Traditional Gospel: Luke 2:41-52
“What did he know and when did he know it?” When scandal breaks in Washington, that is the question journalists and investigators ask as they try to determine guilt. It’s also an important question for Christology, i.e., for what we can say about Christ. Who is Jesus, really? What did He know and when did He know it?
Today we have the only recorded event between the birth of Jesus and the beginning of His public ministry more than thirty years later. At the age of twelve, Jesus goes with Joseph and Mary to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. Every pious family kept this feast in Jerusalem if at all possible. And when the holy days were over, the people of Nazareth began the trek back home as a group. They would not necessarily walk together as a family, but as you might imagine, the men would talk with each other along the road, and likewise the women, while the children ran and played together. At the end of the first day’s journey, Joseph and Mary begin searching for Jesus among their extended family and neighbors. Then comes every parent’s nightmare: He is nowhere to be found. It’s not until the third day that they find Him, in the Jerusalem Temple, in the midst of a theological discussion with the most learned doctors of the Law.
Joy at finding Jesus turned to rebuke, as the woman who conceived this Child while yet a virgin says to Him, “Your father and I have sought you anxiously.” And the first recorded words of our Lord Jesus gently correct His blessed mother: “Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?”
In other words, God – not Joseph – is the true Father of Jesus. Mark this well, dear Christians: Jesus is, as we confess in the Creed, very God of very God, i.e., true God in the flesh. He is the One and only God-man. And He does not become the God-man at the resurrection, or at the crucifixion, or at the transfiguration, or at His Baptism when the Holy Spirit descended on Him and the Father’s voice came from heaven declaring Jesus to be His beloved Son. Jesus does not become true God here at the age of twelve, or when the Wise Men visit, or when He is born in Bethlehem. The Child conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the embryo growing in her womb, was already true God in human flesh.
Why does this matter? Because your redemption depends on it. Your salvation from death, your deliverance from hell, the forgiveness of your sins, your life in the kingdom of God all rests on this, that God became man for you and redeemed your fallen human nature.
But Jesus doesn’t just coast through life with every advantage that being God would have. We treat our sports heroes practically as gods, but imagine if it truly were God in the flesh playing quarterback, and using His attributes of omniscience and omnipotence in a game. In every aspect of life, how easy it all would be! But instead, in every aspect of human life, Christ sets aside the exercise of the divine majesty for His own benefit. Although He was from eternity truly and by nature God, nevertheless Jesus lived as a man, learned as a man, suffered as a man, hungered as a man, felt pain and loss as a man. And not just as any man, but He suffered humiliation and mockery, was betrayed by His disciple, abandoned by His friends, executed among the worst kind of criminals.
All this, for you. So He can truly sympathize with all your weakness, all your problems, all your fears, all your losses. And what is more, so He could truly redeem them and renew our race, as a man. God the Son assumed our human nature so that He could become the Man man was created to be.
God made the first man in His image and likeness; falling into sin, that image was marred and defaced. Every man since then has been a mere shadow of humanity. By the sin he was born with and the sins he committed, every man has by nature moved further from God’s intention for humanity: to live in self-giving love.
So God the Son Himself took on our humanity, assuming the human nature into His person. He passes through every stage of our existence (Kromayer/Pieper), repairing, remedying, perfecting who we are, what we have been, how we have failed. He knows your depression, your family problems, your death.
Back to the original question, then: What did Jesus know, and when did He know it? This story of the twelve year-old Jesus lingering at the temple doesn’t reveal just a child profoundly interested in religion, a wunderkind who amazes adults with his aptitude for understanding. It is the account of God the Son in the twelfth year of His assumption of the human nature. He astounds the teachers of the Law because He is the Author of the Law. What did He know and when did He know it? Jesus at 12 understands His mission: to be about the things of His Father.
Jesus is walking the path of obedience: subject to His mother and Joseph, fulfilling the Fourth Commandment for us; subject to the Law of the Passover, fulfilling the ceremonial laws for us; but most of all, radically submissive to the will of the First Person of the Trinity, God the Father. “I must be about My Father’s business.” In lingering at the temple, Jesus lives out the Psalm the way no person ever had: “Lord, I love the habitation of Thy house, and the place where Thy glory dwells.” Finally, Jesus will be obedient “unto death, even death on a cross” (Ph. 2.8).
These things His blessed mother does not yet understand; just as there are many things we do not fully understand. But the mother of Jesus, most blessed of all women, is a model for us in that, even when she doesn’t understand the words and deeds of Jesus, she treasures them up in her heart and ponders on them. Today, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, is given to us to marvel at, ponder, and treasure up this truth in our hearts: God the Son was made man to do for us everything the Law required, to rescue us from death, to free us from our sins. This He did not just in a singular moment on the cross, but in an entire life lived in obedience to His Father, from childhood, all for our sakes. Keep these things in your heart, and rejoice at how Christ humbled Himself all for your benefit.
