Tween Jesus | Feb 2025

Something I find weird about the Bible is that it only includes 3 stories about Jesus as a child. 3! About the childhood of the Savior of the world. I guess this shouldn’t be entirely surprising because none of the Gospel authors were moms. What I wouldn’t give to have a Gospel written by Mary. If any of the authors had been moms, there would be no end to the childhood stories, and somehow, some way, there would be embarrassing pictures. I don’t know how with it being ancient Israel, but where there’s a mom, there’s a way.

With so little recorded about Jesus’ childhood, the stories that we do have must be important, and yet it is so easy to gloss over them, especially today’s text. Today, we are looking at the story of 12-year-old Jesus found in the gospel of Luke. It is short and unremarkable at first glance, but I believe it acts as an overture to the rest of Jesus’ life. A preview of what is to come.

This story includes the only recorded words spoken by young Jesus, and was surely passed on by Mary herself; who else could have told it? I would like to think she shared it with the disciples to help them learn that Jesus could not be contained by their expectations.  

In our story, we have Mary and Joseph, like thousands upon thousands of devout followers of God’s Law, on pilgrimage to the Passover festival in Jerusalem. Even though Mary and Joseph were poor and women were not required to travel to the Temple, they all went together. They included Jesus who was still a child according to Jewish Law and was also not required to travel. In preparation for turning 13, this could have been his first pilgrimage.

At the end of the week, Mary and Joseph and their whole crew start the 4-5 day walk back to Nazareth and have no idea that they’re missing their child. The larger the group the safer the travel was, and often men and women split into different caravans altogether. It would be easy to assume Jesus was somewhere among the mix. We have all seen Home Alone and the McCallisters only had 15 people in their caravan, but Kevin still manages to get left behind, twice. This is a classic “I thought he was with you” parenting fail.

By the time they realize Jesus is not with them, they have already walked an entire day. For safety, they would need to wait until first light the next day to reverse the whole day’s journey. I can imagine the hours of sleep Mary and Joseph did not get. 

How many of you have ever lost one of your kids before? That feeling is terrible. Only seven months after our adopted son, Link, first moved in with us, I took him and Allie on a trip to Oklahoma to visit my sister. We went to the science museum one day which is surprisingly big and way cooler than you’d expect for Oklahoma. And in the time it took for me to clean up a couple of things Link had been playing with, I looked up and he was gone. My brother-in-law was at the museum with me too, but he was with Allie in a different section. As I’m looking all over, I call Brenden to let him know I can’t find Link. He and Allie start looking too. Link was only 4 and had zero stranger danger. I did not think he would know to tell someone my name or even ask for help. My mind spun out, could he have walked out the front doors without anyone seeing? If we paged him, would he even hear it? What do I tell Nate? The caseworker? After what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few minutes, Brenden found Link. I felt panicked for a couple of minutes at most; Mary and Joseph had days to worry.

And even when they got back to Jerusalem, they still had to find him. The last place they looked was the Temple.  Now you might not realize how big the temple was. It was massive. Part of me wonders if they had given up hope of finding Jesus and had simply stopped there to pray before leaving again.

Somehow, they stumble upon Jesus sitting among the Jewish teachers, engaged in deep theological study - certainly not the place one expects to find a 12-year-old boy. Verse 46 tells us he was listening and asking questions, so he wasn’t teaching, but the teachers were amazed by his answers. This is a sneak peak of Jesus’ future teaching. Throughout his entire ministry, people will be amazed and astonished because they have low expectations of a poor man raised in Nazareth.

Back to our worried parents. Mary, who could finally breathe again for the first time in days asked Jesus, “How could you do this to us? Your father and I have been out of our minds with worry.” She is mad and confused. And Jesus is confused by her confusion. He responds with two questions to answer her one question – classic Jesus. First, he asked, “Why were you looking for me?” That’s a teenage response if I ever heard one. But actually, I think what he meant was why were you so worried about me? Did you doubt God’s promises? Second, he asked, “Didn’t you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?”

This is the first time Jesus claimed God as his Father, and therefore his identity as God’s Son, in the presence of other people. 

