H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
January 7, 2001
JESUS THE BOY; JESUS THE BELOVED
Texts: 1 Samuel 3:15-21
Luke 2:39-52
Jesus the boy. Here is the only glimpse we have in scriptures of Jesus growing up. We are hungry for details. Did Jesus make spit wads in church, kiss girls, fight with his siblings? What happened when he hit the hormone-zone of adolescence?
The Bible is silent on Jesus' growing-up years, save this one text.
Other gospels -- we call them apocryphal gospels -- filled in the silence with wild fanciful tales that more resemble Super Boy comic books than the New Testament gospels. In one story Jesus' friends refuse to play with him. In a fit of disappointment Jesus turns his playmates into sheep. The horrified parents go screaming to Mary. Mary goes to Jesus and demands that he turn the sheep back into children -- which he does. The last scene of the story shows the parents lecturing their children: Next time Jesus asks you to play with him, play with him!
You can see why such stories did not make it into the New Testament. By comparison, Luke's story from Jesus' boyhood is surprisingly understated. And yet, it provides us with some clues about what it means for Jesus (and us) to be both holy and human.
I
The preface to this story describes how Mary and Joseph did "everything according to the law of the Lord" in their raising of Jesus. Jesus, the text says, "grew and became strong in spirit and was filled with wisdom, and the favor [charis, grace] of God was upon him" (Luke 2:46).
Now we come to the Passover pilgrimage that Mary and Joseph made to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve. It was a sixty-five-mile trip, one way. They made it every year, but this year was memorable. Do you remember when you were twelve? Jesus was in full-bore pre-adolescence, one year before his bar-mitzvah.
When the Passover festival was over, they packed up and started home. Jesus missed the departure of the Nazareth contingent.
Mary and Joseph didn't miss him until nightfall. They and all their companions had traveled the first twenty-five or so miles and stopped for the night.
It was like the movie Home Alone, where the family and all their relatives hustle off to the airport for a Christmas trip to Europe and accidentally leave their young son, who is sleeping in his upstairs cove.
It is not so difficult to understand how it happened. Practically the whole village packed up and made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem itself may well have been crowded with more than a million pilgrims there for Passover. When the Nazareth group shoved off to return home, it was a crowd who left, and Jesus was assumed to be somewhere playing with his friends. The familiar African proverb goes: "It takes a village to raise a child." It also takes a village to lose a child.
(In more ways than this can a child be lost in its village.)
When the caravan stopped for the night and Mary and Joseph began looking for Jesus for bedtime, they could not find him anywhere. They grew frantic and scared. Have you ever been separated from your child in a crowd? Or from your parents as a child?
II
Mary and Joseph spent a restless night of worry, then set off the next day to return to Jerusalem. When they got to Jerusalem they searched as long as they could, then went to sleep. It was not until the next morning, the third day since they had left, when they found him.
There he was in the temple squatting on the ground with a circle of teachers, asking questions and talking with them. The rabbis were quite amazed at the knowledge of this boy.
When his parents saw him their parental emotion came flooding out. Mary said, "Child, why have you treated us like this!? Look, your father and I have been worried sick!" ("Worried sick" is the southern, idiomatic translation of the Greek.)
Jesus responded with an extraordinary speech, words we've almost memorized:
Why did you need to be searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?
Or as the King James puts it: "about my Father's business."
Both translations are acceptable. "In my Father's house" is the most concrete and fits best with the dialogue: "You should have known where to find me: in the temple." But the larger and deeper dimensions are true as well: Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business? God's world is my home. God's purposes are my purposes.
Mary said: Why did you do this to us? We were worried sick.
Jesus replied: Why did you need to search? Did you not know I must be about my Father's business?
Teenagers, I must warn you. If you arrive at home two hours after curfew, and your mother or dad meets you at the door and says, Why did you do this to us; we were worried sick?" Jesus' line will not work.
III
But now I move more seriously with this line. There may well be times in your life when what you sense God calling you to do or to be is different from your parents' values or ambitions for you.
