We may want to make the story of the Holy Family pretty or picture perfect, but we should know better, Jesus is too real for any of that. He’s not having any of it. God from God, Light from Light, Jesus is at the same time fully human, like us in all things but sin- which is to say quite a lot. He has come to embrace the full reality of our human awkwardness and ambiguity. And as we heard today, his life with Joseph and Mary was not without its incongruities. The key, I suspect, is the closing phrase: “Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.” My sisters and brothers, we see Jesus this morning advancing, a Work of divine beauty in progress; Jesus at the bewildering, frustrating, age of twelve; he is growing up.
And like any twelve-year-old, totally absorbed in a new interest, a new friend, a project that seems to eclipse all other obligations, Jesus’ surprised response to his mother seems unnerving. “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know?” “The finding of Jesus in the temple is, in fact, the only event that breaks the silence of the Gospels about the hidden years of Jesus. Here Jesus lets us catch a glimpse of the mystery of his total consecration to a mission that flows from his divine sonship.” We glimpse Jesus’ emerging self-understanding; we watch as he discovers that he’s as much at home in the temple, his heavenly Father’s house, as he is at his home in Nazareth. And he expects Mary and Joseph to get it. Holding everything in her heart, Mary ponders, she wonders at the Mystery, as all of us are called to do. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s work?” Mary and Joseph do not understand these words, but they accept them in faith and love for him. And Jesus returns with Mary and Joseph, he goes down to Nazareth to be hidden in the silence of an ordinary life.
Luke recounts this incident from Jesus’ preadolescence through the lens of the final events of his life. This story of Jesus at the unfinished age of twelve is understood by Luke in the light of his faith in and experience of his resurrection. And which one of us can hear the words, “Passover,” “go up to Jerusalem” or “after three days” and not recall the life-giving events of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection? There are echoes all through today’s Gospel.
As our story begins, Jesus, Mary and Joseph dutifully go up to Jerusalem for the annual celebration of the Passover, just as Jesus will do twenty or so years later on the eve of his passion. Then Jesus is lost, everyone thinks he’s with someone else. For Luke lostness is equated with death. We recall that in the story of the lost son the joyful father will exclaim, “My son was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and is found.” This sounds like what Mary and Joseph must have been feeling felt, doesn’t it?
And like the women at the empty tomb, on the third day Mary and Joseph find the one they love. And Mary laments, “Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” Jesus’ words, “Why were you looking for me?” seem to echo the angel’s words to the heart-broken, myrrh-bearing women who will come to the tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
“But they did not understand what he said to them.” They are understandably slow to grasp what angels had told each of them about this Child before his birth. And perhaps we hear an echo of the Emmaus story; at the end of Luke’s gospel. Those two despondent disciples on their way and Jesus’ gentle reproach, “How slow you are to believe all that has been announced to you.”
By the end of the Gospel, Jesus will return to a hidden, ordinary life Nazareth in loving obedience. A life with more contradictions and tragic misunderstandings to come. This morning at the age of twelve we see him becoming more himself, more obedient, more dutiful in obedience to earthly parents as well as to his heavenly Father. This will eventually bring him face to face with the cross. Obedient unto death, he will be exalted by the Father. This resurrection assures him and us of the Father’s constant love and attention.
Mary and Joseph, as disciples, like any of us who pray and love the Lord Jesus, are being drawn more deeply into the mystery of what relationship with Jesus involves, learning how to allow the Mystery of who he is to infuse their lives. God in Christ is very near, hidden in our hearts, more intimate to each one of us than we are to ourselves, even as he remains completely Other. This is the reality of Jesus truly human, truly divine; totally familiar, totally Other; accessible and always exhilaratingly, frustratingly beyond.
Perhaps like Mary, we are haunted by Jesus’ question, “Why were you looking for me?” Why? Why not? How could we not? Mary’s search is our own; and with her we might well respond, “To whom else should we go? You are our Home, our Refuge and Consolation, the only One who can help us make sense of things- to understand that contradictions and confusion are gateways to grace. We have come here to look for you incessantly, to seek you constantly with great desire. Come close for we are slow to understand who you are, stay with us, come home with us, abide with us always.” His response is always the same, “Come then, come to the table that I may feed you with myself.”
As we prepare to journey to Jerusalem with the Holy Family this morning, let us recall our need for the Mercy who accompanied Mary and Joseph in their traveling caravan, the Mercy who is always here with us.
