A Childhood Lived for You
Luke 2:40-52
Second Sunday of Christmas
January 3, 2016
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and
Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our text, the final words of our Gospel reading, “And Jesus increased
in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
How do you lose track of God? It’s quite mind-boggling, isn’t
it, that Jesus could be misplaced! You couldn’t really blame Mary and
Joseph for supposing him in the crowd if he was just another kid like
any of us… Even with a mere five children in our house, I’ve done
that before! But, to lose track of the Savior of the world?! Wouldn’t
you safeguard him with your life and always keep him in sight if you
kept in mind that all of salvation rested with him?
And perhaps that’s really the issue here, isn’t it? – perhaps it
can be said that it had not been kept in mind who this child was. He
had grown like any of us do, learned like any of us do, had cousins
and likely siblings and playmates like any of us do, needed to be fed
and cared for like any of us do… it was probably pretty easy over
twelve years to begin to get comfortable with the idea that this truly
was – in many respects – just a plain, ordinary, healthy growing boy.
Mary sort of implies that, doesn’t she, when she says, “Son,
why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been searching
for you in great distress.” But, Joseph wasn’t his father… and we
excuse the comment because it’s understandable that – over the
course of a childhood – how else would Joseph have been addressed
as head of the house? After twelve years, do we not expect that daily
life for this holy family would become pretty normal!
Luke even gets in on the act, painting the scene with that
“commonality” as he repeatedly refers to Mary and Joseph as “his
parents.” Yes, over the course of time, it would become pretty
commonplace to think of this holy child in a very ordinary way.
We sinners do the same thing, don’t we? This holy child who
proclaims to us wondrous promises at the holidays becomes pretty
commonplace to us over the course of even a month, let alone a
whole church year… let alone twelve years. We come down from our
seasonal joy to a return to normalcy – a normal work schedule,
normal school schedule, normal routines, (which, in and of itself, is
not sinful – not at all!… as Jesus himself lived out his vocations of a
normal childhood – which is probably why we hear so little of it!
There was very little remarkable about it!)
But, if we’re not careful we allow that return to the same
normalcy of daily life to also include the return of common
temptations to forget about, grow complacent about, the holiness of
and hopefulness in this child… we return to the normal sins that seek
to separate us from trusting in his exclusive promises and his unique
ability to deliver on those promises. If we’re not careful, we lose
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track of the holy child in our daily, mundane way of life and we begin
to allow whatever attention-grabbers that break the monotony of
daily life to become priorities, more important, less common, and
therefore defined by us as more worthy of our attention, more
worthy of trusting and hoping in, more “meaningful” to daily life.
“Yes, Jesus and his promises will be here for me for the next
year… the next twelve years… so let’s turn our attention to
something that might be more urgent, something I need to invest in
right now… I can always come back to him later.” And pretty soon,
because we have thought him in too common a way, we lose track of
Jesus.
But, Luke’s gospel beautifully weaves together the true
normalcy of Jesus’ boyhood with the underlying, “ever-present-evenif-only-right-below-the-surface” reality that this child is still God-inthe-flesh, and that divine truth ought never be forgotten! If we want
to understand this Jesus for who He truly is, we must appreciate the
entirety of this text.
The opening words of our text we also read last week as the
conclusion of the text about the presentation of Jesus in this same
temple as a 40-day-old child. So then, that hinge verse is all that we
know about the twelve years between temple appearances: “The
child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favor of
God was upon him.”
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That says much, doesn’t it? He is both a very normal boy
(true man), growing and becoming strong, as little boys do…
bounding around the house with joyful curiosity and learning new
things every day about God’s creation. But, at the same time, this
Jesus is not a normal boy – the favor of God is upon him – true man,
but also true God.
And, as true God, his desire is for the good and perfect will of
God to be fulfilled. And so, in the Scriptural record, where is the only
place we ever find this Christ child? – in the temple. Whether at 40
days or at twelve years, he is only to be found in the temple. This is
not the behavior of a God who wants to get rid of his temple
theology, but who wants to fulfill it (not just “keep” it, as if
constantly being at church should be the aim of the godly: God wants
to fulfill His temple theology) … who sees the temple not as a house
of rules and customs, but as the dwelling place of His glory… and
who, for man’s benefit, seeks to replace that dwelling place of stone
with his own body.
And because He does not want to be rid of the temple of the
Old Covenant but rather wants to fulfill and give full meaning to the
temple of the Old Covenant, his response to his mother should not
surprise us in the least: “Did you not know that I must be in my
Father’s house?” And, as I’ve mentioned before, the Greek more
properly says, “Did you not know that it is necessary for me to be
about the things of my Father?”
