Boy Jesus

Text: Luke 2:41-52

Perhaps, when Jesus and the scholars in the Temple were talking about scripture, they were talking about sea monsters.

In the Hebrew Bible that Jesus knew, there are a lot of sea monsters. As there are in psalm 148 which we just sang. And in Job: the Leviathan that God made for fun.

And other great stories: There are giants in Genesis and Deuteronomy, like King Og (which is a great name for a giant king).

There are battles won with courage, with bravery, with trickery, and with technology (like the one at Jericho). And there are stories of other remarkable twelve-year-old boys, like David, the shepherd who defeated another great giant and who turned out to be a king, or Samuel who was the first great prophet.

The Bible has some terrific stories for a young man or woman of Jesus’ age. Plus, that age is a time of real and intense wondering about God and how the heavens and the earth all fit together. It is not all that surprising that Jesus liked to spend time with the teachers in the Temple, talking about scripture and asking questions and listening to the answers.

This strange interlude on the First Sunday after Christmas falls in the lectionary between two birth stories: the first on Christmas Day with the shepherds and the manger and the second on Epiphany with the arrival of the three kings. So we jump in our readings from birth to emerging adult and back to birth.

This story about young man Jesus appears only in Luke. There is some thought (based on the words and writing style) that it might have been inserted into Luke from some other source. In many ways this story duplicates the one that appears in Luke just before it. That story, in which Jesus is still just a baby, happens in the Temple as this one does. People are amazed at his presence, just as in this one. His parents don’t get it, just as in this one. His mother Mary treasures in her heart the things she hears and sees, just as she does in this one. And in the end, the story notes that Jesus got older and wiser, just as this one does.

So, why is it here? There are other “Jesus as boy” writings, but in books which never made it into the canon of the Bible because of their questionable authority. The best known is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In it Jesus does miraculous and sometimes not very nice things, things appropriate to a energetic, curious child who is a little unruly.

These stories are almost certainly written to help people fill in a not very complete picture of the person of Jesus. We know him from the birth stories in Luke and Matthew, and as an adult preacher, but nothing of the years between that in our own lives are so influential and revealing.

The purpose of these stories is not, as we sometimes suppose, to prove that Jesus as a boy was really God. It is rather the opposite: to show that Jesus whom we now know as God was really a boy. Did boy-things. Was 100% human even as divine, even when a young person.

In the story in Luke, Jesus amazes the teachers and confounds his parents. It does not take a divine child to do that. Twelve-year-old children are amazing no matter what. They are as able as young king David or young prophet Samuel. They know lots about many complicated things. They become geeks (even church geeks, like Jesus) or fledgling scholars or jocks—all at once. They read and remember like crazy. They have sophisticated ideas about things. They ask penetrating questions, as I’m sure Jesus did, and listen closely to the answers, and are good at finding bugs and flaws in arguments.

And they can be adventurous and unruly and as oblivious of their parents as Jesus was. And as mysterious to their parents as Jesus was to his. They did not understand him, it says. Others saw in him what his parents did not, as often happens.

What we celebrate in these stories is not the adult Jesus who is teacher and savior and divine presence among us. There are lots of other times to do that. What we celebrate is the child of promise that is in every human young man or woman. We see and treasure in our hearts the amazing present and potential future in these children. None of us know any more than Mary did for sure what will happen. But we expect and pray that every twelve-year-old, not just the divine son of God, will grow in years and, we hope, in wisdom and divine and human favor.

These stories remind us forcefully that Jesus was human as well as divine. It seems weird that we should have to do that. It would seem that we would be called more often to defend the divinity of Jesus, not his humanity. But Christians have long had a tendency to embrace the God side of “God incarnate” and to deny or evade the incarnate side. Early heresies made it as if Jesus were God in human clothing—or like Zeus, a god disguised as something else—and we sometimes speak and act even now as if that were how it worked. Lutherans can claim to be virtuous in this regard, being especially adamant about the 100% human, 100% God doctrine. But not so consistently that we can pat ourselves on the back about it.

There is in church jargon something called the “scandal of particularity.” What this means is that Jesus was not a general God-presence in the world but a particular person in a particular time born to a particular family. It was scandalous because how could the infinite God be in a finite person. He was a particular little baby, with round cheeks or not, bald or not, chubby or not, cranky or not. He was a particular twelve-year-old boy, doing twelve-year-old things, getting into trouble, knowing stuff, fighting (maybe) with his brothers, amazing his parents and astonishing his teachers in a particular way.

There is no scandal in particularity. All creatures, all humans are particular, individual, great and strange. If God is to be human, God must be, for us, a particular one.

It is important to our faith that we do not let Jesus become a God who is just a kind of divine, magical, privileged tourist in our foreign, human land. We need, and thankfully we have, a God who likes to read about sea monsters as much as likes to create them.