This is a divine revelation. In the Bible, a revelation is anytime a spiritual truth that had been hidden is made known. But the text says, Mary and Joseph “had no idea” what he was talking about. How could they not know what he meant? Did they hear “Father” and their minds went to Jesus’ earthly father, Stepdad Joe, who is a carpenter, not a religious scholar? Maybe. Or did they forget that whole angel prophesying, Holy Spirit hovering, virgin birth in a stable thing? Had those glimpses of glory at his birth faded into the monotony of life over the past decade? Also, maybe.

Or maybe, they had been holding on to a more tangible expectation of Jesus’ future that prevented them from understanding what he was saying now. They had been told that Jesus would be the salvation of Israel, but their version was likely of a very different kind of savior. Let’s review what they had been told about their son. He would be a savior, a light to all people, the glory of Israel, freer of Jerusalem, a King like David, Son of the Most High God, and one whose kingdom will never end. If you take away our hindsight, these clues don’t spell out a Jesus destined to be an underpaid teacher. The deepest hope of the Jews was for a Messiah to rise up and overthrow the oppressive powers of Rome. It makes perfect sense if Mary and Joseph imagined a beautiful future for Jesus as an earthly king.

Finding Jesus in the Temple among teachers of the Torah did not add up for them. But Jesus, growing in Spirit, had come to Jerusalem and experienced new communal worship and conversations full of God’s Word. We have no way of knowing what amount of self-knowledge Jesus had, but as fully human, it makes sense to me that it increased with his age, just as ours does. By setting aside his divinity, and with it his perfect knowledge, he chose to become fully human in every way. I imagine young Jesus entering the Temple for the first time and feeling the Spirit within him stirring.

The increased presence of the Spirit in our lives leads to deeper sensitivity to spiritual things.

As Jesus gained more clarity, he would know that God’s will would have the first claim on his priorities.

This story reveals the way Mary and Joseph’s expectations worked to limit their ability to see and know God. They looked at Jesus and saw their little boy—and why wouldn’t they? They had been present to him in a million ordinary moments of his precious life. Their instinct was to protect him, but it also blinded them to God himself standing before them. It was her son who Mary was scolding, but it was the Son of God who responded to her. Perhaps Jesus wanted to relieve them of their expectation that they were his sole protectors. They would need to learn to trust that it was God who carried that burden.

If Jesus’ parents had limiting beliefs and assumptions about Jesus that they had to learn to set aside as they grew in their own faith, of course we do too. Jesus was not the type of Messiah anyone thought God would send. He wasn’t powerful enough for the Romans, legalistic enough for the Pharisees, political enough for the Zealots, or kingly enough for his followers. I think that is still true today. The hardest part might be for us to identify the specific burden of false expectations we have placed on God.

So what expectations or limitations have you placed on Jesus?

And how are they getting in the way of seeing him fully?

Are you missing Jesus in your midst because you only see him as some guy from centuries ago? Are you missing the way Jesus embodied both love and justice, not just one or the other? Are you angry and skeptical of God’s goodness because of the suffering and pain you have experienced (often at the hand of other “believers”) or witnessed in the lives of those you love? Are you missing knowing God’s tender, feminine, nurturing self because the only image you’ve been taught to see is that of a father? Are you missing out on Jesus’ empathetic brotherhood because God is too holy, too distant, and too apathetic? I don’t know what it is for you.

For me, I have struggled most recently to understand God’s presence with me when I mostly don’t feel like God is tangible or present with me. So much of my faith was formed in a tradition that held up individual here-and-now emotional experiences as the right way to encounter God. When I don’t have those feelings and encounters, all of my pondering and wrestling with the mystery of God feels far more intellectual than transformational. What does it mean to be with God, and for God to be with me? I’m trying to practice awareness of my breath as a physical reminder that God is my very breath. Even if it doesn’t feel that way.

One day, homeboy Paul promises that we will see God as clearly as God sees us. In 1 Corinthians 13:12 he writes, “We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!”

For now, we trust that God cannot be contained by our expectations. God is in the business of astounding people. God will continue to show up in unexpected ways.

As we go this week, I want to challenge you to make space to consider what about God you are not seeing clearly. What expectations are getting in the way? Invite the Holy Spirit, who is within you, to reveal truth about God to you, to surprise you. May her hovering and stirring shine light on the truths of God that you need to hear most.