There are certain movies out there that are quintessentially
Christmas movies. You have seen them, probably over and over and
over again - "A Christmas Carol," of course, "It's a Wonderful
Life," "Miracle on 34th Street," to name a few, and one of my
all-time favorites, "Home Alone." That one ties incredibly well
with this gospel lesson.
A family is traveling for the holidays. (1)
They are preparing
for the return trip to Nazareth after spending Passover in
Jerusalem. The entourage is complicated, and the mother who, of
course, is in charge of details, checks and rechecks the parcels,
the animals, the children, counting noses and checking her list.
One of the children, Jesus, has not actually been seen, but of
course he is here somewhere - he is the good one, the one who can
always be counted on to be responsive and obedient and - most
important, to be where he is supposed to be, when he is supposed
to be there. Time is passing, everything else is accounted for,
and the father, who, of course, is in charge of timeliness, is
eager to get out of Jerusalem before the traffic, so they set
off.
But the mother continues to be plagued with a question that
gnaws at her. "Do we have everything?" They reach the city
limits of Jerusalem and head out into the desert. "I know we
have forgotten something," Mary says. They stop for lunch beside
an olive grove. "What could it be?" She ponders: "All of the
children are here, of course." And she checks her list once
more. But then, when they stop for the night, she realizes that
the unthinkable in fact is happening, and with terror and remorse
she screams. "JESUS!!!"
An aside here about scripture. From your earliest days in
Sunday School you learned that the Word of God is "living and
active, sharper than any two-edged sword..." (2) And one of the
ways we know it is LIVING is that it changes meaning for us as WE
change. It speaks to us in new ways in new circumstances. This
story is a prime example.
When I was a lad, my identification in this account was with
Jesus - Jesus, the sharp young boy; Jesus, the over-achieving
first child of the family; Jesus, the devout student of the faith
for whom Temple tasks came as a priority over even family
concerns. It all fed right into my normal adolescent rebellion
(and I loved it) - Jesus is twelve and tells his parents to let
him do his own thing (Yes!). Jesus finds respect and affection
outside the family circle: with the elders, with the leaders of
the Jewish religion, not just in Nazareth, but in Jerusalem, the
Temple itself. I identified there as well.
But now, I have grown up. My vantage point has changed.
Now I read this story, not in identification with Jesus, the
adolescent wizard in the law, but rather with Mary and Joseph,
the distraught parents who search frantically for their son, who
are desperate to know where he is, and who, upon finding him, are
more angry than understanding. In other words, to paraphrase the
Apostle Paul, when I was a child I read this text like a child,
and now that I am a father, I read it like a dad.
Just a few days ago, we retold the story of Jesus' birth.
The shepherds arrived. The angels sang. But the shepherds go
away a mere twenty verses into chapter two of the Gospel of Luke.
In the thirty-two verses that remain, Luke gives us a brief
snapshot of Jesus' naming at eight days and then a mini-narrative
about Jesus' presentation at the temple when he was four weeks
old. But then suddenly the gospel video is put on fast forward,
and the "baby" is twelve years old, going to Jerusalem once more
with his family. What happened between four weeks and twelve
years? We do not know.
There is a lot we do not know about Jesus' life. We do not
know if Jesus had colic or diaper rash, if he walked on time or
got his teeth on schedule. We know nothing of his first words or
how old he was when he learned to read and write. We do not know
if he liked spinach or remembered to brush his teeth without
being told. There is a lot we do not know about Jesus' life,
because it was not Luke's intention to write a biography. Luke's
purpose is not to give us a graphic description of Jesus'
childhood, but rather to tell us that, even in childhood, Jesus
was the Christ. This story is told not to provide information
about human events but to allow Luke to add another literary
stone to his gospel mosaic which proclaimed to the early church -
and still proclaims to us today - that Jesus Christ was Lord - is
Lord - and always will be Lord, Messiah, the Christ, Immanuel,
God in our very midst. "For unto us a child is born...a son is
given..."
