Preached by Frank Faine, Pastoral Intern of the Sunshine Cathedral, at the 10:20 am service on Sunday, January 8, 2006.
The grace of our Master Teacher — the love of God in the unity of Spirit — be with you all.
O Wisdom of the Ages: Your Spirit brooded on creation, shaping our world into a happy and healthy home. Your first words brought order to Chaos. Your wisdom continues to fill our lives with wonder, whether spoken by prophets and wise men and women of old or coming from the lips of Jesus, our Master Teacher, who summed up Truth as the manifestation of your Love in our lives.
Yet we sometimes cling to our ignorance and our prejudices. Lord, have mercy.
We resist the urge to “come of age”. Christ, have mercy.
We’d rather continue as little dependent children. Lord, have mercy.
Let your Spirit of Wisdom move upon us anew and make us a new creation, filled with your Truth, as we follow Jesus, our Master, who embodied all that is True, in whose name and example we pray. Amen.
Gitanjali (Song Offering) – Rabindranath Tagore
The child who is decked with prince’s robes and who has jeweled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust, he keeps himself from the world and is afraid ever to move. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.
Infancy Gospel of Thomas 19 (Miller)
When he was twelve years old his parents went to Jerusalem, as was their custom, for the Passover festival, along with their traveling companions. After Passover they returned home. As they returned, the child Jesus went back to Jerusalem, but his parents thought he was in the caravan. When they had gone a day’s journey, they sought him among their relatives. When they didn’t find him, they were upset and returned to the city to look for him.
Three days later they found him in the temple, seated among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. Everyone paid attention to him and all were amazed how, though a child, he was able to silence the elders and teachers of the people, interpreting the main points of the Law and the enigmatic sayings of the prophets.
His mother Mary approached. “Why did you do this to us, child,” she said to him. “Look how we have been searching for you in our grief.”
“Why are you looking for me?” Jesus answered. “Don’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
The scholars and Pharisees asked, “Are you the mother of this child?”
“I am,” Mary responded.
They said to her, “You of all women are to be congratulated, because God has blessed the fruit of your womb. We have never seen nor heard of such glory or such virtue and wisdom.”
Jesus got up, followed his mother, and was obedient to his parents. His mother remembered all these events. Jesus grew in wisdom and age and grace.
A Jewish man, in tears walks up to another Jewish man. “What’s the matter the second man asks?” “I sent my son to Jerusalem to become a better Jew, and he comes back a Christian. What am I to do,” the first one replies. The second pauses for a moment, “You know funny that you should say that, because, I too, sent my son to Jerusalem to become a better Jew and he came back a Christian. Let’s go talk to the Rabbi.
So the two men visit the Rabbi and say, Rabbi we both sent our sons to Jerusalem to become a better Jews, and they both came back Christians. What are we to do?” The Rabbi replied, “You know it’s funny that you say that, because I sent my son to Jerusalem to become a better Jew and he came back a Christian. Let us pray for an answer.”
So the three men began praying. After a few minutes they heard the voice of God from heaven say, “You know, it’s funny you say that…”
Aside from being a cute story, this little tale underscores the two key questions we want consider as we reflect on this infancy narrative we have just heard from the Gospel of Thomas: First, whose child was Jesus? Was he only Mary and Joseph’s son or an incarnate expression of the Divine plan? And second, whose child are we? Are we just the present generation of the various families we have come from? Or, like Jesus, are we human expressions of God’s Spirit?
As we begin to look at this story for the answers to these questions, I think we should bear in mind that this story might very well be a censored version of what really happened. What parents would leave a crowded city -- one that was not their home -- and journey a whole day without noting that their child was missing? Today they would be charged with child neglect. What 12-year-old from a loving home would calmly detach from his parents, enter the portals of probably the most daunting building in the city, and be found three days later in solemn debate with theologians of note? And then, what Jewish momma, finding her missing child after three days, would simply inquire why he did what he did? Can you imagine her saying in polite Aramaic, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously." Give me a break!
