Jesus Found in the Temple -- James Tissot
Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival.
When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents were unaware of this.Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day's journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends.
When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.When his parents saw him they were astonished, and his mother said to him, "Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you."
He said to them, "Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" But they did not understand what he said to them.Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them, and his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor. Luke 2: 41-52 NRSVue
This is the first Sunday in the Christmas season and today clergy everywhere have passed on worship leadership to someone else or, as is increasingly common, Sunday service has been cancelled. Many of us are literally lying down until the Christmas feeling goes away.
We do miss out on some of the "Jesus as a child" passages in Luke's gospel as a result. Today's reading is about Jesus travelling with his family and other pilgrims from Nazareth in the north to Jerusalem for the celebration of Passover. It sounds as though all went well until the return journey when Mary and Joseph realized that twelve-year-old Jesus had gone AWOL at some point.
Eventually they discover their precocious child in the temple, talking theology with religious elders who are saying "this kid is special." Mary scolds Jesus and says that she was anxious.
For decades I read this as a reminder that Jesus was wise at an early age, not like "normal" children but now I appreciate his normality in that he likely hung out with a pack of other kids who "free-ranged" it on the road. There is nothing here about the other parents shaming Mary and Joseph or calling the Childrens Aid Society. I couldn't find a single art image of Jesus playing as a boy, un-supervised or outside with other children. Why hasn't that interested Christians?
This brought to mind a recently CBC Radio The Current interview withJonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and bestselling author of The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (I've touched on this book before.) Haidt doesn't like what cellphones are doing to kids' brains, nor does it feel that it's healthy to be over-protective of children as they develop as persons. This exchange with host Matt Galloway struck me:
MG: You say that before we look at the evidence around kids living in these kind of phone-based lives, we have to, to step back and kind of define what childhood is. Is there a sense that we don't know anymore what it means to be a child?
JONATHAN HAIDT: I think we've forgotten the active role that we all need to play in it. We think that our job is to just keep them safe. We want to protect them from threats. But that's actually kind of wrong because they need to take risks. And so, we're over-protecting them in the real world.
We're not letting them have the experience that is what drives development. Experiences of going too fast on your bicycle and being scared, but then recovering or climbing a tree or getting into a fight with friends or an argument with friends. Kids need a lot of independent experience, and that's what makes up childhood. That's how they develop. But at least, especially in North America, we have this ridiculous idea that, no, our job is to be the chaperone, the helicopter, the snow plough, to solve problems for the kids. It's exactly the opposite.
As the story in Luke suggests Mary did get anxious but I imagine he was back doing kid stuff in no time. We had our 12 and 9 year-old grandchildren for a double sleepover and as always we wondered about how much latitude to give them. They made a great snow fort, with tunnels, and they lived to tell the tale. Thank you Jesus!
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