Jesus, on the Eve of Bar Mitzvah?

2 Christmas  B January 4, 2014 
Jeremiah 31:7-14 Psalm 84 or 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a  Luke 2:41-52
 
Lectionary Link

    As parents, when our children are born we imagine having the problems which Mary and Joseph had with their young son Jesus.  We can imagine that our children are prodigies until we settle for what children are in the proverbial "Lake Wobegon" where all the children are above average.

  What does a parent do with a genius child?  Can you imagine the adults in the life of Wolfgang Mozart?  He was composing as a child without struggle and it all seemed to come so easy.  What about when children are better in some skills than adults?  How do parents live with this situation?

  Today's Gospel lesson about the 12 year old boy Jesus is something like the story of a prodigy and the concept of the  movie  "Home Alone."  This was a long time before there was a Jerusalem Child Protective Services.  When Mary and Joseph were traveling in a caravan of people, they relied upon their prodigy son to meet up with the caravan and they assumed their village would help raise their son but about a day's trip from Jerusalem, Jesus could not be found in the caravan.  Mary and Joseph then had to make a day’s trip back to Jerusalem and then take three more days to finally find their son Jesus in the temple participating in the a typical question and answer session with the resident teachers of the Torah.

  Jesus was 12 when this took place.  The typical age for the bar mitzvah is thirteen.  The coming age rite was better defined in Talmudic times of the 3rd to 6th century but the Talmud was a time when the Oral Tradition of the Torah was finally written down.  So we have traditions which derive from the great rabbis of the time of Jesus, the schools of Hillel and Shammai.  Jesus in the temple was probably in the middle of a discussion between the various schools of rabbinical thought.  One of the discussion had to do with who should be taught the Torah.  One school thought that everyone should be taught the Torah whereas others thought that it was for those with a more special calling.  One could in an anachronistic sense call this unique story about the young Jesus when he was on  the eve of his bar mitzvah.  In a typical bar mitzvah the father of the boy makes a prayer of thanksgiving for being relieved of responsibility for the conduct of the boy because the boy has now been given responsibility for his own actions.  In the Gospel story it seems as though Jesus is willing to take that responsibility before his father and mother want him to.

  In the exchange of Jesus with his anxious and upset parent, his sayings are quite puzzling and if Jesus was perfect, I guess we would want to say he was also perfectly, adolescent in his aspirations to be older than others were going to allow him to be.  In his response he is really pushing the limits on the fifth commandment about honoring one's father and mother.

  "Mom and Dad, you are upset about me not returning to your home.  I am home right here in the Temple.  This is my Father's house and I must be about my Father 's business."

  Wow!  Poor Joseph just wanted Jesus to get back to the carpenter shop and work on mitering with his saw cuts.  And here Jesus wants to be an academic.  He wants to hang out with the teachers of the Torah.  And the amazing thing about Jesus is that he clearly has the aptitude for it even at the age of 12.

  What are we to make of this lone Gospel story about Jesus as a child?  What are we to make of the seeming separation of himself from his earthly parents and their home in Nazareth?

  This story functions within a constellation of puzzling "family value" statements attributed to Jesus during his ministry.  “If you don't leave family and home and follow me, you can't be my disciples.  Who is my mother, brother or sister?  The one who does the Father's will.  If you don't hate your family you can't be my disciple.”

  One of reason we are such Trinitarians as Christians is because of the sayings of Jesus.  With Jesus we arrive at the Fatherization of God.  I think that the rather enigmatic and shocking family value statements of Jesus represent the conditions of the formative eras of the Christian faith.  To be truthful, the Gospels represent sayings which pertain to the controversies within Judaism which led to the separation of Christianity from Judaism.  The Gospel represents time when families and communities were divided by their religious loyalties and commitment.  The disagreement led to open division between families and communities.  So the strong bonds of the natural family which would give advocacy to each family member within society had to give way to a spiritual family whereby a person gave up one's natural family for one's spiritual family.  And in this new family, one recognized God as one's Father and primary parent.

  This is hard for us to understand since we understand religion and faith to be something which is taught and shared in one's own family.  We understand like the Jews of old, the deep ethnic bonds of religious faith.

  But this is not the formative experience of the Gospel era and so we have their quite shocking family value statements which begin even when Jesus was a young boy.

  So how do you I and process this message today?  We survey it and ask ourselves how it applies to us and our modern life experience?

  Each of us like Jesus need to know that God is our heavenly parent and that we dwell in this world as God's house.  Adult and mature spirituality happens when we are not dependent or over determined by our parents views but when we have learn to transact with God as the one who becomes the one who "determines" our life.  This is a liberating experience of Christian adulthood; no longer either blaming our parents for our problems or simply parroting their faith views; but rather truly coming to know that God is the determining one in our lives.

  The other thing for us to learn from the ironic family value tradition of the Gospel is this: sometimes we have to part company with people close to us in order to obey God and make a creative advance in our lives of faith.  It is wonderful if our parents and friends do not assert themselves as competitors to our obedience to God but this is not always the case.

  So this story about Jesus as a child prodigy exists and functions within this ironic family value tradition of Gospel communities which were being formed within the crucible of division from Judaism.  We have to be honest about this to be honest to the Gospels, but we also have to be honest to come to know our identity as sons and daughters of God in the events of our own personal spiritual breakthroughs  And this is the greatest things which our brother Jesus taught us, even when he was but a child of twelve.  Amen.