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December 28, 2003
Jesus Became a Toddler Too
Jesus Became a Toddler Too
Psalm 98 / I Samuel 1: 10-24
Luke 2: 21-40
December 28th, 2003
Three days ago we celebrated Jesus’ birth. I propose this morning we remember that Jesus became a toddler too. Why? You’re wondering.
We pass so quickly from Jesus’ birth to His life as an adult. The story of Jesus is like the story of Samuel, who springs from being a little boy into a prophet. Why does the Bible hide the childhood and young adult years of its important people?
The Gospels tell us very little about Jesus’ childhood. Jesus was taken to the Temple when He was eight days old to be circumcised and given His name. The law of the Jews required this. In the Temple Mary and Joseph met an old man, Simeon, and an old lady, Anna, who recognized that this little baby boy was “the Lord’s Christ” or Messiah, and “the redemption of Jerusalem.”
What greatness already hovers over little Jesus. A favorite Christmas carol has us sing “no crying He makes” in the manger scene in Bethlehem. Why not? Every baby cries. It’s good for the lungs. It gets the arms and legs moving—good exercise. But not the baby Jesus, the carol has us sing. Maybe no crying in the Temple either—unlike our grandson at his baptism, when he set up a furious howl.
Then we read of a moment when Jesus was twelve years old. His family went from Nazareth to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. When the celebrations were over Mary, and Joseph headed back home. They looked around. “Where’s Jesus? No Jesus to be found. In a panic they went back to Jerusalem. Where was He? What responsibility they had to protect this Son whose life had greatness written all over it! For a moment it seems as though Jesus is like most kids on the cusp of becoming a teenager!
Not so, Luke tells us. This moment of tension in Jesus’ earthly family life illustrates that it was His heavenly Father who was really important. Mary scolds Jesus, “Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.”
Jesus’ reply sets things straight. “Wrong Father, mother.” Why were you looking for me? Did you not know?” or as the wonderful old King James Version puts it, “Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?” Mary and Joseph mistakenly “wisted” that Jesus’ life was more ordinary than that. He should have been the kind of twelve year old who sticks with mom and dad in a crowd so he wouldn’t get lost and so they wouldn’t worry.
But when you and I read this, does it seem that Jesus was very much like most twelve year olds? Take away the answer Jesus gave to Mary’s question and He seems like most of us were at that age. Budding teenagers have their own agendas. In the terrible twos we discovered the words “me” and “no.” In the terrible teens those two words grow up, and grow horns. We parents joke about how hard it is to have teen-agers. Teenagers joke about how hard it is to have parents. Jesus turned twelve too.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews it seems that the picture of Jesus gets set straight. There we read “he had to be made like his brethren in every respect.” Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every respect as we are.” Don’t idealize Jesus’ testing, as though it was always like when He went into the desert for forty days at the start of His ministry, to be tempted by the devil.
What stages of life are more of a test to a child than when he is learning to walk, learning the meaning of “no,” and to move beyond howls to words? Then when junior hits twelve years old, the seams of life seem ready to burst. Conflicts of will between parents and children are daily, sometimes it seems, hourly events. Jesus was tested in every respect as we are.
Hebrews impresses this on us still more forcefully. It tells us that Jesus, the pioneer of our salvation, was made “perfect through suffering.” I don’t think this means only the suffering of the cross. I don’t think this means only the kinds of suffering that resulted from bad people responding to him badly. I think we are to understand that Jesus’ life was hard like the your life sometimes, and mine.
Somehow, Jesus came to all those little moments of testing—the temptation to tell a lie to get out of a jam, the temptation to get mad and take a swing at someone in the school yard, the temptation to sass mom and dad—without actually telling a lie, or punching a classmate, or talking back to His parents. That is, the tense moments came and Jesus too faced two choices.
I wonder, was Jesus tested by discouragement or self-doubt? Did he think as most of us have that he didn’t look very good? What one of us as a teenager doesn’t think we’re ugly? The moments of Jesus’ life were filled with the same tensions that our moments are.
In the Gospel song we sing, “Jesus knows our every weakness, take it to the Lord in prayer.” How did He know our every weakness? How? By watching us? No, Jesus had lab training. He went through the lab of life.
It feels scandalous to think of Jesus being tested as we are tested. How careful our Christian ancestors were in making sure we kept straight that Jesus was God made flesh. How hard it is to imagine God-made-flesh really being tempted! But there’s another angle to this.
Testing stretches us to see how we will handle the sacredness of life. You idealize Jesus’ life, because He was God-made-flesh but have you accepted the sacredness of your life? We ponder what God gave us in Jesus, that perfect God-man. But have you pondered what God gave in creating you?
