The Family Business
Christmas 2, Year C 2025; Luke 2:41-52
Episcopalians (USA etc) have a choice of three (!) options for the Gospel of the second Sunday after Christmas: the journey of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt (both from Matthew), or the story of Jesus’s extended stay in Jerusalem as a twelve-year old, from Luke. Here, we will continue with the Gospel of Luke and the third option. Those sticking closer to the Revised Common Lectionary (CofE, Australia, etc.) read this a week ago, so may care to look at an earlier treatment of the John 1 reading set for them for this day instead.
This story of the child Jesus in the Temple is the last section of Luke’s infancy narrative, as we tend to call these first two chapters. It certainly belongs with the rest of the material before it, although this is no longer the story of a baby. It shows that the point of Luke’s early chapters is more than “infancy”; unlike any other evangelist, he provides something of Jesus’ “backstory.”
Despite the narrative trajectory from Nazareth to Bethlehem (itself in Judea, not far from Jerusalem) the Temple is the most prominent place in the infancy narrative, and today’s story already the third scene placed there (after Zechariah’s annunciation and the Presentation). Sacrifices are a backdrop to the events: Zechariah was working his priestly shift, offering incense when the angelic visitor came; in the Presentation story, Joseph and Mary explicitly offer a pair of doves as a sacrifice. Yet there is always more going on as well; Simeon and Anna are regulars who suggest the holiness of the place is not solely bound up in the offerings themselves, but in the fact of God’s presence.
The Passover feast, while depicted in Exodus as a household event, was in reality focused on the Temple because of the sacrifice of the lambs, hence the significance and regularity of the Jerusalem pilgrimage. This already hints at Jesus’ last Passover, and instantiates his own habitual presence in the Temple, now presented as well established before his adult ministry. So the “infancy” backstory begins and ends at the Temple and at this feast, as does the Gospel.
A human-interest drama wraps around this episode; the anxiety of Mary and Joseph will be all-too-readily imagined by most of us, although some modern readers may be as distracted by how incomprehensible all this seems (yes, you’re the same people who get judge-y at Catherine O’Hara’s and John Heard’s characters in Home Alone). The plausibility of the story depends on a different social context, where extended family played a far more significant role; spending too long on that problem will mean missing the point of the story. Readers should find ourselves identifying with Mary and Joseph in their concern, but also then having to negotiate the conflict of expectations and allegiances they encounter when finding Jesus.
His presence in the Temple is a surprise to them. The time they take to search is mostly an indicator that he was not in the obvious places, presumably their former lodgings and homes of acquaintances. At the sanctuary, the scene is more a seminar than a service, and so expands (plausibly, despite Luke’s distance from the Temple in time and space) our sense of the complex beyond sacrifices. Just as prayer was appropriately offered there because of God’s presence, so too study and theological education were appropriate, and expected. It is Jesus’ place there that is surprising.
Luke’s narrative makes two points about Jesus’ presence and action. One is implied in the depiction of the scene, and the other is made explicit in the exchange with his parents. First, the extraordinary capacity of Jesus to engage the teachers shows he possesses an unusual wisdom. The participation of a twelve-year old in a graduate seminar is the sort of parallel we might draw here. The age of twelve was generally seen as close to a cusp between childhood and adulthood, but definitely still on the “child” side of the divide, hence the sense of precocity.1
This is just any knowledge or a general demonstration of intellectual prowess however but theology, matters of divine truth—wisdom. Jesus’ extraordinary wisdom is a sign of God’s presence, rather than that he was a very smart kid. The feminine gender of personified Wisdom in earlier reflections does not exclude a sense that the boy Jesus represents this divine attribute in his own person.2 In Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) Wisdom announces: “Thus in the beloved city he gave me a resting place, and in Jerusalem was my domain” (24:12). Luke will later have Jesus make another such self-identification as Wisdom (7:35).
The second point is made out loud in his exchange with the bewildered parents. Jesus’ response to them is the first statement he utters in this Gospel, and the only instance where Jesus speaks at all prior to his public ministry. As with his disappearance, we may well be intended to sympathize with Mary and Joseph—but also then to understand something difficult and important about Jesus.
The phrase our translations now usually render “my father’s house” is not as straightforward as that; literally it’s “I had to be among my father’s things.” This is a comprehensible idiom for being “on the property” or “in the building,” and is used in the Greek Old Testament (LXX) this way. Yet it can also mean, not exclusively, something more like “being immersed in my father’s affairs.” This may work better here, but perhaps it is meant to remain ambiguous. Jesus is in this place because it is the house of his Father; that will not stop him being about his Father’s business when he accompanies Joseph and Mary back to Nazareth, or when he begins to minister in Galilee. Yet just as through this whole narrative, the Temple stands for the fact of God’s presence, and Jesus’ being here tells us something about him—the same thing which he tells his parents now.
The sharp edge on this “unpastoral” response for Mary and (especially) Joseph cannot be avoided. For all their concern for him, and the anguish they have experienced, their love for their son does not really tell them or us what we need to know about Jesus’ identity. This exchange recapitulates what the Annunciation story had already told us, and what from Luke’s narrative standpoint these two are already supposed to know: “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David” (1:32). This episode tells us just the same thing; that this Galilean boy is not who he appears to be, but the coming King of Israel. We may also find ourselves disturbed by the fact that who he needs to be is not necessarily who we want him to be.
The personal pain that Luke’s story acknowledges is made different, even for Joseph whose fatherhood is displaced, by what is taking place here. Comfort for Mary and Joseph may come in some immediate sense from the fact that Jesus accompanies and (now) obeys them. Yet like the reader they have been taught—as clearly as the scribes in the Temple were being taught—that Jesus has come to be something more than a good boy, but to be the savior of Israel (and, it will turn out, the world). This is the family business he is about in this episode, and it is the family business he will conduct at the Passovers to come, and especially at the last one.
On this see further Henk J. De Jonge, “Sonship, Wisdom, Infancy: Luke Ii. 41–51.” New Testament Studies 24, no. 3 (April 1978): 317–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688500004124. De Jonge refers to legendary material about Solomon and Daniel, among others, as twelve-year-old prodigies.
Pace Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke : Introduction, Translation, and Notes. Vol. 1. Anchor Bible 28. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981, 437
I love icons of Joseph sitting apart, a whole range of emotions running through him. This is the last time he comes up in the New Testament. How old was he when Mary and Jesus attend the wedding in Cana? Maybe in his 70’s? Reading, I thought of John the Baptist in John, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”