Thoughts for the Day

Luke 2:49-50 “Why were you searching for me? [Jesus] asked.  “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”  But [Joseph and Mary] did not understand what he was saying to them.

Luke records just one episode while Jesus is growing up.  He is twelve.  After making their annual Passover visit to Jerusalem the family begins the journey home and discovers a day later that Jesus is not with the group.  They search, return to Jerusalem and eventually find him after three days sitting among the teachers in the temple, listening and asking questions.  If it’s hard for us to appreciate the cultural setting, our empathy with Mary and Joseph’s concern is probably not too wide of the mark.  We are surprised that seemingly Jesus didn’t realise that they would be worried, just as he was surprised that they would imagine searching anywhere else for him.  But why did Luke include this episode and just this one?  It is certainly possible, perhaps even probable, that Luke interviewed Mary as part of his research.  I imagine her reflecting back on Jesus’s birth and upbringing, and from her treasure-trove of memories this incident comes most poignantly to mind. “Even we didn’t understand,” she muses.  “Despite the angel’s words, despite seeing him growing up every day, we didn’t understand.  But even at twelve, he did.  He already recognised his Father-Son relationship with God in a unique way.”  Fanciful?  Maybe. But we are so familiar with this Father-Son description from Jesus’s ministry that we are apt to miss how radical it was, so it’s no bad thing to be challenged to view it afresh. And we will come back to it several times.