Given first to Mary and Joseph, of course. And here we see
them both struggling with the downside of being central
characters in the Christmas pageant. They are having to deal
with the consequences of being the ones chosen to parent the
Christ, to pioneer for us all the problem of living with a
personal God. You would think, after all that happened earlier
in the story, that Mary and Joseph would not be surprised by much
of anything. But, in fact, Mary and Joseph are surprised. It is
as though none of that earlier stuff - the shepherds, the angels,
the wise men - had ever happened. To them, Jesus is not much
different from the other boys growing up in Nazareth. And they
panic.
Most parents reach a panic point much earlier, usually right
after arriving home from the hospital when, surrounded by gifts
and instruction booklets, they look at their screaming infant,
throw up their hands in terror, and say, "Now what?" For, as
most of us who have been through it realize, having the baby is
just the beginning. What really counts is the next twenty or
thirty years. In a similar way, the real question of Christmas
is not, "How are we going to celebrate the birth?" but rather,
"How are we going to live with Immanuel...God with us?"
As you scholars know, for the first several hundred years of
church history, the church did not have any special celebrations
to commemorate the birth of Jesus at all. We noted the feast day
of the Annunciation on March 25th each year, and it was only by
adding nine months to that that we came up with a December 25th
date for Jesus' birth. The arrival itself was not that big a
deal - only two of the four gospels even bother to mention it.
Could there be a message in that for us? Perhaps it is this -
dealing with a newly-arrived infant is easy: just a few ooh's and
ahh's and an occasional coo-chee-coo, that is all. But as time
goes on, there is so much more. In this case, after the
decorations are put away and the tinsel of Christmas is behind
us, we are faced with the real question with which the church has
wrestled since the beginning: what do we do now that we have
proclaimed that God is living in our very midst? Now what? It
is not easy.
Look again at how Mary handles it. Her son is missing.
They are a day's journey from Jerusalem and turn back and search
the capitol for him. After three days, they find him, sitting
among the elders in the Temple with not a care in the world.
Mary explodes. She does not understand. She does not understand
why he did not go back to Nazareth with the family. She does not
understand why he returned to the Temple. She does not
understand why he did not at least tell them his plans. She does
not understand why he seems so bright, so wise, so full of
understanding beyond his years, but at the same time, oblivious
to the concerns of his parents. And she lets him have it.
"Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and
I have been searching for you in great anxiety."
She is a distraught woman, a terrified mom whose twelve-year-old son has been missing for several days. Moreover, Mary
is a distraught Jewish mother whose son has learned well that one
of the commandments is, "Honor your father and your mother," and
she has no explanation for this behavior. And she explodes, in
anger, just as you or I might do. "Why have you done this? Why
did you do this to me? Your father and I are worried about you."
Mary has totally lost it. She is hysterical, and she wants an
explanation, NOW.
Jesus replies, calmly, coolly, on a completely different
level, without even a lame excuse about meaning to tell them or
forgetting to let them know. "Why were you searching for me?" he
asks. "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"
("Don't you understand? Come on, Mom, surely you have not
forgotten all those prophecies and angel choirs.")
For Jesus, it is a matter of priority. To be more specific,
it is a matter of vocation.
- "...I MUST," says Jesus, "be in my Father's house." "I MUST
be about the work my Father has given me to do."
- "I MUST," he says again in chapter four, "preach, the good
news of the kingdom of God...for I was sent for this
purpose."
- "The Son of Man MUST," he says in chapter nine, "suffer many
things...be killed...and on the third day be raised."
- "Behold," he says in chapter thirteen, "I cast out demons
and perform cures today and tomorrow and the third day MUST
finish my course..."
Jesus was born to a task, yes, even conceived to a task,
says Luke, and here he acknowledges it himself for the first
time: in Jerusalem, in the Temple, at Passover, in the same place
and at the same time of the year that his ministry ends - on a
cross, which he came to bear, a cross on which he came to die.
