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| "Mary finding Jesus" from Franco Zeffirelli's movie, Jesus of Nazareth |
So you may be wondering what happens between the time
the little baby Jesus arrives in the manger, and when he is a full-fledged, fully-grown
Messiah, teaching and healing, all self-sufficient and confident?
Well, this
happens.
12 year old Jesus gets left behind by his parents.
On an annual road trip with his family. And not accidentally
left at a rest stop when the caravan pulled away. But apparently deciding suddenly that he had a different
agenda, that he was on a different journey from his friends and relatives, and
simply bowing out of the group thing.
And perhaps he figured it would be better to ask
forgiveness than permission – mom would NEVER let me stay behind and hang out
in the temple! – or perhaps he didn’t think of his parents at all.
But no matter which way you slice it, nobody comes out
looking great here.
How could you
lose the Messiah?
I
give you one job… the most important job in all the earth, and you mess it up?
How long had it taken Mary to get over
the scandal of the whole “pregnant by the Holy Spirit” debacle, and now, when she
seems to have become a respectable parent doing a pretty decent job of it, now
this?
And Jesus, what the heck are you thinking? Because you are not thinking of your parents.
“Son,
how could you do this to your father and me?”
“I
wasn’t doing anything TO you. Why
were you searching for me anyway? Wouldn’t you know I would be in my father’s
house doing my father’s business?”
Cheeky.
There is so much sass in this answer I don’t even know where to begin.
How should they have known that, Jesus?
Should they have known that
because they are your parents, and parents know everything?
Should they have
read your mind, or held the bigger picture at all times?
What should THEY have done differently, here, Jesus?
Has it dawned on you yet that you that while you were in
a euphoric state of self-discovery and growth and amazing learning and getting
all kinds of accolades for your wisdom, your parents were frantic and sobbing
and enlisting the help of everyone they knew and praying desperate, apologetic
prayers to God for losing the Messiah of the world, or at the very least,
desperate, apologetic prayers to God for losing their beloved son?
Are you looking your relieved and confused mom in the
eye when you answer back?
Didn’t
you know I would be in my father’s house?
Who’s your daddy, Jesus?
Because you just told your adopted daddy, who has loved
you from the day you were born, and raised you as your father, that he has no
claim on you; you just threw the “you’re not my real Dad” card in his face.
Did Joseph flinch? Did Jesus notice?
So here is my question.
Why does Luke decide that of all the childhood experiences,
all the wonderful memories and tales that could be told that would give a
glimpse of God as a child, of all the things the church and the followers of
Christ would need to know about Jesus in his early years, that might tell us
something of his character and person, that this
is the ONE story to tell from his childhood? Why is this the one that’s got to be in there?
When I was in seminary I took a preaching class called
“Making Doctrine Live.” We were assigned
a Christian doctrine and a scripture text - mine were the divinity and humanity
of Christ, and the passage from Luke when Jesus calmed the storm. I wrestled for hours upon hours with
that text, and - for days I read commentaries and theology books, and tried to
wrap my head around the doctrine.
I strove to understand how Jesus could be both divine and human and then
agonized over how to talk about it.
In frustration, the day before I was to preach the text for my class, I
sat down and began writing, and a letter came out. It was a letter to a friend,
as though I was in the boat with Jesus the night he calmed the storm. It was a
letter that poured out my own frustration – that what I was seeing was true,
before my eyes, but I could not explain it, could not even understand it, and
yet it compelled me, and moved me to follow.
And I saw for the first time how the gospel writers revealed deep and poignant truth about God through
story – that sometimes the only way to talk about something that is bigger than
human words and more true than human concepts, is through story. In telling the
story of God-with-us, we resonate deeply in our being - beyond what our mind
can grasp or our theology spell out - with the inconceivable and relentless
love of God.
“And the
boy Jesus increases in wisdom and years, and in the favor of God and
people.” It’s a journey, growth
is, we don’t come out knowing it all, doing life and relationships right, right from
the get go, apparently, any of us.
Not even God.
I sometimes think there might be no worse feeling in all
the world than that of hurting the people you love. The worse you hurt them the worse the feeling. And when it happens by accident,
because you are not thinking of them and are thinking only of yourself, when
your thoughtless words or selfish actions tear down someone you love and
respect, and you’ve done something you can’t take back and can’t make right,
what a horrible feeling it can be.
And it gives me hope, actually, to imagine that in the
very heart of God, the heart that has been broken again and again by the
children of God’s betrayal and stupidity, by a world filled with selfish and
thoughtless actions and words that divide and destroy, that in that heart is
now the other experience, the other side. You have hurt those who love you more
than anything on earth. You maybe didn’t mean to, but you are responsible for
your choices. And you caused them pain and suffering. That was your fault. The breakdown here, the division here; you caused that.
If we thought the incarnation got LESS messy as it went
along, we thought wrong. The mess
goes all the way through. Every new stage is filled with new mess. And what to
do with a Jesus who seems to show a growing self-awareness, an awakening sense
of who he is, his own wrestling to make sense of it all?
And what about his parents? Who thought they just about got their
heads around this incarnation thing when he was little, but were not prepared
for this new, tall, argumentative Jesus, this too-big-for-his-britches tween,
who is not quite a man but no longer a boy?
And that thing that starts the second your baby is born,
that knowledge that hovers that you are working yourself out of a job, that one
day you have to let them go, that every new stage, every new word and step and
friend and hobby and discovery is exhilarating and a tiny bit heart-breaking
because it takes them into themselves and into the world and out of your hands,
and it is both as it should be and completely unnerving- that whole thing is
hard enough.
