2nd Sunday of Christmas
Luke 2:41-52
Now every year [Jesus’] parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And, when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents were unaware of this. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.
After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And, all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But, they did not understand what he said to them. Then, he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them, and his mother treasured all these things in her heart.
And, Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.
Senior Prank
It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I was a pretty well-behaved kid, at least one I got past my elementary school days. I wasn’t necessarily afraid of doing bad things, I just really didn’t want to do bad things. So, you probably will be surprised to know that I was the one who orchestrated the senior prank during my senior year of high school.
As far as I know, the senior prank is a sort of tradition in a lot of high schools, but in case anyone doesn’t know, as the school year comes to a close, a group of graduating seniors will play some kind of mostly harmless prank on the school. Some pranks are just kind of simple and silly, like putting petroleum jelly on all the doorknobs, or putting googly eyes on everything. And, some are pretty elaborate; I heard of one senior prank where the kids somehow got a Volkswagon Beetle onto the roof of the cafeteria.
During my senior year of high school, I fully expected whispers and rumors to start going around about the senior prank, but I never heard anything. I even started asking around, and it seemed like no one was planning to do anything. I was confused, because I thought this was supposed to be a thing, and I was really looking forward to seeing what was going to happen. But, nobody was planning anything. Did that mean that I was going to have to do something? I assumed this was a kind of popular kid thing to do, and that certainly wasn’t the crowd that I ran with. Of all of the seniors at my school, my graduating class was about 600 students, by the way, I would be one of the least likely to do the senior prank. But, this was a tradition, and traditions have always been important to me, so despite my aversion to doing bad things, I started to plan.
I started asking around, and the only person I could get to help me with it wasn’t even a senior! She was a junior, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I needed help. On the night that we decided to do the senior prank, I left a note for my dad, just in case I didn’t make it back home before he noticed that my car was gone.
We got to the school, drove up to the locked gate, and started tossing our supplies over. As we were doing that, a cop drove by and saw what we were doing. We told him that we were doing the senior prank, and he took our information and said he was going to call our parents, but then he just left. So, we thought, we’re already here, the cops are already going to call our parents, we might as well do what we came here to do!
A lot of you are parents. Please raise your hand if you have a child that always did exactly what you wanted them to. Not a lot of hands up, I see. That’s not really how kids are, right? Kids are curious, kids experiment, we all thought we knew more than we actually did when we were younger. It takes time to learn and understand responsibility, empathy, patience.
Jesus was twelve years old when he decided to stay behind at the temple, as his parents made their way back home to Nazareth. The trip to Jerusalem for Passover was not something new or different for him. They went to Jerusalem every year; he knew the routine. Now, we don’t know for sure why he stayed behind without saying anything. Maybe he was so focused on his conversations at the temple, that he didn’t realize when it was time to leave, and by the time that he did, it was too late. He certainly couldn’t venture out into the wilderness on his own to try to catch up with them. Maybe he did it to test them, or to teach them a lesson. Surely, he would have known that they would be worried and upset.
This is one of those stories that’s so familiar that we just kind of gloss over the details. They went to Jerusalem every year for the Passover. Every year! That’s like a hundred miles! Traveling by foot, donkey, horse, that would have taken about a week each way. And, Jerusalem was a city of about 25,000 people, but the population would grow to about 100,000 people during the Passover festival, can you even imagine? I’m so curious about the logistics of all of that; how does a town accommodate an influx of that many people, especially without all of the modern conveniences we have, now? Where does all of the food and water come from? Where does all of the waste go? Maybe Jesus just got caught up in all of the excitement and forgot where he was supposed to be.
By the time his parents realized that he wasn’t with the group travelling back to Nazareth, they had already travelled for a full day! It’s wild looking at this story with our modern sensibilities, because it’s so hard to imagine how a family could travel for an entire day and not realize that one of their children was missing. Mary and Joseph now have to turn around and head back, which is going to take another day, to get back to Jerusalem. And, this next part is a little confusing, because depending on the translation and how you interpret the syntax, it either took a total of three days to find him, or five days. But logically, it seems like it should’ve only taken them three days, so that’s the number we’re going to go with. But even still, three days is a long time! Jesus is a growing twelve-year-old boy! Who was feeding him, all this time?
So, they find Jesus in the temple, teaching and asking questions amongst the learned men. He’s on the cusp of adulthood, but still, it’s surprising that they’re paying attention to him. He must have been saying some truly profound things.
Mary says, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.”
And, Jesus replies, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Again, we are so familiar with this story, that we just kind of accept this answer. Mary and Joseph should’ve known better. But, imagine this conversation in today’s context. This is kind of a flippant answer that Jesus is giving to his parents, and he doesn’t even apologize…kind of like how a modern, obstinate, know-it-all teenager might answer. The end of our reading says that Jesus “went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them,” which to me implies that he wasn’t totally obedient before.
Jesus was a human child. We just celebrated his birthday a few weeks ago, and now he’s twelve. Like every other human child that’s been born on Earth, Jesus had to learn how to crawl and walk, he went from infant, to toddler, to child, and preadolescent, just like we all had to. Jesus was divine, but he was human, too. And, even though he might have been better behaved than most, even if the worst thing he ever did was spend too much time at the temple, he wasn’t perfect, and I don’t think that it serves us to try to make him perfect. We don’t have to look at this story and say that Jesus was 100% right, and Mary and Joseph were 100% wrong. Maybe, Jesus was a little bit wrong.
So many people, including me until just a few years ago, spend so much of their time performing the mental gymnastics required to maintain this image of Jesus as someone who never made any mistakes and never did anything wrong. We’ve talked about this before. Jesus wasn’t perfect. He was always doing things that people didn’t like, and occasionally he did things that one could objectively argue were not strictly good. But, that’s okay. Why do we need Jesus to be perfect? It doesn’t stop him from being the Son of God. It doesn’t make his birth or resurrection any less miraculous; it doesn’t make the miracles he performed any less miraculous. It doesn’t stop him from being the Messiah who lived and died and came back to life to us.
Jesus was human, just like you and me, and he had his growing pains and times when he had to learn from his mistakes. He was one of us, even if it was only for a short time.
The highlight of my senior prank escapade was the giant happy face that we drew with salt on the football field, along with the numbers 97, the year that I graduated. Because we did it with salt, it took about a week to kill the grass and for the happy face to appear. It was so big, you had to be at the top of the bleachers to really see the whole thing. And, because we did it with salt, the grass eventually grew back, and the happy face disappeared.
I surprisingly didn’t get into any trouble the next morning when my parents listened to the message from the police about how I had been caught at the school the previous night. It almost seemed like my dad was actually a little proud of me for doing it. I am glad that I did it. It’s a fond memory, and I was able to carry on the tradition of senior pranks, even if it was technically wrong…technically a bad thing to do.
None of us are perfect; none of us can be perfect. But, that doesn’t mean that we give up on being good. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and grow. And, we should never stop learning. God’s love and forgiveness is vast beyond measure. Maybe that’s because Jesus learned for himself how hard it can be sometimes to be human. So, make your mistakes, and try to be good, and know that Jesus has at least a little understanding of what it’s like to be us. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
