January 5, 2025, Growing Up – It’s Only Human, Luke 2:41-52 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ January 5, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

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I’ve been looking through boxes of old family photos lately – mostly pictures of my kids – at home, and on birthdays and holidays over the years. The funny thing about looking at old pictures is when I see a picture of Emily or Roseanna or Victoria, even a baby picture, they are so completely and unmistakably themselves. But they clearly aren’t themselves as I know them now – not just because they’re bigger and older, but because in some real sense they weren’t “finished” yet in that old picture. The person in the picture isn’t yet the person they are now. And in years to come, they will be even more themselves. Because as long as they live, people are growing up.

In today’s reading, Luke gives us a rare snapshot of Jesus Unfinished, Jesus in his childhood. We’ve been reading the story of Jesus’s birth during the Christmas season, and the gospels tell us a lot about Jesus as a man, but this one little story in Luke’s gospel is the only glimpse we get in all the gospels of Jesus as a boy.

We see Jesus here at twelve years old, traveling with his parents to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. The journey to Jerusalem was something they did every year, and they traveled as a community, along with family and friends, so that when Mary and Joseph didn’t see Jesus, it was a whole day before they started to worry about him. It was natural to assume that he was hanging out with relatives, or talking and playing with the other kids.

I find it wonderful that when God decided to take on our humanity and be born as a real person, he chose to grow up in the kind of natural human relationships most of us grew up in. Mary and Joseph assumed their son was off all day playing with his friends and cousins because of course, that’s where a twelve year old boy would be. But this little story also lets us see that in all his normal boy-ness, Jesus was growing up into his unique self. This must have been just one of so many other moments when Mary and Joseph were reminded that their son was not like the other children, that he was special. And Mary treasured all those moments in her heart.

They headed back to Jerusalem, and it took them three days to find Jesus. If you are a parent you have some idea what a state of panic and rage they would have been in when at long last they went into the Temple and saw Jesus sitting calmly, in serious conversation with the most respected men in Jerusalem, seemingly unaware that he had caused his parents any anxiety at all. I feel like probably Luke toned down their reaction. “Child, why have you treated us like this?” they cried out. Or maybe something stronger. And here we learn something about the Son of God that is very hard to imagine. Jesus, the twelve-year-old Jesus, didn’t seem to realize how utterly panicked his parents would have been. He was surprised that they didn’t know what was so obvious and reasonable to him – how did they not know that they would find him in his Father’s house? Here we see Jesus, the Son of God, lacking in understanding.

And there’s more here. When people describe this scene in the Temple, and how amazed the learned men in the Temple were by Jesus, they very often make it sound like he was just sitting there teaching them, like some kind of boy genius – and Luke does say that they were astonished by his understanding and his answers. But actually, Luke says that Jesus was doing two things: he was listening, and he was asking questions.

Paul later wrote this to the church in Philippi: “Jesus didn’t count his equality with God something to hang onto; on the contrary, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born as a human baby.” When Jesus emptied himself, letting go of the privilege and strength and glory of his God-ness, one of the things that means is that Jesus had to learn. He didn’t always understand. Jesus had to grow up, as any human child has to grow up. As every one of us has to do, to be honest, no matter how old we are.

The writer to the Hebrews tells us that it is that very thing that makes Jesus a perfect and compassionate High Priest for us. “Although he was a son,” he writes, “Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.”

Luke tells us this story so that we can see Jesus, our Savior and Lord, in the process of learning, suffering the anger and disappointment of his parents, coming to an understanding he didn’t have before, and growing in his obedience to them. It is almost unthinkable that the God of the Universe would choose to become like us in our ignorance and weakness, so that he would have to learn obedience, and not just be perfectly and effortlessly obedient right from the get-go. But, we see that’s exactly what he did, out of his great love for us, so that in truly and completely sharing our human life, he made us able to struly and completely hare his God-ife.

And that tells us at least two very important things about ourselves as well. It tells us first of all that he will never despise us for our ignorance or our weakness. Jesus chose to know exactly what it’s like to have to learn, what it’s like to need to grow up, which we all know isn’t something that ends at age twelve or eighteen or sixty-five – or any age. We keep needing to grow up, in our understanding, and in our abilities, and in our obedience, for as long as we are alive. Goodness didn’t spring fully-formed from our heads or our hearts when we become Christians. Perfect wisdom didn’t magically appear at our graduation or any other time in our lives. It takes our whole lives for God to grow us up into the person he created us to be. And he is patient with us – maybe more patient than we are with ourselves – because he knows what it’s like to be unfinished. Our God understands, from the inside, what it is to be a human being in the process of growing. That is one of the great mysteries of our faith.

And the other thing we learn, from this picture of Jesus as a boy, is that our errors and our ignorance and our shortcomings are not sin. We know that Jesus suffered everything that goes along with the human experience with one great exception – he was without sin, always. Sin is turning our backs on God by choosing not to love, and Jesus always chose love. Goodness knows we have all sinned in our own lives, many times over, choosing not to love, and every time we sin we need to repent and be healed and start again. But too often we waste time and energy feeling guilt and shame for our failings that are not sin at all, but just the unfinished business of our growing up. When we are weak, when we make mistakes, when we lack understanding, when we have doubts, when we suffer depression or anxiety, Jesus knows – he knows – that what we need is to grow a little more, and to find healing and understanding, not condemnation. He knows, because he had to grow up, too.

When Mary and Joseph found Jesus, he knew in his heart that he belonged in the house of his heavenly Father. But Luke tells us that Jesus chose to be obedient to his earthly mother and father. He chose to go back home with them, learning obedience by being submissive to his parents. He wasn’t pretending to learn obedience, just going through the motions; he grew up into obedience by choosing to love and respect his mother and father, even when they didn’t understand him. Jesus grew in wisdom as he grew in years, and he grew in favor with both God and man. And we, too – no matter how old we are – as we grow in years, we are growing in wisdom, day by day, strengthened and cheered by the love and grace of God, and of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Amen. +