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After three days they found Him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, this is a glorious, even if somewhat mysterious, text of the visit of Jesus when He was twelve years old to the temple. And we’re going to consider what it means to find Jesus. But before that, I’d like to just say a couple of words about, oh, I suppose about the turmoil of our own day.
I mean, I’m sure that many of you have been like me just in the last week or so, paying attention to the news and the various different things that are happening around the world. I put on the news this morning, the five-minute newscast, just driving to church, and just to think of some of the things that it listed. The escalating violence in Iran and the Middle East, there was, we heard last week, another shooting in a church, there are the impeachment hearings and the accompanying arguments that go with it, and with that, the ramping up of another political season. There’s fires covering the entire continent of Australia, it seems; I mean, it’s just one story after another, and almost all of them have these words like catastrophic or global.
And I think, at least for me, that everything seems so big; all the problems that face the world seem so large that it’s tempting to just almost throw up your hands and say, what can I even do about it? What can I do to help? How can I change the world? There’s sort of a helplessness, at least I think I feel it when we watch the news and see all of these catastrophes happening all around us.
Now I think it’s in some ways quite amazing to see that in the midst of all of the trouble and in the midst of all of the catastrophes and in the midst of disasters of global proportions, God the Holy Spirit takes us and He puts our nose to the Bible and He tells us the story of a family who lost their little boy.
Now just to think about that for a moment is really quite stunning. Because one of the ways that I think the devil tempts us is to think that this life is out of control, that there’s nothing that we can do about it, that there’s nothing that I can do to help or make a difference in the world. But there’s some wisdom even just in this, that when things seem too big for us or that when we seem too insignificant, the Lord simply sends us to bless and care for the people that are right in front of us.
The Lord reminds us that the real action is not in the geopolitical ramifications of certain particular actions, but that the real action is right there in front of us with our nearest neighbor. It happens in our homes and with the neighbors that the Lord has given to us, so that there is something that we can do. I mean, when it seems like the world’s falling apart, what do we do? We try to make our own homes places of refuge and places of peace.
And not only that, but we try to make our own congregation a place of refuge and a place of peace, a place where we can all come and rejoice that in this place is a little bit of God’s Word and a little bit of God’s order, and it’s a sanctuary from the chaos of the world. And that this, this place is a place where we hear the Lord’s peace, and I mean not only from the font and from the absolution and from the altar and from the lectern and here from the pulpit, but that you hear God’s peace also from each other.
As you bless one another and as you care for one another and as we embrace one another as the Christian family, I mean it is amazing that the world could be falling apart and the Holy Spirit says, look at how it was with Mary and Joseph looking for Jesus. This is amazing and really wonderful and comforting for us.
Now, in pursuit of that peace, I want to consider the gospel text and how Mary and Joseph almost found Jesus in the temple. A couple of notes on the text: one, this is a text of a lot of onlys and firsts and lasts. For example, it’s the only account of the childhood of Jesus, and in fact, in some ways, I think that’s why we have it in the gospels, that Luke is giving it to us.
Remember, Luke was investigating all of the things about the life of Jesus, and he was talking to Mary about these things, and Mary was telling how it was, and Luke puts this in there, and I think there’s this almost… as Christians, we can’t stop from asking this question. How in the world would it have been when God was a child? We know how it was when God was a baby, but what was He like in third grade? What was he like in high school? What position did he play in the baseball team? You know, we just have all these kind of questions.
Now, this is the only text that we have that answers those questions. This one example from Jesus’ birth and return to Nazareth until He is baptized at age 30, this is the only text that we have. This text is also the last time that we hear of Joseph in the Holy Scripture. Joseph is there at the birth of Jesus and the flight to Egypt and the return to Nazareth. He’s there, and the text tells us that it was the custom of Mary and Joseph to travel down to Jerusalem for the Passover and then back home, but this is the last time we hear of Joseph and this is why the church has considered that Joseph died sometime in the years between this moment and the baptism of Jesus.
And perhaps the most significant thing to note in the text is that this text is the first time that we hear the sacred voice of Jesus. There’s this line, I think we’ll sing it during the distribution of the Father’s Love Begotten, this great Christmas hymn, and it says, and it has this beautiful line that talks about how Christmas was the first time that God revealed His sacred face. Now, that’s a wonder to think about, that at Christmastime, God reveals His face.
But this is the text when Jesus reveals His voice. And the words that Jesus speaks to Mary and Joseph in the text are the first words in red in the Bible, the first reported words of Jesus. Now there’s drama in the text, and we mostly find the drama in the being lost, and we can all imagine that. I imagine all of us had those moments when we were kids when we were lost or when we thought we were lost.
Now, this is a traumatic thing, both for mother and for child, when you realize that you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where your parents are and they’ve gone and all this sort of stuff. This is a particularly dramatic moment, but one of the great things in the text is that it seems like this is only dramatic for Mary and Joseph. They went to Jerusalem for the Passover. This was the feast that all who could were required to go to Jerusalem to celebrate it, and it seemed like they were, it was their custom to do it.
But Jesus comes with them a year before he would have been bar mitzvahed; the year that you start having to pay attention in church when you’re 12 years old, that’s the Jewish tradition. We make it earlier, children, but this is so Jesus was 12 years old and he goes up to with his parents to Jerusalem and they finish six days in the temple. And then they’re all headed back, and you gotta think it was a caravan of family and friends from Nazareth, and so they’re all traveling together, and they figure that Jesus is with one of his aunts or uncles traveling with the family.
