A Family Vacation – A Milestone Event
When Jesus was about 12 we have a story in Luke Chapter 2 of Him being about the Father’s business. His family did their regular 12-month visit to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter. Wait…What?
Of course, this was before Easter existed. Jesus’ family were coming down to celebrate Passover. At the same time of year, Jesus was hung on the cross. But there are a good few years to go before that happens. but it creates some interesting thoughts. As in do we actually have Luke’s gospel to blame for the Easter eggs coming out immediately after Christmas has finished? You see it’s in this gospel that immediately after the birth of Jesus we have the prelude to Easter called Passover. Please forgive my twisted sense of humour.
Anyway, here we have what is considered by some to be a very strange story. It’s the story of what many consider to be the first recorded time when Jesus was naughty. Or was it?
This text certainly does tell of a milestone event in the life of Jesus and his family, but there is no indication from Jesus’ parents that they thought that he was doing anything he was supposed to be doing.
Even when Jesus explained it to them they were a bit mystified.
Mischievous 12-Year-Old Jesus
So was Jesus misbehaving?
There, of course, lots of people make the case that Jesus was 12 and under Jewish law at 12 almost 13 he would have been through or about to go through his bar mitzvah. The Jewish right of passage of a young male from childhood to manhood. Thus there were now many things that He did not have to defer to His parents over. From Jesus’s perspective, He certainly was not misbehaving. This was one of those things that He did not have to get permission for. There was no doubt in His mind at all that His parents should have known exactly where He was and really, this is not a completely unreasonable expectation.
My Teenage Adventures
I recall, when I was a teenager we would always spend summer down the beach. It was a regular feature of those holidays that we would attend the flicks (my generation’s slang for the movie theatre) at night to catch up on all the movies that we had not been able to see during the year. The advent of the VCR had not arrived, let alone DVD and streaming was not even a twinkle in somebody’s eye. This was often the only way you were ever going to see these movies.
My mother would usually spend this time at home in the tent with friends talking.
One of these evenings, one of her friends commented about me being much later home from the movies than they would have expected. To which my Mother replied that she was pretty sure that I’d made a detour to the local Christian Coffee shop on my way home.
Mum related this to me the next day with some amusement at the astonishment of her friends.
I found it very disturbing that my mother knew me so well.
A Familiar Panic
This is the picture we have here. Mary knew Jesus would be with his cousins and being so confident in this, when the group started to leave she stayed with the crowd, assuming Jesus would do the same because that is what he always did.
As the day wore on, however, as all good mothers would, she decided that it was time to call her own family together and relieve the relatives. Only to discover that no one had seen Jesus. They all had assumed He was with Mary.
Now all parents know this panic. Whilst you start the search, you try desperately to allow reason to be in control. Only to realize that reason does not want to come to the party. You are just going to have to deal with the panic.
For three days his parents looked for Jesus searching every place they had been, hoping that they had not passed Him as they looked and doubling back from time to time in case they had. This would be hard enough on any parent but the prospect of losing the “Saviour”. I don’t think anybody could possibly comprehend the edge that had to have created.
Being About the Father’s Business
Then at last they find Him. Like all good parents, every fibre in their body is torn between tearing Jesus limb from limb and hugging Him till life is just about squeezed from Him. But Mary decided that a frontal attack was the best plan. She confronts Jesus with her best rebuke. Only for His comeback to be perfectly sound.
Don’t you just hate that?
You are all ready for a perfectly good drawing and quartering and bang you get hit with an argument you can’t refute. All prospects of any entertainment at your child’s expense are completely shot down.
How annoying!
Jesus must have detected the confusion in the hearts of His parents because the scriptures say that He was obedient to them thereafter till his time came.
Pondering in The Heart – Being About the Father’s Business
So what is the point of this passage?
There is no question of Jesus misbehaving but I do think that there is a much more significant thing going on in this passage. I think the real point is in the verse that Mary “pondered all these things in her heart”.
Just as we find this story setting the stage for the future so we tend to ponder what our future holds.
What is it that is just ahead of us?
What is it that is just over the Horizon?
Just like Mary, we hold these things in our hearts to ponder.
The answer is in what the boy Jesus said to his mother, “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house (NIV)? We need to be about our father’s business.
What is our father’s business for you?
Where is it you are called?
Not all of us can be as confident with our guidance as Jesus. Most of us flounder around saying “What now God?”
Are you waiting for God to tell you what is next?
Have you laid out the fleece and had nothing happen?
Perhaps you are the person who has no clue as to how you can have any way of knowing. Or you say that you’ve asked God and got nothing. It would be just too easy wouldn’t it to say that we are waiting on God?
It would have been perfectly acceptable for Jesus Himself at 12 years old, to continue to be a teenager and nothing more. Because we all know that there is quite enough in a teenager’s life to contend with, without adding anything more. Instead, He stepped out and made it known that His heavenly father came first.
Learning from the Boy Jesus
Is it possible that you already know what it is the Father would have you do?
Is it possible that you have spent enough time waiting on God?
Has the fleece you laid out remained un-actioned because the answer already is clear. You just don’t want to accept it.
We are supposed to be people of faith. How long will we view our heavenly Father as an ogre and refuse to obey him because of it?
Will this be the year that you are going to be about your father’s business?
Perhaps you truly don’t know what the Lord requires of you. Then isn’t it time that you found out?
Remember what Jesus was doing when his mother found Him.
He was learning!
He was asking questions.
Are you asking questions?
Have you put yourself in a position where you can learn what God is requiring you to do?
It is one thing to be waiting on God it is another altogether to be pretending to be waiting on God.
The future is scary. But the future needs to be confronted. Today as we consider what our future holds, let’s make sure that whatever it is it involves going about the father’s business.
Fairdinkum
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