Luke 2:39-52

Introduction

Continuing through our series we come to a rather important and peculiar part of Jesus life. He’s 12 years old and he’s left behind “accidentally” by His parents.

Jesus loses His parents

You might be wondering what’s the point of including a story about Jesus’ parents losing their son in the Gospel narrative?

Here’s our God, here’s our savior, Jesus Christ, having been left behind by his parents.

One of the things that I find most fascinating about talking with parents, especially those who have several children, is how often I hear about them leaving a child somewhere.

And typically at a gas station.

But one thing I don’t normally think about is that when Jesus was a child, his parents left him behind at the temple.

So why include that in the narrative? What good does that do to inform Theophilus of this rather embarrassing issue?

They go up every year for Passover. The three festivals, pentecost, passover, and tabernacles were celebrated.

But normally, since plenty of Jews lived so far away they would only go up to Jerusalem once a year.

It’s because it shows us that Jesus came, humanly speaking, from an ordinary yet pious household.

Jesus’ parents are clearly going up more than once a year.

If you’re going to make someone up as both the fulfillment of all the mighty Old Testament prophecies why put him with a family that seems so ordinary?

That’s not something you make up if you want to start a new religion. It shows the realness of Jesus’ humanity and human experiences.

It’s because

And when Jesus was twelve, the typical age for a Jew to be considered responsible to God, they went up for Passover.

Jesus loses His teachers

You might be thinking that Jesus’ ability to grasp information and to astonish His teachers has to do with his Deity.

But let’s think for a moment, does it have to do with His Deity or with His humanity?

What if, it is with respect to His humanity and that the reason why he is capable of grasping so much truth about God is due to His sinlessness rather than His deity?

This is a picture of what humanity should be. And what this does is to create a yearning and a longing to be like Jesus.

As He shows us what it’s like to be humanity as it was intended to be, like Jesus.

And it creates within us a longing for what’s to come when we will be as He is.

Jesus leaves with his parents

So Jesus parents find Him again and he reveals something to them. He wasn’t left behind for no reason. He was where He was supposed to be.

And this is the unavoidable reality of the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, He would be aware, very early on, that He is His Father’s Son.

And it says that Jesus went away with them and was submissive to them.

This is an ongoing submissiveness, it’s not communicating that He wasn’t submissive before and then started being submissive.

But the fact as well as that His submissiveness was more of a condescension to His parents.

He is supposed to be in Father’s house, but He is willingly setting aside His privilege of being in His Father’s house for their sake.

And for the sake of living as an obedient Son.