But when you’ve had glimpses and full face views of what
is in store for this child, when you are told at his christening that a sword
will pierce your soul because he will divide nations, when celestial beings
announce his birth and strangers travel from the ends of the earth to lay eyes
on him and the king of your land wants him dead and you’ve lived in exile and
returned – you’ve had foreshadowed to you all along that his future is out of
your control, out of your imagination, and out of your hands, but all along
that has been SO FAR OFF, and he’s just been your baby, your kid, your delight,
and you’ve done a pretty good job of giving him gradually more independence and
respect, you let him travel with the big kids instead of by your side, on the
annual family trip, after all, and then this
happens.
This.
But also, what was that feeling - when you saw him in the temple, before
he saw you, and after the relief and the anger rushed up inside you but just
before you rushed up to him- what was that feeling that made you gasp and hold
your breath when you watched him, answering the great teachers, his face
alight, his hands animated, and their eyes riveted and bodies still, as they
took him in with respect and wonder? Had you ever seen your boy like this
before? With a look at what he might be as a man? With a glimpse of how he might be in the world as a leader? Was
there pride or wonder of your own? Or was it sheer terror?
This is all so close, it really is happening. This is really, really real.
And Jesus, what happened when mom and dad showed up and
the bubble burst? Real life floods
in and the reverie is broken and you have your oh, sh*t moment when you look
at your watch for the first time, (or calendar, as the case may be), and realize
how much trouble you must, rightly, be in?
And that embarrassment when you go from feeling so very
grown up in the eyes of the those you respect and admire, to being reprimanded
by your mommy in front of these great men, and deservedly so. And you condescendingly sass back at
your worried sick parents instead of apologizing?
I think the apology is there, by the way. In the way 12
year old boys sometimes apologize. He
goes back with them and is obedient, the text reads. Once they are out of
the temple he submits to his mother’s hug, and leans into her with his head
down, acknowledging her affection and dropping his attitude and letting her
brush the hair off his sweaty forehead and ask him when’s the last time he had
something to eat.
What is incarnation? What does it really mean, this “God-with-us” thing? Is God all-knowing and outside the
fray? Is God moved by human pathos? Is God able to make mistakes? And
apologize? And be forgiven? And learn from them?
There is no great doctrinal response. But maybe it doesn’t matter how it all happened, just that it did.
Maybe it’s not important to be able to say precisely what it means, the incarnation, how Jesus is God
with us, how he could be both a kid and the creator of the universe, how he
could be love embodied, and also mess up and hurt his parents. Only that God did. God did it all. For
us. With us. Maybe the only way to understand
the incarnation is to feel it from the inside, to hear the story of it and see
it in our own stories, to live it, like Jesus himself did.
And maybe we can do what Mary does- we can treasure
these things in our heart. We can
wonder, and let them sink in, and shake our heads in disbelief, and sit for a
while in the discomfort and comfort it simultaneously brings, and let the
incarnation’s truth seep into all the places in our own lives that need to hear
it right now.
And so God, when I let myself treasure and ponder these
things, I wonder…
What does it feel like to be on the inside? Is it how you thought it would be, this
living thing?
What do you make of puberty? What’s it like getting in arguments with your sisters and
brothers? Is it hard to be close
to Joseph? Does Mary sometimes drive you crazy or embarrass you in front of
your friends?
Do you have high expectations of yourself?
Are you able to forgive easily, or do you find it
difficult, like I do, to let go?
Do you wish you looked different, had a different voice
or were better at some sport or skill than you are?
How much did your parents tell you growing up about who
you were?
How much did you take in, and was this when it first
began to dawn on you?
What did it feel like to realize you knew thing, you
WERE things?
What did that feel like, when pieces began to connect,
when vistas began to open?
Did you always know you were different, from the very
start? Or did cousin John recklessly break the news on one of the family trips?
How hard is love, God? It’s hard, isn’t it?
It’s hard to belong to people and be accountable to
people and sometimes have no good options and sometimes make the wrong
move. And do the work to stay
close even if you don’t deserve it and they don’t deserve it and you all really
need it.
Is it harder than you thought it would be?
It’s harder
than I thought it would be.
It looks easy from the outside, but it’s really not.
Love demands all of you and stretches you in ways you didn’t knew you reached.
Do you see the world differently now? Do you love
differently now?
Did you ever want out? Did you ever feel trapped, as one of us, and want out?
You really played the long game, didn’t you?
This wasn’t a quickie experiment; you didn’t come as a
grown up, to try out this humanity thing, you were in it all the way from the
get go. You had to learn it all, go through it all.
And those weren’t throw-away years, were they? Those were essential to shaping you,
those were vital to your experience, to your mission, your person, to your
God-with-us-ness.
Why haven’t you shared much about those early years with
us? Are they too private? Do you want us to know that they were not so different
from our own early years?
Once upon a time brilliant and mouthy pre-teen God
screwed up and ditched the family trip without asking permission or telling his
parents.
Once upon a time the two people charged with raising God
from a baby and protecting the incarnation lost the Messiah of the whole world for four days.
Once upon a time the leaders of religion and teachers of
wisdom and worshipers of Yahweh saw God before them both incognito and revealed
in a skinny, ruddy, well-spoken boy, opening up their minds with his questions
and getting in big trouble from his mom.
Once upon a time God said things that were rude and
disrespectful to his parents, that hurt them deeply, but also were a totally
normal part of pulling away and growing up.
And he kept growing up, kept on learning and becoming,
and got better at loving and respecting and gained favor in the eyes of both
God and human beings.
And for some reason the story of God-with-us is not
complete without this particular part.
May we receive the gift of it, absorb the truth of it, and
treasure these things in our heart.
Amen.
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