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January 03, 2010
“A Twelve-Year-Old in the Temple”
I Kings 8: 1-13/Luke 2: 41-52
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Did you notice the similarities in the two Scripture passages this morning? The most obvious thing they have in common is that both have to do with events that took place in the Temple in Jerusalem, although strictly speaking they were different temples.
The passage from I Kings is referring to the original Temple, the Temple built by Solomon around 900 BC. The Passage from Luke records an event that took place in the Temple that had been rebuilt from the ground up when the Jews returned from the Babylon captivity around 500 BC then rebuilt again by Herod the Great in the generation just prior to the birth of Jesus.
The second thing these passages have in common is a little more subtle. Both passages describe God coming into his temple. In the passage from Kings, God is described as moving into the new temple as the Shekinah, the cloud of glory that had led the Israelites in the wilderness 500 years earlier. God’s cloudy presence on the day the Temple was dedicated so overcame the interior spaces of the temple that the priests had to leave it and temporarily stop their work.
The passage from Luke also describes the presence of God in his temple, but on this occasion he was present perhaps in a more physical but also much more subtle way. He was present in his temple in the 12-year-old Jesus.
Subtlety is a good tool to use when you want to reveal something that can otherwise be overwhelming, but the danger of being subtle is that if you overdo it, if you are too subtle, no one picks up on what you are trying to reveal. This is important for Christians to think about because our God is one who often comes to us in subtle ways. He speaks to us through the voices of children as well as through the voices of pastors. He reveals things to us through the major points of his scriptures as well as through some of the details.
The danger of subtlety is seen in this passage from Luke because it doesn’t seem that anyone realized that God was present in his temple that day in the 12-year-old Jesus, not even his parents. They knew that he was the Son of God in a very real way, but they did not seem to know that they actually had almighty God growing up in their house. Everybody else who was in the temple that day seems to have been amazed at the precocious 12 year old in their midst, but no one recognized him as Almighty God.
And that is not the end of the subtleties in this passage. At a first and casual reading this just seems to be a pleasant anecdote about the 12 year old Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem, but there are some lessons for all of us in this passage.
The twelfth year of life was an important year in the life of a Jewish boy. That was the final year of his preparations for his Bar-Mitzvah on his 13th birthday. He would be learning to read the Hebrew Scriptures (remember, Jesus spoke Aramaic and may have known some Greek).
So this visit to the temple may have been the first one on which Jesus was able to articulate his views of the Scriptures since he had studied some of them in the original Hebrew. He had been studying about the Scriptures and the Hebrew faith for some months and now when he visited the temple he could understand the symbolism of the building and the rituals. He could more fully appreciate the significance of the priestly garments.
He seems to have enjoyed himself so much that he forgot to go home. Now this is where some folks have problems because to them it seems as if Jesus is irresponsible or disobedient to his parents which is hard to reconcile with his sinlessness.
But as a father looking back on my active years of parenting, it has occurred to me that I sometimes expected my children to know things that I did not explicitly tell them and that I sometimes expected a level of maturity of them that was unrealistic. So I am inclined to leave the discipline or lack of discipline in Jesus’ family up to Jesus’ family and still maintain that Jesus was without sin.
But, having said that, I must admit that I cringe when I read the words of Mary to Jesus in this passage. She said “Why have you treated us like this?” Now again, I am willing to give Mary a lot of slack because she had been looking for her son for a day or two or three and had spent another day getting back to Jerusalem after she had spent a day headed home. But what I want to say to Mary is “this really is not about you. It is about Jesus.”
I can remember some times when I disciplined my children more out of a sense of my disappointment or anger out of a sense of my being harmed in some way by their behavior than because they had actually done wrong. To those of you who are still raising children or are very much involved in the raising of your grandchildren my advice is try to take your own personal feelings out of the situation. When hear yourself about to say something like Mary’s “Why have you treated us like this?” Take some time and get your anger out of the way long enough to determine if there really is bad or disobedient behavior that has to be dealt with.
By the way, in their defense, Mary and Joseph were not guilty of child neglect in not knowing that Jesus was not with them. The women usually left as a group earlier than the men. The men formed a group and left later, walked faster, and joined the women at the end of the day’s journey. Children traveled with either parent, sometimes in a group with their friends traveling with one of the adult groups.
Now I have some advice for children and young people who might be listening. At the end of this passage we are told that Jesus left the Temple and Jerusalem and went with them to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents. Jesus’ parents were not perfect, but Jesus was. Your parents are not perfect, but you aren’t Jesus, so neither are you. Jesus obeyed and respected his imperfect parents and he expects you to respect and obey yours.
During the last part of this sermon I want to back up and get to some words of Jesus that I think will provide us with some good advice as we face a new year.
When Mary wanted to know why he mistreated her and Joseph and informed him that she and his father had been searching for him in great anxiety, He said “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?”
Jesus was truly surprised that they did not know where he was. He could not imagine that they searched other places for him first. They should have known he would be in His Father’s house or about His Father’s Business. If you look in the King James Version’s translation of this passage you will see “business” instead of House. That is because the Greek word here is ambiguous. If it is to be taken as in the Masculine form it means Place or House, if it is in the Neutral form it means Affairs or Business. I like to think that Luke was guided by the Holy Spirit to use this ambiguous term to guide us. As children of God we are to be about our father’s business and in his house.
Now this church building is not God’s house in exactly the same way that the Temple in Jerusalem was, but on Sunday morning when other Christians are Worshipping here, it is very much God’s house. So during this new year, if you claim to be a child of God, a person who has been adopted into God’s family by the death and resurrection of Jesus, you know where you ought to be each Sunday morning - you should be in God’s house Worshipping Him with his other children.
Some people think that Jesus referred to the temple as His Father’s House because Mary had referred to Joseph as Jesus’ father. Jesus might have been reminding her that God was really his father.
Sometimes we need to remember that about ourselves. God is our Father. After we exercise our responsibility to our parents to obey and honor them, we are still responsible to obey and honor God as our eternal Father.
A new year has begun, but we are still expected to honor God as our Father. We are still expected to be taking care of his business and getting ourselves to his House on Sunday morning.
Pastor David Horner
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 3, 2010 01:49 PM