Thoughts for the Day

Luke 2: 40 And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.

Only Luke records anything of Jesus’s childhood, and even he only gives us a handful of verses.  This one covers Jesus’s first 12 years.  What can we make of it?  By way of context, from what I glean, a Jewish child of this time would have attended lessons in the synagogue, perhaps daily from the age of five.  Writing materials were expensive and scrolls few, so the focus was on the memorising of an oral tradition, including the scriptures (Old Testament, of course) through chanting and repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition!  Jesus’s memory of scripture would have been prodigious by our standards, as indeed would have been that of his audience when later he began to preach.  Nevertheless, for one so young to be “filled with wisdom” and have “the grace of God” upon him speaks of something very special … which takes us into the tricky area of Jesus being fully man and fully God.  Did being “fully God” allow Jesus to short-cut the trials of youth (and then adolescence and adulthood)?  How are we to understand this?  If Jesus fully entered our humanity and knew our weaknesses, knew temptation as fully as we do and provided an example that we should aspire to follow, then surely he must have laid aside all his power and knowledge.  And yet he displayed power and authority that demonstrated his nature as God.  It is a mystery, but a very real issue!  I might sum it up with a very personal question, “How far do I believe Jesus really knows what it is like to be me?”  To be continued … !