So they go a day’s journey, and they go to settle down in the inn or wherever they were stopped to camp on their way back home, and they start looking for Jesus, and they can’t find him anywhere. So they spend a day, the entire next day, and you have to imagine all night spending a day and a night looking for Jesus. They can’t find him amongst all their friends and family, and so they go back to Jerusalem, the day’s journey back to Jerusalem, and start looking around Jerusalem, and finally three days after they realize that they lost Him, they find Jesus in the temple.
Now, we want to think, as we read through the text, that that was the sort of the drama and the resolution, that Jesus was lost and then He’s found. But the text is going to invite us into another drama that’s not resolved, because you first have the conflict of not knowing where Jesus is and not knowing where to find Him, and then, astonishingly enough, they find Jesus in the temple, and we have these great notes about how Jesus was there with the teachers and He was asking them questions, and they were all astonished at this twelve-year-old boy who was asking such questions, and even giving such answers from the Scriptures that they didn’t know what to think of them.
And His father and His mother find Him there, and then here’s what happens: Mary comes to Jesus and rebukes Him, gently, but rebukes Him. She says, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Behold, your father”—note that father—”behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” And Jesus says to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s business? In my father’s house?” In fact, the Greek word there for house or business is just the word stuff. “Didn’t you know that I needed to be in the midst of my father’s stuff?”
Now, now what happens when Jesus answers Mary and Joseph in this way is a slight rebuff also back to his mother. Mary says, “Look, your father and I have been looking for you,” and Jesus says, “Remember I have a different father. God is my father, and I’m about His business.” But they did not understand it. Verse 50 says, “They did not understand the saying that He spoke to them,” and He went down with them and came to Nazareth.
Now I want to suggest to you this morning, as we meditate on this text, that while Mary and Joseph found Jesus, I mean they found where He was, they found His body, they found His presence; they could grab a hold of Him, they could point to Him, and they could look at them, they found Jesus. They had not yet found Jesus because they did not understand the saying that He spoke to them. And I think this is true also for us. There are a lot of people who say they have found Jesus, but the Jesus that they found is not the right one.
The Jesus that Mary and Joseph were looking for was Jesus the boy, Jesus the one who should be with them, Jesus the Son of Mary and the Son of Joseph. But the true Jesus is the Son of the Father going about the Father’s business. Now, what this means, dear saints, is that it is entirely possible to say that we have Jesus, or that Jesus has us, and have the wrong one: have the wrong guy, worship the wrong Jesus.
There are a lot of ways to go wrong here, I just want to consider three. There is the judge. This was the picture of Jesus, especially in the Middle Ages, and it’s the picture of Jesus coming to judge the world, coming with wrath. Jesus is the one who’s coming with anger and with justice to punish sin. And when we think of Jesus in this way, then we become terrified of Him. In fact, I think a lot of the piety that developed around the Virgin Mary had to do with this, that Jesus was considered to be so mean, or so rough, or so crude, or so cruel, or so hard-worded, that Mary became the nice one, the one that we go to when we need help.
You have a wrong picture of Jesus as the one who comes only in judgment and not in mercy, then we have the wrong Jesus. We have not yet truly found Him. Jesus says, “I have not come to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through me.”
Or, and I think this is probably the Jesus that most people find nowadays, you have kind of on the other side, you just have the nice guy Jesus, like the inspirational Jesus, the Jesus who’s okay with everything, who doesn’t have any standards at all, who’s just there to make you feel good about yourself. I mean this Jesus, I think this Jesus is preached even in some churches and I can’t imagine why, because every single word from the mouth of Jesus in the Scripture dispels this. Jesus does not come to support us in our own attempts to achieve our own righteousness. He comes to kill and make alive, to destroy and to raise up. He shows us our sins so that we would receive Him or know Him better, so that we would know Him as our Savior.
Or there’s the third picture of Jesus. I think I was talking to you guys in Bible class about how I’ve had an ongoing conversation now with some new friends who are Jehovah’s Witnesses who are coming by the house. And this last… yesterday in our last conversation, this just really broke my heart. The guy was talking about how Jesus is the one who has to step in to fix things, and then He steps back out of the way. He had this longing for the day when Jesus was no longer the mediator between man and God, but that He would deal directly with God the Father Himself.
This is the idea, and this is also common in the church, that Jesus steps in to get us into the church, to fix our problems, to maybe make us Christians, but then after that He gets out of the way and now it’s up to us. This is also the wrong Jesus.
What is the right Jesus? Well, He tells us in the text. Jesus says, “Did you not know that I had to be amongst the stuff of my Father?” That is to say, “Didn’t you know that I had to be about the business of this place?” And what place was that? It was the place of the temple, a place of blood and word and fire, a place of sacrifice, a place of lambs and bulls and goats going to be killed and to be burnt so that God would be appeased with sin.
In other words, Jesus must be about the business of forgiving sins. That’s the true Jesus. That’s the Jesus who comes to us to save us. That is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and for us to come to Jesus in this right way we have to know first that we are sinners and second and most importantly and above all else that He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
We might know that Jesus is God in the flesh. We might know that Jesus is a profound prophet who told the truth about God. We might know that Jesus was crucified, and we might even know that Jesus was raised from the dead, but if that’s all we know about Jesus, we are like Mary and Joseph. We found Him, but we don’t yet understand.
But when you know that Jesus has taken all of your sin, all of your guilt, and all of your shame, and all of your suffering, all of it, and suffered everything He suffered for your sake, then you have found the true Jesus. Or maybe even better yet, then He has found you, and rescued you, and delivered you. May God grant it, that Jesus would find us this morning and forgive our sins. Amen.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.