In His Father’s House

Luke 2:41 – 52

 

If someone would have told me that being a kid/teenager living under my dad’s roof would’ve been some of the least stressful days of my life, I would’ve told them to stop lying. And I would’ve been the one who was wrong. Living with my dad, especially as a teenager, was no walk in the park, for sure.

 

When I was a baby, I’m told my dad was super protective, heaven forbid a light breeze touched me. But as boy and a teenager, it was a different story. As I grew up, we butted heads like two mountain rams in the alps. The problem was, by age 12 I had my own opinions and will, and they often differed from his. But living in his house, all I really had to do was go to school and go to work on our own farm.

 

I didn’t have to worry about bills, about putting food on the table, clothes on my back, or anyone else’s, I didn’t have to worry about getting fired (working on your family’s farm does come with job security if you don’t mind the slave-like conditions), or any of the other stressors in my adult life today. All I had to do was honor my father by being obedient to him. It seems impossible when we’re kids ourselves, ha-ha.

 

The other thing about where, and with whom, you grow up is that it informs your identity. There’s an awful lot about my personality, for better or worse, that is a product of having been raised in my father’s house.

 

Time spent with him was very influential, as it should be when a father is present in their child’s life. Even though there were many bad experiences with my dad, there were good ones that I’ve come to appreciate after becoming a father myself, and losing him.

 

I think most of us enjoy hearing the childhood stories of other people, people we know and famous people alike. We like to know what people were like as kids, what influenced their upbringing and impacted their character today. The same can be said about the childhood of Jesus Christ. There is very little information about His life from soon after His birth until he began His ministry at around 30 years old.

 

There’s been such an interest in Jesus’ upbringing that there were other gospels written, that were not the Word of God, but that were attempts at telling stories about His childhood that were not actually authentic. But today’s passage, however, is the only Scripture that is about Jesus’ childhood. Let’s read God’s Word together, Luke 2:41 – 52.

 

Continuing to model obedience to God in their lives, every year Jesus’ parents went up to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. According to Deuteronomy 16:16, the Feast of Unleavened Bread was one of three annual festivals that Jewish men were required to celebrate in Jerusalem every year.

 

By the time of Jesus, the entire feast came to be called the Feast of Passover, because Passover was the opening feast of the weeklong festival. A Portuguese festa doesn’t even hold a candle to what this Jewish feast must have been like.

 

We last saw Jesus and His family after they had presented Him to the Lord and conducted Mary’s purification rites at the temple. Now, Jesus was 12 years old, and like His family had done every year, they all went up to Jerusalem for the festival, according to custom. Once the week was over and the feast ended, they set out to return home to Nazareth.

 

But their caravan was one member short. The boy Jesus had stayed behind in Jerusalem, and no one, not even his parents, had noticed. The annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem was not the whole family piled into the car for a family vacation like the Griswold’s, and it wasn’t like the 12 or so McCalister’s in Home Alone leaving Macaulay Culkin’s character behind.

 

These caravans would get rather large as people from the same town and region came together to make the trek easier by sharing the burden and certainly safer. Jesus being twelve, He was likely trusted enough to look after himself and walk with the other boys in the group, so that Mary and Joseph didn’t have him glued to their hips.

 

They should’ve put a monkey backpack with a leash on Him because after the first day’s journey ended and they made camp they realized Jesus wasn’t there. They looked among their relatives and other acquaintances they met on the journey, and still no one could find Him. So the next morning they headed back to Jerusalem, looking for Him along the way and in the city once they got there.

I had a penchant for getting lost as little kid. I was younger than Jesus was in this story, I was like 5 or 6, but not once but twice did I get lost inside of Mervyn’s in Turlock. Anybody remember Mervyn’s? It’s a Walmart Neighborhood Market now. Anyway, on two occasions I caused my mom great panic inside Mervyn’s, once I got away and was hanging out by one of the entry doors, and the other time I went and hid inside a clothing rack.

 

But perhaps the time that really caused a stir was when my mom couldn’t find me at home on the dairy. She had come back from visiting the wife of one of our employees, they lived on our dairy, and she saw my little rubber boots at the door but I was nowhere to be found. She called out and searched the house, but couldn’t find me. She had the other employee wives out searching for me all over the farm too, to no avail.