Yet, even though we don’t get a full version of all the drama and domestic dynamics, including more of what we might imagine the dialogue that took place between Mary and Jesus (although we do have get a hint it in what appears to a veiled precious remark when Jesus says he must be about his “Father’s business!); I don’t think that’s the true intent of this story. Theses verses from the Gospel of Thomas and a parallel passage in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel are the only records we have of Jesus’ childhood. It is from both of these we get our first glimpse of how Jesus begins to grapple with being both human and divine.
In both versions of the telling of this event, the mystery of the incarnation is put squarely before us. Just as we have recently celebrated the birth of Jesus as that human child of divine origin, this story now asks us to ponder just what it means for God to take on human flesh both in Jesus, and in us. Here we see Jesus portrayed as a real child with an actual family, in fact he is shown as almost a teenage. And like most teenagers he probably wished his parents would not “bug” him so much, and just leave him alone.
Together with his family, they have made their annual pilgrimage during the Passover festival to worship in the Temple. Yet, this time something stirs in him, something he can’t quite put his finger on. During the return trip he sneaks back to Jerusalem. There in the Temple he sits among scholars and elders engaging and amazing them as they debate the intricacies and fine points of the Law. Three days later in walk his parents. His mother, as mother would be, was no doubt both irate and relieved to find him there after a frantic search. Their brief interchange, highly condensed and edited in the text as we have already noted, only serves to highlight the apparent conflict between what his parents sense his responsibilities to them and the rest of his human family, and Jesus’ emerging sense to “be about my Father’s business”.
Certainly Jesus seems to be behaving like any normal teenager as he begins to struggle with what his parents expect of him and what he hew senses his emerging identity.
However, in the midst of this conflict, comes an ironic twist. The scholars and teachers congratulate Mary telling her God has blessed her with this child. They recognize the divine wisdom and virtue in Jesus. And Jesus without further argument gets up and obediently returns home with his parents
To be sure all of this confused Mary and Joseph. As the text notes Mary remembered and pondered all these events. Luke adds “she treasured all this things in her heart”. And as a final editorial remark we are told Jesus continues to grow in “wisdom and age and grace”.
As I reflect on the ending of this story, especially the comments of the scholars to Mary as well as her response to them, I reminded of the following words from the contemporary Indian poet Janaka Stagnaro:
Each child is a spark of laughter
A gleam in a smiling god’s eye…
Each child holds the fire of heaven
to be tended and allowed to set forth ablaze
…to arrive as seeds for humanity’s dreams.
I think these lines offer a clue not only to what Mary and the scholars were starting to understand Jesus, but also may provide some shape to the answer we seek about just whose child we are.
This child Jesus, like all children, holds the spark of the divine in human form. I suspect Mary was coming to grips with this: Jesus as her human child was both a gift from God and only hers temporarily, to be raised and nurtured by her and the rest of his family to prepare him to assume his role in the God’s divine plan.
The Jesus in this story knows this, too. Returning to Nazareth he obediently took his place as a son in this human family, allowing his experience there to enable him “to grow in the wisdom and favor of God and man”. The spiritual formation that will occur for him here over the ensuing 20 years before he begins his public ministry will become the place were he not only learns whose child he is, but also how he may show us whose child we are to become.
Perhaps, the following passage from Margery Williams’s children’s fable The Velveteen Rabbit provides us some concluding thoughts, for it seems to me that the crux of the answers to both questions we have asked resides with being “real”, of our learning to live in that mystery of being a human expression of divine love within a specific time and place She writes:
“What is real?” asked the Rabbit when he and the skin horse were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made, “said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you’re real, you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints… and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people… who don’t understand
And once we become real like this we may as Jan Richardson, a contemporary theologian and spiritual writer, observes, be able to hold and live these questions, to have them bless us as we come to know the God in whose life is our life.
I am God’s Divine Child
My life is a gift from God.
I am human expression of God’s Divine Love
I manifest God’s Divine Love to others.
I rejoice at being God’s Divine Child to the world
And so it is. Amen.
The final word comes from a popular song by songwriter Joan Osborne:
If God had a name what would it be?
If God had a face what would it look like?
and what you want to see?
