And He said to them, “Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?” ~ Luke 2:49
They lost God. Mary, who is known to “treasure all things in her heart,” who is clearly a thinker, took her eyes off her Savior and lost Him.
From a physical human standpoint, I’m sure every mother out there has done this. We stand on the sidelines of a park, or trust our children to walk beside us at a store. We’re momentarily looking at something else and suddenly our child is gone.
But Jesus wasn’t a toddler at this point. He was 12. The family had been in Jerusalem celebrating the Passover and were now walking home. In community. It’s not like today where each family gets in their own separate cars, carefully accounted for, carefully buckled in. They lived in community. Mary would have been walking with the women, Joseph with the men, and Jesus, at 12, would have been walking with the other children. Families kept an eye on each other and the journey was made in community.
At the end of the first day’s walk each family reconvened for bedtime. That’s when they noticed Jesus wasn’t in the crowd.
Like any frantic parents, the next day Mary and Joseph turned back to Jerusalem to look for Jesus. Verse 2:46 says it took them three days to find Him. Where was He? Talking with the teachers at the temple.
If I ever lose my sons when they’re teenagers, I hope I find them in a church.
This story is sandwiched between two statements of “Jesus kept increasing in wisdom” (2:40, 2:52). Why is that significant? Most commentaries gloss over that statement. Historically, liberal scholars have debate over whether this “proves” that He wasn’t really God until His baptism. But He was God right from the beginning – that’s part of the Holy Spirit descending on Mary and the miraculous conception.
Jesus was fully God right from the start, but He was also fully human. As God, He amazed the teachers in the temple with His knowledge. The education system He would have grown up in required all children to memorize the first five books of the Bible (the Torah). If children could pass the test, they could continue on and memorize more of the Old Testament. If they didn’t pass, they began training in the trade of their fathers. It was an honor to become a Rabbi; it meant they had memorized and meditated on an enormous amount of Scripture and had earned the right to become a teacher.
Jesus was a carpenter. Did He pass the Rabbi test? As God He knew the Scriptures; as God, He wrote the Scriptures; to ponder it one further, John 1 calls Jesus “the Word in the flesh.” Jesus’s relationship to the Scriptures is one of mystery. The Word is inspired, inerrant, and alive (Hebrews 4:12). Jesus knew the Scriptures. There is no question about that. Maybe His parents couldn’t afford to send Him to school. We know they were poor, so maybe they needed Him to help Joseph. Either way, Jesus was not en-route to becoming a rabbi in the traditional sense. (We know His followers recognized Him as such, but that was another argument the Pharisees had for trying to stop His ministry.)
So how did Jesus grow in wisdom? And why is this story stuck between those two statements? He was also fully human. As God, He knew He had the ability to teach and to heal. But He also knew His purpose and that if that purpose was revealed too soon, it might change things. Every step of His life was written in the Old Testament prophecies. Even as a fully grown man, in John 2:4 He says, “My time has not yet come.” He was fully human and learning to keep His mouth shut.
How much restraint must that have taken! He knew what was to come. He knew His purpose was to pay the price for each of us. Even right after His baptism, when He was in the desert being tempted, Satan offered Him the world, if only He would bow down. (As if God, in the flesh, could really bow down to worship the devil, but that’s a subject for another day.) Jesus knew His purpose. He knew what He was sent here to do. But He was also fully human, at and 12, He was a little too excited to interact with who lead in the temple.