The Second Sunday after Christmas (January 2, 2004)
Luke 2:41-52
Every year his parents used to go to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up for the feast as usual. When the days of the feast were over and they set off home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem without his parents knowing it. They assumed he was somewhere in the party, and it was only after a day’s journey that they went to look for him among their relations and acquaintances. When they failed to find him they went back to Jerusalem looking for him everywhere. It happened that, three days later, they found him in the Temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them, and asking them questions; and all those who heard him were astounded at his intelligence and his replies. They were overcome when they saw him, and his mother said to him, ‘My child, why have you done this to us? See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you.’ He replied, ‘Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ But they did not understand what he meant. He went down with them then and came to Nazareth and lived under their authority. His mother stored up all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people. -- The New Jerusalem Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1995, c1985
A Study
As scholars point out to us repetitively, the Gospels are not history, and they are not even that similar to the lives that the Greeks were so fond of writing. Absent Josephus and a few others, there would be hardly any history at all of Palestine during the early first century.
But this charming story remains, canonically only in the gospel attributed to Luke. Writing principally for Greeks, Luke's writers needed to show that Jesus, even as a boy, understood that His Father was YHWH, while his mother's husband was Joseph. It is probably not wise for us to think of him actually interacting with the Sanhedrin, meeting on the tails of the Passover, but rather as being fully engaged as a student of their wise discussions.
A Reflection
Once again, within the space of two chapters, we experience tantalizing disconnects within the same gospel story. In this Luke story we have the Annunciation, the Magnificat, the visit of the shepherds, the prophecy of Simeon in the Nunc Dimittis, the prophecy of Anna ... and now we are told "they did not understand what he meant" in talking about being in "his Father's house"?
Any rookie screenwriter in Hollywood would either get fired or need a very righteous reason for introducing such a plot twist!
Those who ascribe multiple writers, editors, redactors, and "improvers" to the gospel story make the straightforward assertion that in the Eastern tradition, it was quite common to gather up all the notes and marginal glosses into a text when copying it; what some revere today as The Gospel of St. Luke might be the result.
Others might think that this couple were dimwits: she who had been visited by an angel and pronounced Magnificat, and her husband who had been visited by an angel and accepted a pregnant virgin to be his wife. They had just "forgotten."
Others have other theories. There's no rational explanation for a left-brained fellow like me. I accept that the story could be true, but don't believe that my salvation depends on it. What should we do with these non-continuous accounts?
Perhaps we should accept them into our hearts, as Mary did, and ponder them.
The Collect
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
2:35:39 PM 
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