The next line of the text says that Jesus' parents "did not understand the saying which he spoke to them." As well as your parents understand you, you are more than your parents' shared genetic package bequeathed to you. You are more than all they have poured into you in their nurture, teaching and example. More than nurture or nature. You are a spiritual being created in God's image with your own unique relationship to God and unique destiny in God.
The text tells us that Jesus returned with them to Nazareth and was "obedient" to them. And that he "grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and humanity."
This means that Jesus was taught and fed, learned and grew like any other human boy or girl -- and that he absorbed the teachings of his faith -- which included the commandment "Honor your father and mother." Jesus was fully human. And as I said in my Christmas Eve sermon, this means he could know no more than could be stored in a human head small enough to pass through the birth canal of his mother's body.
Jesus was well trained in his faith, as we all need to be. But there is more, more for Jesus, more for us. The God who created us and bequeathed to us the Hebrew and Christian scriptures lives in us. He needs no human intermediary to speak to us and guide us. We are more than the human sum of our parts, more even than all we are taught; we are spirit and can commune with God in spirit and in truth.
Parents are called to give their children roots and wings.
The roots are the foundational sense of being loved and of belonging and the foundational moral values handed down to us in the faith. That is, we are called to teach our children what is right and to take delight in them, the law and grace of our existence as children of God. Roots.
But we are also called to give our children wings. The capacity to fly wherever God leads them and the freedom to take flight.
The story of Jesus is of a child who was both holy and human and who teaches us how to be holy and human. The word"holy" may make us nervous, but hang with me. In the biblical tradition "holy" does not mean perfect: It means whole and it means set apart for a purpose.
Jesus' holiness, consisted of at least these two things:
1. The intimacy he had with God which resulted in his knowing that he was God's beloved. I call this the "Abba-experience" where Jesus knew and where we can know that we are the Beloved of God.
2. Jesus' willingness to do whatever he perceived God wanting him to do. He did not always know what God wanted him to do -- for example, his agony in the garden of Gethsemane -- but he had the deepest willingness to do what God called him to do.
These two things -- the deepest sense that we are God's beloved and the deepest willingness to do what God wants us to do- are what made Jesus holy and what makes us holy.
God calls us all to a holiness that is one part wholeness and one part being set apart for a purpose.
Each of you is being called, set apart to join God's purposes in the world. This calling may change from season to season of your life, but there is this spiritual destiny to which we are all called, some unique way we join in what God is doing in the world. There is no such thing as the uncalled life - - only a life unmindful of one's call.
It was Amateur Night at the Harlem Opera House. A skinny sixteen-year-old came on stage. The announcer said, "She is going to dance for you." The girl whispered something in his ear. "Wait, no," he then said, "she says she is going to sing."1 The young lady sang and won first place and sang three encores. Her name - Ella Fitzgerald. She had been trained to dance that night, but she knew her destiny was to sing!
God wants each of us to hear what Jesus heard at his baptism, "You are my beloved daughter, son, in whom I take delight." And God wants each of us to discover that unique place where we join God in what God is doing in this world. This is our journey and this is our home.
CONCLUSION
At staff meeting this week Joe read Anne Lamott's explanation of why she's been to her church next to the flea market in Marin County almost every Sunday for ten years.
Her preacher, a tall African-American woman named Veronica, told the story of when she was seven. Her best friend got lost. The little girl ran up and down the streets of her town but couldn't find a single landmark to give her directions. Finally a policeman stopped to help, put her in the front seat of his car, and they drove around looking until she saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman and said firmly:
You could let me out now. This is my church,
and I can always find my way home from here.
That is the sense of what Jesus said to his parents that day. And it is our hopeful faith, too -- that no matter how "lost or lonely and frightened" we get, when we are here we can find our way home.2
1 James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
(N.Y.: Random House, 1996), p. 10.
2 Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), p.
55.
Copyright © 2001 H. Stephen Shoemaker
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