines. Jesus was obedient to His parents under the Fourth Commandment. Though He was their Lord, He obeyed them as their Son. Though He was the Wisdom of God in the Flesh, He was obedient and respectful to His teachers.

Though He was fully God and wholly divine, He shared in our humanity, in our flesh and blood (Hebrews 2:14). Though as God He was above the Law, He came as the perfect blend of God and man to live under the Law for us. To keep it perfectly in our place. To actively fulfill it. That’s what’s underneath His circumcision, His presentation, His appearance at the temple. He is there in obedience to the Law for us, in our place, for our salvation. He is being prepared, yes. But not simply to be numbered with the men of Israel and participate in the Passover liturgy. He is being prepared for His own Passover, His sacrifice on the cross. And that preparation begins with His circumcision under the Law, it continues with His obedient life under the Law, and it all culminates in His perfect death under the Law, all to save you. He shared in our humanity so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is the devil (Hebrews 2:14). He himself suffered when He was tempted so that He is able to help those who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:18).

We call this Jesus’ “state of humiliation,” His humbling of Himself in obedience to the Law unto death on a cross. Mary and Joseph could not have known that frantic day what the future would hold. The angel had only told them that He would save His people from their sins. He didn’t say how. They were frantic that day, as they searched high and low throughout the crowded city, looking for Jesus. In twenty years, Jesus would go to His appointed hour on the cross, and again Mary would be there, this time without her husband Joseph, and she would know what it meant that He had to be in His Father’s house to do His Father’s will. But for now she treasured all these things in her heart, just as she had pondered what the shepherds of Bethlehem told her the night Jesus was born.

He was obedient to them and to His teachers and to the Law. That’s the first thing to remember on this First Sunday after Christmas. This Child of Bethlehem was born to be like us in every way, yet without sin. Growing up in a household, growing up under parents, going through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Learning, playing, working. Every facet of Jesus’ life reflects your life, except without sin. And it is done so ordinarily, that no one even notices that there is something different about Jesus. Mary and Joseph even seem to have lost sight of what the angel told them in their moment of panic.

So never say it is human to sin. It’s not. Jesus did not sin, and yet He was so perfectly and completely human, no one even noticed.

A second thought for today is this: God works hiddenly, humbly, and subversively. We see this throughout the Christmas story and Jesus’ childhood. His divinity is buried deeply, completely hidden from human eyes. He appears to be just another twelve-year-old in the temple. A precociously bright twelve-year-old, yes. A theologically engaged twelve-year-old, certainly. But no one said, “Hey, this kid is God!”

You and I would have missed that point, too. We probably would have lost Him in the crowd. And we certainly would not have understood what He was saying when He said, “I must be in my Father’s house.” The incarnation of God is like that. It just doesn’t fit our categories or our way of thinking or our pious religious notions about God. God is a twelve-year-old whose parents momentarily lost sight of Him.

Don’t lose sight of Jesus. For He knows what it’s like to be one of us. He really is Immanuel – God with us, and “with us” so hiddenly, so humbly, so subversively that we would not have even noticed Him. But that’s precisely the way God works with us and among us. Not in the seen but the unseen. Not in the powerful and mighty, but in the lowly and humble. A manger, a cross. A child. A teenager. A man. He embraces life in all its humanity. He even knows what it’s like to be chewed out by your parents and not have done anything wrong!

That hiddenness is not understood today, nor can it be. Who Jesus is and what He has done must be revealed to us and seen through the gift of faith. There is no other way. Mary treasured up all these things in her heart. And that treasured up Word had its way with her, creating and enlivening a living faith in her Son, God’s Son.

He comes to you today in the same hidden and subversive way. Creating, enlivening you. Having its way with you. In Baptism, Word, and Supper. So easily ignored, despised, rejected. As easily rejected as a twelve-year-old kid in the temple. But the Word says there is something more than meets our eyes, our senses, our reason. This is the power of God to save. God in the Flesh come to save us. A perfect obedience to the Law that is yours not by what you do but by trust in what Jesus has done. Life in death because of the obedient, perfect death of the Son of God in the flesh. Power in temptation for He has overcome all temptations for you.

And so once again, on this First Sunday after Christmas, our joy is Immanuel – God with us. The baby of the manger, the child in the temple, the man of the cross, the Word made flesh dwelling among us. Treasure up all these things in your heart. Amen.