Then, think more broadly still about testing. Think of the identity crises you have gone through. Why do I exist at all? What shall I do with my life? Maybe you weren’t a great student, growing up in a town that idealizes great students. You postpone the decision what to do with your life by going to college. But then you graduate and must decide. Few people end up doing what they thought they would do early on. Many people have no idea what to do. Facing the unknown can be fearful. As a young man, what fears did He have about His future? Jesus at one point admitted that he did not know the future. I wonder if Jesus’ sense of mission in life suddenly clarified after His baptism when the Holy Spirit came on Him.
Our greatest questions go well beyond career decisions. You wonder as you date someone if this is the one to share your life. How can you know? How can you see ahead to know what this person will be like in the very ordinary life of the home, after the romantic feelings of courtship have been tested as the promises people make at weddings summarize—“for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—until we are parted by death.”
Jesus didn’t face the question of whom to marry (or did he? Maybe he did and realized he could not marry.) He faced all the same kinds of questions you and I face. This lets us know two things, first, that Jesus understands, and second, that it is pertinent to ask, “What would Jesus do?” You and I find guidance from the answers that come to that question.
But there is still more to recognizing that Jesus became a toddler too. Paul writes that God’s plan was to unite all things in Jesus. All things? What does that mean? And what does Jesus’ becoming a toddler have to do with that?
A second century Church father from France proposed that it means that Jesus became what we are in order that we might become what He is. What we lost in Adam’s fall, we regained in Jesus’ obedience to the Father. In fact, Jesus went through all the stages of life, from birth to death, in order to recover every stage of life. He became the Pioneer of our salvation. He led the way.
Jesus went through all the stages of life, and then took on Himself all the guilt of all the sins we have made in the various stages of life. When we trust in Him, God already sees us as though we are like Jesus. The purpose of life then, for you and me, is to live out our gratitude. Following Jesus is not a tedious task of trying to be perfect, but a process of saying Thank you to God.
But there is a second larger pertinence to Jesus becoming as we are—that is, really here. This larger pertinence is that with Jesus really present, He uses His Divine power to holds all things together. Jesus keeps the world from spinning out of control.
Do you wonder, as I do, what keeps the world from simply exploding? With all the nuclear arsenals, and biological weapons to contaminate the world’s water and air, and with all the hate and mistrust, what holds things together? Jesus holds things together. “Though the wrong seem oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.” Jesus holds the reins of history so that no Alexander the Great, or Emperor Augustus, or Attila the Hun, or Adolph Hitler conquers the whole world. Somehow Jesus, the Son of God, even causes earthquakes in Iran, or hurricanes in Bangladesh, or mudslides in California, or tornadoes in Indiana to have good long-range effects.
At the moment, if we are at the center of a disaster, it hardly seems so. But there is a picture far bigger than you and I can see. Again I borrow from the Apostle Paul’s clear view of this, “Our lives are hid with Christ in God.” “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.” Nothing. “In Him all things hold together.” All things. All things! God is not limited by my inability to understand. That’s why it is wise to trust God.
God not only created everything. God experienced personally our life. So God understands. You can trust God with your life. You say, “I’m just a child and feel life is pretty scary outside my home.” Jesus was a child and so He understands what you’re going through. You say, “I’ve got to choose what I’m going to do with my life, and I’m frightened.” Jesus says, “I was a young person too.” You say, “My name is Schmidt, and I’m nearing the end of my career, and I’m afraid.” Jesus says, “I came to the end of my career. Follow me.” You say, “I see that life is nearing the end, and I am afraid of declining health.” Jesus says, “I suffered death before you. Trust me.”
You say, “The world is falling apart at the seams: war, earthquakes, brutal dictators, dreadful diseases, unspeakable poverty, terrible injustice. Jesus says, “I hold everything together. Nothing, absolutely nothing can separate you from the love of God that I have in measureless supply.”
Next Thursday it will be 2004. 1984 was twenty years ago. We made it past that fearful year. What will the new year bring? For you? For your little ones? For America? For the world? We don’t know. But Jesus knows in detail the stuff of life, and of this world, and we may safely trust Him for the unknown tomorrows.
Not only this. But Jesus is moving life along to a happy end. People will become like Him. The world will become again as God intends. This is our hope. This is our trust, our confidence in God.
Let us pray: O God, our Father, thank you for sending your Son to be born a holy child in the tiny town of Bethlehem. Thank you that he not only died for us, to save us from our sins, but lived for us, that we may follow him. Help us to do this, thankfully, trusting he will show the way. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at December 28, 2003 09:30 AM