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Doing his Father’s business, carrying out His Father’s will,
plan, and mission for your salvation… that’s what this divine child is
(even if only right under the surface of a normal childhood) really all
about.
And that means you ought thank God for Christ’s childhood.
Because even his childhood was lived in place of yours. You recall
your childhood… kicking and screaming on your way to church, or
being a rebel against your parents, or being constantly disagreeable
with or prideful over your siblings, or dishonoring authority or
disregarding the well-being of your neighborhood friends or
classmates. You know that your childhood is not a picture of being
about the things of God. And, if Christ is going to fulfill all
righteousness, even his childhood is about that. Even about living
faithfully in God’s truth and confessing God’s truth in the daily
realities of childhood… even about diligently studying the Scriptures
at the feet of the temple teachers and eagerly asking questions of
them and answering their questions to him. And then, after it all, the
text concludes, going down with his parents back to his hometown
and being submissive to them. Can you imagine the righteousness
involved in that! Leaving the temple after visiting it for the first time
you can remember would be like our children leaving Disneyworld.
There’s nothing submissive about them at all at that point – just
kicking and screaming or attempted bargaining to stay longer or just
downright defiance or exhaustion. Who wants to return to normal
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childhood life after Disneyworld? And we convince ourselves that
we’re better off if we didn’t have to leave this “happiest place on
earth.” But Jesus in his youth knows that it is His Father’s will that he
leave the divine serenity and return to daily life, and he does so
without disagreement, without objection, but in perfect obedience
and submission… even to parents that were perhaps short-tempered
and at fault for not being perfectly righteous and patient in how they
pulled their youngster away from this “holiest place on earth.”
All of that is this child being faithful to God’s will and plan…
and none of it is something any of us can say was the true
representation of our childhood.
And so, we need our Lord’s childhood… not, “we need his
example” – literally, our salvation depends on the righteousness of
His childhood! And we need him, from childhood, to be about the
things of his Father, to love them so completely that – as he in his
humanity learns what the Messiah has been promised to do – he in
his divinity already knows and rejoices at what he is already on the
road to suffering.
How thoroughly do we need a Savior! It’s not enough that a
Savior come and die for us. It is necessary that he also be born for us
and grow up in righteous life for us and live childhood perfectly in
the way we did not. Those who fool themselves into thinking they
can please God with their own righteousness and now (at some point
midway through life “dedicate themselves to God”) convince
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themselves they can conveniently start trying right now and that
anything that comes before – including the sins of childhood – are
not counted against them. We casually chuckle about the “sins of our
youth”, of which we don’t repent or don’t consider how much they
require the salvation of Christ.
But Christ’s childhood shows us the depth of our depravity
from childhood. And his love for his Father’s business, his love for his
Father’s house even teaches us as adults – the child teaching the
teachers, if you will – how we ought to rejoice in His salvific
childhood and in this dwelling place… and in our case, we ought
rejoice in this dwelling place specifically because Jesus did not rid his
Church of temple theology, but fulfilled the meaning of the temple,
that we might benefit from here dwelling with him – the holy place
of God now being the body of our crucified and risen Lord.
Indeed, friends, the Scriptures may say very little about
Jesus’ childhood – only enough to give us two Sundays’ worth of
Gospel readings each year – but what they do say is worth treasuring
up in our hearts:
1. Jesus increased in wisdom and stature as any normal boy.
2. God’s favor was upon Him, for – from the annunciation,
to the manger, to the age of twelve – his childhood
carried the divine mission of the Messiah.
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3. Jesus’ childhood is all about the temple… because the
temple theology of our God is something that benefits us
from our childhood.
From your new birth in baptism until your dying day, this place of
weekly normalcy to-the-point-of-seeming-mundane carries right
under the surface a divine truth to it that is anything but normal.
God is not ashamed to call this his holy house – and therefore we
ought understand it and treat it as holy – because it is here that the
fulfillment of the temple – Christ himself – comes to dwell with his
people and bring us all the benefits … to pour out for us anew all the
benefits of his righteousness from childhood through his
righteousness upon the cross.
Yes, how necessary and salvific are these words for you: “And
Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and
man.”
In the Name of the Father
And of the Son
And of the Holy Spirit.
+ AMEN +
Rev. Mark C. Bestul
Calvary Lutheran Church
January 3, 2016
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