One Christmas morning, a young widow was doing her best to make Christmas happy for her two little boys. This was their first Christmas without their father. Unexpectedly, someone knocked at the door. "Who could that be?" she wondered. When she opened the door, she found her pastor standing with his arms full of toys and candy. This man, who was one of the most renowned preachers of his era, said quite simply: "I thought your boys might miss their father on Christmas morning." He spent the next two hours playing with the two boys and their new toys.1
That minister became a living parable of the meaning of Christmas! By his caring deed, he demonstrated the doctrine of the Incarnation far more persuasively than he could have with his most eloquent sermon. Christmas means God humbled himself to come to the place where we live. The Incarnation of God in the flesh means God willingly shared in the joys and pains of our existence. The birth of Jesus means God took upon himself all the frailties and limitations of the flesh. Christmas means God elected to experience life on our terms.
This true story, which I have said is a parable, reminds me of a famous fictional story called The Prince and the Pauper. Only in recent years has the truth dawned on me that this tale is also a parable of the Incarnation. A young prince is depicted as having exchanged his rich garments and crown for the rags of a beggar. He gave up the comfort and protection of his palace for the rough-and-ready life of a street urchin. He moved upon the dirty, ragged, hungry, and looked-down-upon ordinary people. Only then did he begin to understand how the common people lived.
I also thought of a cross-country coach I know. He does not just teach by word. He runs alongside of his boys and girls. He demonstrates the art of running with his own body. He keeps in touch with the feelings of frustration and elation experienced by his runners. I thought of the contrast with my own college cross-country coach. He was a fine man and a successful coach. He used to drive alongside of us during a race or practice and yell encouraging words. With his 230-pound bulk, he could do little else!
The Incarnation is God choosing to share our common human lot. Much of the meaning of the Incarnation is encapsulated in the single event recorded from the growing-up days of Jesus. Our text is, therefore, an example of God communicating through Jesus in humanly understandable terms. Our text shows God communicating to us by entering into the life of a boy who grew up like many other boys. The Gospel according to Luke emphasizes that fact by the way the account is begun and ended. In the prelude to this passage, we are told that "... the child grew and became strong ..." (Luke 2:40). The postlude summarizes by saying: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor" (v. 52).
Romantic artists and writers have distorted the scene of twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple with the elders. For example, the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas gives extravagant but inaccurate, even repulsive, accounts of the young Jesus as an exhibitionist or some kind of "boy wonder." Christian art has sometimes depicted the incident under the misleading caption, "The Boy Jesus Teaching in the Temple." But scripture never portrays Jesus as a "boy wonder"! Luke never suggests the twelve-year-old was a precocious teacher of elders. Luke describes Jesus as "... sitting among the teachers, listening ..." (v. 46). Like any boy of that young age who has been raised in a devout home, he listened with respect to his elders.
So it was that his anxious mother and father, who had searched for him for three days, found him listening, respectfully. That scene must have become engraved indelibly in their minds. Years later, as she looked at her adult son and thought back to that incident, Mary must have shaken her head in wonder. Do you remember that touching moment in Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye sings: "Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don't remember growing older. When did they?" ("Sunrise, Sunset" by Sheldon Harnick). How often Mary must have thought something like that as she watched her special Son grow into manhood and become the magnificent preacher and healer! How often neighbors must have looked at the grown-up Jesus with such head-shaking wonderment and exclaimed: "I don't believe it! Is that the little boy at play? Is that really Mary's and Joseph's son? I don't remember growing older. Why did he?" Yes, Jesus must have been much like any other boy.
Perhaps Mary and Joseph had their first and only clue (other than the amazing events which surrounded the Nativity) that he was different in that moment in the Temple. Perhaps something deep and profound stirred within them as he answered their distressed question with the words: "Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" (v. 49). These are the first recorded words from the lips of Jesus. In those words, we see the first emerging self-consciousness of his special identity. Here we see the earliest recognition of his unique Sonship to God! But, other than one moment, we have no reason to suspect Jesus had other than a normal boyhood. This is the greatness of God. He communicated to us by entering into the life of a boy who grew up like many other boys.
God also communicated in humanly understandable terms when he chose to have his special Son raised in a home like many others. He did not grow up in a wealthy home. We can tell Mary and Joseph were persons of small means by the humble thank-offering they brought to the Temple -- i.e., "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons" (Luke 2:24). A well-to-do family might have offered a lamb. We can also tell that Jesus grew up in a good, law-abiding home. His parents showed respect for the sacred laws by bringing their son to the Temple on the proscribed eighth day for the required ritual of dedication called circumcision. Whoever has ever brought a young child to God's altar for Baptism can identify with that scene. So can any parent identify with the scene described by our text who has ever worried over and scolded a child who has lost track of time. Mary and Joseph were very normal. They worried when their son was missing. Then, when they found him, all their pent-up worry and anger poured out: "Child, why have you treated us so? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety" (v. 48). Mary and Joseph could not have been more ordinary and human than when they revealed themselves in those words. This, too, is the greatness of God. He communicated to us in the humanly understandable terms of a very ordinary home -- perhaps much like our own.
What is most precious about God coping with life on our human terms is that God did it his way! And, he did it successfully, victoriously, happily. Jesus was attractive, admirable, strong, winsome, and blessed. Remember Luke's observation that, as Jesus grew, he "... increased ... in divine and human favor" (v. 52). Jesus blessed every life he touched. Too many people forget that! They think of him as a depressor or "wet-blanket" who ruins the joy of life. They react as if he were a curse instead of a blessing. So Walter Russell Bowie, writing in The Interpreter's Bible, says about our text:
Many people since that time, both without and within the church, have made the mistake of the Pharisees. They have supposed that somehow there must be an incompatibility between religion and the bright enjoyment of this world. They have divorced it from poetry and turned it into dogmatic prose. They have divorced it even from beauty and made religion a thing of drab clothes and drab demeanor. They have turned it into a hard, inward discipline of spirit and have forgotten that all life ought to be baptized into a larger meaning if religion is to be true to the beauty of Christ. Worst of all, they have treated religion as though it had nothing necessarily to do with the everyday matter of keeping human contacts warm and lovely. Some persons of official standing in the church, both clerical and lay, have a kind of formal piety, but are poison to live with, like Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield. It has been rightly said that not much credit can be given to any man's religion whose very dog and cat are not the better for it.2
Let us so see Jesus. May you and I pray during this Christmas-tide season:
We would see Jesus,
Mary's son most holy,
Light of the village
life from day to day;
Shining revealed through
every task most lowly,
The Christ of God,
the life, the truth, the way.
We would see Jesus,
on the mountain teaching,
With all the listening
people gathered round;
While birds and flowers and
sky above are preaching
The blessedness
which simple trust has found.3
1. As told to Dr. Harrell Beck of the Boston University School of Theology speaking to a pastor's school in Bennington, Vermont, in 1975.
2. Walter Russell Bowie, The Gospel According to St. Luke, The Interpreter's Bible, Volume 8 (New York and Nashville: Abingdon, 1952), p. 69.
3. 1964 United Methodist Hymnal, No. 90, "We Would See Jesus; Lo! His Star Is Shining," Stanzas 2 and 3, by J. Edgar Park.