Being Lost

2ChristmasC St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, January 5, 2025, by Sr. Annette Fricke, OP First, there are no other accounts of Jesus in the temple at age 12 except this one. Not in Mark, Matthew, John or any other place. This appears to be written by the author himself, Luke, not a contemporary of Paul, but a generation or so after Paul. Second, Jesus was attending the Passover with his family as a 12-year-old. You might think this is the year before his Bar Mitzvah. It isn’t. The Bar Mitzvah is at age 13 for boys, But there was no Bar Mitzvah till some four hundred years ago. Jesus never had a Bar Mitzvah. However, at age 13, even in that timeframe, boys were considered adults at age 13 and were expected to follow Torah and make their own independent decisions. They were also expected to follow Jewish customs and festivals. At that time, Passover was 8 days; people weren’t expected to stay the full 8 days, but most likely Mary, Joseph, and family did. Third, is this story of Jesus in the Temple true? Maybe. There is no surviving evidence, but it could very well have happened this way. In today’s literature, we call it, “Historical fiction.” Luke likes to be a storyteller and indeed he is. He invites us into a humanity that we don’t find so much of in the other gospels. His gospel is what Clinical Pastoral Education would term, “fleshed out.” At least, that was my CPE experience with Chaplain Harley. Those people who like a good, engaging story will like Luke. In this story, one could say that Jesus was lost. He hadn’t stayed with his family. That was what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to be obedient to his mom and dad. It may or may not happen in families today, but certainly was the norm in Jesus’ day. But from Jesus’ perspective, he was not lost, but merely wrestling with issues that he would later address in his ministry. How many days was he in the Temple? This story is rather vague if you give it a careful read. The biblical scholar, Raymond E. Brown proposes it could have been 3 days. It might be a bit much to wrap our heads around and might seem like a long time. But remember; they did not travel by train, bus, or plane. If you are out for a day and a half, it will take a day and a half to get back. Or if close to the Temple, in Jesus’ time, Jerusalem was about 25,000 people. If it’s like Moses Lake without car or bus, which has a similar population, you might be looking for a while and if it’s a story told later in life, you can see where details could get lost. Mary is upset, anxious, maybe angry and feels that Jesus disrespected both she and her husband, Joseph. She confronts him with this, and his response is simply, “Why were you searching for me? I must be in my Father’s house.” Luke, who doesn’t put the story of the Wedding of Cana in his gospel, still tries to fill in a link to Jesus’ formal ministry. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” 46 and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.