Thinking Jesus was in the caravan, they journeyed for a day and looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances, but did not find him, so they returned to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” And he said to them “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2.44-49)
It didn’t only happen to Mary and Joseph. Not that many years ago, on a Christmas trip, a five-year-old boy from Texas was accidentally left behind in a service station bathroom in Nashville, Tennessee. The newspapers carried the story. The family had been to Nashville to visit the young boy’s grandparents. Tyler, the five-year-old, got out of the car to use the bathroom when they stopped to get gas.
However, the door to the bathroom stuck on him and the family, unaware of Tyler’s absence in the car, headed towards Texas. Two hours later, when they stopped at Wendy’s for a hamburger, they saw Tyler wasn’t with them. Fortunately for Tyler, a woman at the service station had heard his screaming and crying and opened the door for him.
As we might expect, Tyler was inconsolable and could only say, “I want my mommy.” Sobs turned to smiles when Tyler saw his family. He showed his brothers and sisters the teddy bears, coloring books, and candy that had been given to him by the detectives from the Nashville Metro Youth Guidance Center who had come to Tyler’s rescue.
“I told you your parents would come back,” the gas station attendant told the small boy, now happy and all smiles. His dad, embarrassed about the mishap, explained, “We normally have a head count, but this time we didn’t. We were tired.” He had fallen asleep while his wife took the wheel of the car. The other children also dozed in the back seats. Tyler, for his part, gave his mom a big hug and said to her, “I’m never going to the bathroom again.”
As we see, Luke the evangelist offers us a similar story today, with Mary and Joseph forgetting to take a head count until most of the day had passed. When they finally missed Jesus, they figured he was with family or friends, and when that wasn’t the case, they turned around and headed back to Jerusalem, worried to death.
Luke is the only gospel writer to give us a glimpse into Jesus’ “hidden years,” as the years before his public ministry are called, since nothing of those years–except for this singular story–made it into the pages of sacred scripture. While there are other childhood stories related in other non-canonical writings–many fanciful and farcical–this is the one exception in the canon of scripture, leaving us to wonder why Luke included it.
Perhaps because Luke, already in the first two chapters of his gospel, wants to set the stage for the story he is about to tell about Jesus, the itinerant teacher who, in his adult life, walked from town to town in Galilee, teaching people by word and by action about the love that God has for his children. The themes that we will find in later pages of the text already appear in these early chapters, tight and tightly woven.
One such theme is that people will continue to look for Jesus. We will see it multiple times when certain people in the gospel–a synagogue official, or the father of a sick child, or a tax-collector in a tree–look for Jesus. At one point, his mother and brothers also look for him, concerned about his well-being, mental and physical. The night before his death, the leaders of Jerusalem look for him, wanting to take him prisoner and put him on trial. “Day after day I was with you in the temple area,” Jesus says to them when they have found him in the garden, “and you did not seize me; but this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness.”
Even after his death, when the women went to the tomb to prepare his body for burial, they looked for him because his body was nowhere to be found. “Why do you seek the living one among the dead?” two men in white garments at the gravesite ask them. Relaying the situation to the others, the women step back and allow Peter to look for himself, which he does as he runs to the tomb and looks inside.
Later, when he appears to the eleven and those gathered in the upper room, he sees their shocked and stupefied faces, nobody expecting to see him alive again. “Look at my hands and at my feet,” he tells them, “It is I.” As at the start of the story, so at the end. People are continually looking for Jesus, the object of their search, the answer to their question.
And where do they find him? They find him doing what he was doing in the temple area when he was twelve-years-old. “Why were you looking for me?” he asks his parents. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” And that business, as his life will reiterate again and again, is to show his Father’s divine presence in the world, a world desperately in need of mercy, love, and healing.
Here, the word must that Jesus uses to describe his mission in the world is consequential. Translated variously as “I must be, or I have to be, or it is necessary,” it is clear that he understands his work as an obligation, as a duty, as a calling. He will use the same word many times in his future years, saying “I must preach the good news of the Kingdom of God,” or “The Son of Man must suffer many things,” or “I must go on my way, for it cannot be that a prophet perish outside of Jerusalem.”
That the first spoken words out of Jesus’ mouth in the gospel of Luke tell of his duty to his heavenly Father is not a fluke. Never a careless writer, Luke chooses his words carefully. And he wants us to take notice that Jesus’ first spoken words forecast his later work–he must do his Father’s will, even if it should cost him his life. “Not my will, but thy will be done,” he says in the garden as he awaits the death squad that is coming to steal him away in the silence of the night.
In the end, as his closing moments come and as he draws a few final breaths, he speaks his last words, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” his will again in sync with his Father’s will, “about his Father’s business,” as he was at twelve years of age in the Temple, completing his mission, handing over his spirit to his Father, spent in service to the God who sent him to earth, the One whom he called Father.
As Luke swiftly moves from the twelve-year-old boy to the thirty-year-old man, a matter of a few sentences, the storyline will stay the same, already foreshadowed in the Temple area, the trajectory the same. Whenever people look for Jesus, he will be found doing his Father’s business–healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the outcast.
And, as he once astounded the people with his understanding and with his answers, again, as an adult, he will do the same, astounding one and all, as he shares the good news of God’s love for his people, giving answers to the many questions about God that the downtrodden, the destitute, and the despised carried in their hearts, wondering where to look for God in their pain and in their misery, finding the answer when they look for the Rabbi of Galilee.
Now, the only question that remains, the question that is always at the heart of the gospel, is where will people find us when they look for us. Will they find us about our Heavenly Father’s business, or will they find us about our own business? Will they find us doing the Father’s will, or will they find us doing our own will? Will they find us doing what we must do or will they find us doing what we want to do?
In the weeks ahead, we will stay with Luke and his story, as he shows us the many ways that the Galilean goes about doing his Father’s business. But it is not enough that we watch as the story unfolds, spectators of Divine Love at work. No, we must become participants in the ongoing story of the outpouring of that Divine Love, now in us, as it was in Jesus of Nazareth.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 