The First Sunday after the Epiphany

How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house, about my Father’s business? If you’re like me, you might instinctively hear this as a rhetorical question. Come on guys, didn’t you know that I would be here? You should have known that and if you didn’t you’ve been foolish! Why do we, or at least I, hear the words of Jesus like this? Could it not be that this is a completely innocent question? Jesus is twelve years old. This is the only account we’re given of his childhood and in the account Luke explains that Jesus increased in wisdom and stature. Is this a learning moment for Jesus as well as his parents? The young innocent eyes looked into his mother’s with genuine surprise and wonder. Didn’t you know I would be here? The question was asked as much to himself as to his parents. Oh, you didn’t know. You don’t have that sort of insight. Sorry mum, I didn’t realise but I do now.

And Mary ponders these words in her heart. Her twelve year old son grows in wisdom but she also recognises that she has much to learn. She realises he is growing but she takes the little boy seriously.

There is an echo of these events in the end of the Gospel of saint Luke, in chapter 24. Just as his parents searched for him for three days and find that he’s been in the temple, just so, Jesus lies dead for three days and those who search for him find that it is through this death that he has made the world a temple, a meeting place with God. Not only that but in death itself, in the harrowing of hell, just as the twelve year old Jesus sat in the temple with the teachers, so in death Jesus sits and listens to and asks questions of the souls in hades.

Then, on the third day, the angel asks the women in the garden outside the tomb, “Why do you search for the living among the dead?” “How slow you are to believe,” Jesus tells the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and their eyes were opened as he broke bread with them in communion. He was lost and is found. He was dead and is alive. The loss of the twelve year old Jesus and his being found in the temple prepares his parents for his death when a sword pierces the heart of Mary. Maybe her pondering his words when she finds him as a twelve year old, gives her the faith, years later, that he is not lost in death but is with his father.

How often does it feel like we loose Jesus? We get to the end of another day in a long journey and find that the child is gone. Have we had times when, after three days, three months, maybe years, we realise that he was there all along, in his father’s house, waiting for us. Waiting for us in that temple, in those secret places in the world where, if we are honest with ourselves, are places where God is known to us in a special way. A way which others might not understand. Do we ponder those moments? Ponder how they give us faith that when, at the end of our lives, in all those moments that it feels we’ve lost Jesus, we can have faith that he’s there, in a temple which encompasses our loss. Maybe it’s here, in communion, that we find that faith.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

At the start of Chp 2, the emporer of Rome issues a decree.

But the real world ruler is far away in Bethlehem and rules with mercy.

What were angels doing in a field? Why weren’t they in the temple?

They have gone to Jerusalem to present Jesus at the temple after his circumcision on the 8th day and after the 33 days needed for Mary to wait after giving birth. Risk of infection.

The two turtle doves indicates they are comparatively poor.

This is the only story in the Gospels we have of Jesus’s early years.

They went every year to Jerusalem for passover.

Jesus is 12.

They search for 3 days. He is listening to and asking the teachers questions.

“In the things of my father.”

Echo in Luke 24, Cleopas and his friend on the road to emmaus. As if Emmaus has become a new temple.

On pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the Jews used to go in two groups—one of men, the other of women. Children could go with either group. This explains how they could go a day’s journey before they discovered the Child was missing when the families regrouped to camp.

Are there times when we’ve lost Jesus?

just as Jesus must “progress” in wisdom, so must those who follow his story, who, like Mary, “keep these words in their heart.”

Luke identifies being lost with being dead, and being found with coming back to life (15:32).