 

A lot can go wrong on a farm, so I can understand the panic, but I sure didn’t get it as a kid. Eventually my mom checked the house again, and this time she found me. I had gone into my sister’s room, crawled under her bed, and had fallen fast asleep. That’s how my mom found me, sleeping underneath a bed.

 

I can only imagine the panic inside Mary and Joseph at losing Jesus. Can you imagine that conversation? “Honey, how could you lose the Messiah?” “He’s the Son of God, Mary, I thought He could look after Himself!” Really though, when they finally find Jesus, they tell Him that they were in great distress while looking for Him. Seriously though, I know any good parent would be in great distress if they lost their child.

 

After THREE days, they found Jesus. One day travelling away from Jerusalem, one day travelling back to Jerusalem, and then a day searching for Him in the city. That’s too long of a time to be an anxious mess wondering what’s happened to your Son. But the most unexpected thing was happening when they found Him.

 

They found the boy Jesus hanging out in the temple courts. And what was He doing you might ask? He was sitting among the teachers, listening to them and engaging with them, asking them questions, and answering questions Himself, with a wisdom and understanding well beyond His years. So much so that everyone who heard this exchange were amazed.

 

I’ve always had a hard time picturing this scene before. I don’t know exactly what I pictured, but it wasn’t what is actually going on here. Studying to preach this opened my eyes to what was really happening. These Jewish teachers are painted as good men, not in the same negative light we see the Teachers of the Law, the Scribes, and the Pharisees later on in Jesus’ ministry.

 

These guys were the theologians of their day, and they spent their days sitting in the temple having discussions and disputations about their theology, posing deep questions to one another and making arguments either for or against their positions. Deep, theological and philosophical thinking was going on there.

 

And here’s the boy Jesus, just sitting there among them like He’s one of them. At 12 years old, Jesus was nearing the age of officially joining the religious community as a man. At 13 he would have His bar-mitzvah, which means “son of the commandment,” and He would be considered an adult man in the religious community.

 

So He wasn’t quite there yet, but yet He was astonishing everyone with His understanding and answers. He was engaging with these theologians on their level, likely even surpassing them if they were amazed at Him. And He was doing that at 12, before He was expected to join the religious community.

 

I know the boy Jesus was never an ordinary boy, but I just want to say this. I’m not taking a dig at our education system, secular and religious alike, but even in my lifetime I feel like our country’s education standards have just gotten lower and lower. The expectations of our kids today in school are not the same expectations that were had of me, and the expectations of me were not the same as those from generations before me.

 

I saw this picture of an 8^th grade test from 1912 on Facebook. Just look at some of those questions, I can’t even answer some of them! And if you want to go back further in time, you had guys like the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, I learned about him in seminary this past semester, who at 14 years old in the 1200’s began attending university in Italy, at 14!

 

 

Anway, here’s Jesus, listening to Bible scholars discuss Scripture, asking them questions on certain things and then they would ask Jesus questions in turn, and He was answering them with such a deep understanding of Scripture, to the amazement of everyone there. This is the scene that His parents find Him in.

 

This the scene that Mary and Joseph walk into and Mary walks up to Jesus and asks Him, why have you treated us like this? We’ve been terrified that something bad happened to you. And here Scripture gives us Jesus’ first recorded words in all of the Bible at 12 years old.

 

He doesn’t talk back, He isn’t snarky, He’s truly confused as to why they were so anxious. He says to them,” Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” In Jesus’ mind He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’s at home where he belongs. Truly, at 12 He was old enough to know where He’s supposed to be, like His parents expected Him to be in the caravan. Instead, He was where He was supposed to be, in God’s house.

 

What a statement. At 12 years old, Jesus tells His parents within earshot of the Scripture scholars there in Jerusalem, that He is the Son of God. His first recorded words in all of Scripture are Jesus proclaiming that He is the Son of God. Jesus at 12 already knew precisely who He was.

 

And despite Mary and Joseph having been told over and over about who their Son was and what He was going to do, they still didn’t fully get it. Gabriel spoke to them, shepherds came and bowed down to Him, wise men came from the east and worshipped Him, Simeon and Anna spoke of what He was to do for God’s people, and still Mary did NOT know.

 

It had been at least a decade since all of those wonderous things happened surrounding His birth, so perhaps Mary and Joseph can be forgiven for losing sight of who their boy really was. Jesus likely had a very quiet, normal childhood from the magi visiting Him up to this point.