But, says Luke, Jesus' parents, Mary and Joseph, humble folk
of Nazareth, pious Jews, good people of their day, "did not
understand what he said to them." They are good people. They
have tried hard. But the Son of God is in their midst, living in
their very home, and they just do not understand.
Perhaps this is why Christmas has become such a huge
celebration in the church in our day. It is easy to listen to
angel choirs. When it comes right down to it, despite the
acknowledged pain of the mother, it is not that difficult to give
birth, even in less than ideal conditions with shepherds and
exotic foreigners trooping in to see the baby. Bringing the Son
of God to life is simple. But that is just the beginning. It
gets tougher as the days and years go on.
And that is probably why Luke put this story at the end of
his introductory two chapters. For he writes not to share the
details of a family crisis or to show us how Mary and Joseph
handle the conflicts of life with a precocious pre-adolescent.
Rather, he writes to share with the church, believers from the
earliest times right down to the present, the notion that
understanding Jesus is not easy. Not for Mary and Joseph. Not
for anyone. Several times during his ministry, Jesus predicts
that he will be rejected, betrayed, and given over to die. Over
and over he tries to get his disciples to understand. But they
never understand.
And neither do we. We prefer the glitz and the glitter, the
ooh's and the ahh's, of Christmas, and would just as soon avoid
the hard questions of these Sundays after, the questions with
which we would rather not deal. What do we do now that we have
proclaimed, "Unto us a child is born...a son is given"...God is
living with us?
What do we do as we see him spending so much of his time
with hookers, thieves, lepers, outcasts, those on the margins of
society instead of with good religious folk, the people like you
and me? What do we do with a Messiah who is so intensely
political (remember this "king of the Jews" designation that got
Herod to murdering Bethlehem's baby boys, (3) and later all this
"kingdom" talk while walking around in the middle of someone
else's kingdom that eventually got Jesus killed) when we who
follow along at a distance would prefer to keep politics and
religion separate? What do we, who live in a society that
teaches that the one who dies with the most toys wins, do with
all Jesus' talk about the problems inherent with money and
possessions? Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas. Now what?
Somewhere or other I read of a sign a merchant placed in his
store window at this season of the year: "Put the X back in
Xmas." I do not know whether he was a cynic or a theologian. I
prefer the latter to the former because the message then becomes,
"In the midst of all the happiness and joy surrounding the
blessed birth, with all the tinsel and trappings, remember that
this is only the beginning of the story; remember the "X,"
remember the "cross."
When we leave Mary and Joseph at the end of chapter two, we
parents sympathize with their adventure that has sounded like an
early script for "Home Alone." They do not understand
everything, but, to their credit, they hang in. They ponder.
They do not comprehend what their son is doing, but they do not
give up. They do not know what to expect, but they do know that
whatever happens, it will be the Father's business that their son
is about. And, we are told, Jesus goes home to Nazareth. He
hangs in too. It is the first of many gracious acts of hanging
in with people who do not have a clue, who simply do not
understand. The rest of the Gospel of Luke is full of these
stories. The history of the church is full of these stories.
And when we sit around and talk honestly about it, we find that
we are full of these stories too. "For unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given..." Okee dokee. Now what?
Well, for starters, we shout it out, that's what. Have you
ever come across a family into which a new baby has come who kept
quiet about it? Of course not. This news is for sharing. Then
let US tell the world: "Unto us a child is born" - Jesus Christ -
and he is living with us now (no, we do not always understand
him, but we keep on hanging in, as best we can, because we WILL
get better at it). He is HERE, hanging in with us, and, World,
we would love to have you hanging with us as well. "Go, tell it
on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is HERE."
Amen!
1. Some of this message is inspired and informed by Bobbi Wells Hargleroad, First United
Church of Oak Park, Oak Park, IL, "Living with the Incarnation," Journal for Preachers, Advent,
1994, pp. 25-28
2. Hebrews 4:12
3. Matthew 2:16-18
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