Luke 2:41-52
Christmas Loyalties
James Sledge December
30, 2018
Some
of you may have heard this story before, but with today’s gospel reading, I
couldn’t resist telling it again. I once lost one of my daughters in a drug
store. She was four or five years old and standing right there next to me as I
looked for some item. But when I looked away from the store shelf to where she
had been seconds before, she was gone. I called her name and quickly looked on
the adjoining aisles. My panic growing, I traversed the store multiple times,
looking down every aisle over and over without finding her. As the minutes wore
on, I experienced a feeling of sheer terror.
In
desperation, I finally left the store and ran down the grocery store where we
had planned to go next. Hoping against hope I ran to the bakery section of the Harris
Teeter, where they handed out free cookies to children. And sure enough, there
she was, getting her free cookie. She had simply decided that she would go there
on her own. Never mind that it was not next to the drug store but at the other
end of a strip mall.
If
any of you have a had a similar experience, you know how frightening it feels.
My terror last but a few minutes, though it seemed much longer. I can scarcely
imaging how Mary and Joseph must have felt. According to Luke, they searched
for Jesus for three days, retracing their steps to Jerusalem and hunting all
over the city before finally finding him.
It
sometimes surprises people to learn that this is the only story in the Bible
about Jesus as a child. Jesus does come from a humble background, and so makes
some sense that little would be know about his early days. Still, stories about
great heroes typically include some from childhood, episodes that point to
their greatness to come.
I
don’t know that it’s taught in school any longer – we live in a more cynical
time – but when I was in elementary school I learned the story of George
Washington chopping down the cherry tree. Asked if he was the culprit he
proclaimed, “I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” In all
likelihood the event never happened, but that is beside the point. The story’s
main purpose is to illuminate something about the character of the man, to
demonstrate that his greatness was rooted in a deep, personal virtuousness.
Abraham
Lincoln has his own childhood stories that give clues as to the man he will
become. For that matter, there are stories about the young emperor Augustus,
who ruled when Jesus was born, that point to the great leader he would become.
Augustus achieved great learning at a very young age, and, in a story that was
likely known by the first readers of Luke’s gospel, Augustus gave the funeral
oration for his grandmother Julia Caesaris, sister of Julius Caesar, at the age
of twelve.[1]
Luke,
writing his gospel for Gentile Christians, seems eager to present Jesus as
greater than Augustus, filled with remarkable learning despite not having any
of the instruction and education that the emperor-to-be had received. Jesus
wasn’t simply groomed to be a great ruler. He was born for the role, part of
God’s unfolding saga of salvation.
But that is only part of our gospel this
morning. Luke could easily have told the story of a miraculously precocious
Jesus without the part about Jesus disappearing on his parents. Jesus could
have wowed them at the Temple while the family was there for Passover. This
part of the story is about something else altogether.