 

But it's almost the same as the apostles spending three years walking with Jesus and doing ministry with Him, and they did not get it, until after His death, burial, and resurrection. It truly is difficult, if not impossible, for the human mind to fully grasp the divine. Even the mother of Christ did not fully grasp the truth, the full truth of her Son.

Long before Jesus began His public ministry, He was aware of His unique relationship to God. Before His birth, Mary’s child was already Lord and God the Son, and here at the age of 12 he demonstrated that He already knew all of that, and that His ultimate allegiance was to the Father.

 

But Jesus understood the assignment, and He remained obedient to His parents, keeping the law of God fully, remaining sinless. Our Scripture here tells us that he went down with them to Nazareth, and was submissive to them. And His mother Mary treasured all these things in her heart. She has been treasuring many things, pondering them, but not yet understanding.

 

Mary certainly began to understand later on. We see in the Gospel of John when she tells Jesus the wedding was out of wine, fully expecting Him to perform a miracle. Later, when you read the Book of Acts, you see that Mary is there in the upper room praying with the apostles and disciples when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, and it comes upon her too. By that point, I imagine everything was starting to make sense.

 

Throughout the rest of Jesus’ life, from here at the temple until He begins his public ministry around the age of 30, Scripture tells us that Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with both God and man.

 

It’s hard to imagine the perfect Son of God needing to grow in wisdom, but the reality of the incarnation is that Christ took on human flesh, with its limitations, including have to grow up like a human. You see, Christ incarnate is fully God, and fully man, and as fully man He had to undergo the human maturation process, which includes growing in size and in wisdom.

 

And as He grew up, He found favor among His fellow men, which is a tremendous contrast to how He is received later when He comes preaching His message of repentance because the kingdom of God is at hand. But more importantly, God the Father found favor in Him.

 

Because Jesus is indeed the Son of God, you can intimately know and confidently root your identity as a child of God in Christ.

 

 

 

At 12, Jesus already knew well who He was. He didn’t have to be told, He knew it and He knew it intimately and confidently. As a believer in Jesus, you can have that same confidence and intimate knowledge of who you are.

 

It took me too long to realize my true identity was found in Christ. I spent the majority of life until the last couple of years, grounding my identity in what I did, and what my dad did. And every time my trajectory changed, cows were sold, career changes, and such, I struggled with an internal identity crisis.

 

Who was I if I wasn’t a dairyman? Who was I if I wasn’t a dairy manager? Who was I if I didn’t work in the dairy industry? Who are you if you’re not a farmer? Who are you if you’re not a teacher? Who are you if you’re not a mechanic? Dusty can tell you all about it because we had a whole lesson in both our men’s Bible study about and our discipleship study about our identities in Christ.

 

I recently had a text conversation with an old coworker of mine from Jerome Idaho. When I told him that I had left the dairy industry and became a pastor he said he could not imagine me never working in dairy because of how well I handled any dairy conversation that came up. I can talk about cows for hours. Now I can talk about cows and God for hours. I told him I fully believe God called me away from that world so that I would look up and find my true identity in Christ Jesus.

 

And I am forever grateful to God for doing that. As a believer in Jesus Christ you too can have that confidence in your identity as a child of God, you can have that same intimate understanding of who God is and who you are in Christ.

 

I want you to take Jesus’ lead from our passage today and study Scripture to grow, to have as deep and intimate understanding of God’s Word as the Holy Spirit makes possible for you. Learning what God reveals about Himself in His Word is a lifelong and worthwhile pursuit. There is no pursuit more important and valuable than this.

 

While God doesn’t live in a church building, I urge you to spend time with fellow believers who can help you grow in your understanding of your identity in Christ because you are the church and God’s Holy Spirit lives in you now.

There is something truly beautiful when believers come together to worship God and be the church. Have deep theological conversations with each other here, and at home, and out and about. We should be helping each other grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Lastly, you can have confidence in your eternal security in Christ, because of who you are as a follower of Christ. You may at times not fully understand Him, sometimes you might forget or ignore who He is or that He’s there, but once God has called you to saving faith in Jesus, you can’t ever lose that, because of who God is and who you are to Him in Christ.

 

Let’s pray.