The Familiar and the Unfamiliar

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

December 27, 2015

The Familiar and the Unfamiliar

Selected Texts

It is a familiar story,

almost as familiar as the birth narratives.

It is the only story in the Bible that captures Jesus

between his birth and his ministry,

a charming story found in the gospel of Luke,

about Jesus as a 12-year-old boy,

an adolescent.

Do you remember the story?

“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 did not know it.

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?

Look, your father and I have been

searching for you in great anxiety.”

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.

It is Passover,

a time of holiness and ritual

for the children of God

throughout the land of Judah.

And there was no more holy and special way

to celebrate the Passover

than to journey to Jerusalem

and celebrate the Passover there.

And that’s what Joseph and Mary did each year –

they and other faithful children of God

set out for Jerusalem.

It was a trek that would take them

about 5 days from Nazareth.

Along the way, others would join them,

the group of pilgrims swelling

as they got closer and closer to Jerusalem.

All of the faithful would gather to recall

God’s words to the Israelites

spoken through Moses

more than a thousand years before:

“This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.

You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord;

Throughout your generations

you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread;…

On the first day you shall hold a solemn assembly,

and on the seventh day [another] solemn assembly;

no work shall be done on those days;

…You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread,

for on this very day

I brought your [ancestors] out of the land of Egypt:

you shall observe this day throughout your generations

as a perpetual ordinance.”

(Exodus 12:14-17)

It was a time of holy observance,

but it was also a time of celebration,

as the children of Israel recalled how God

had freed their ancestors from slavery

and led them out of Egypt,

then through the wilderness

and on to the land where they now lived,

lived in relative freedom,

even if they lived under the iron rule

of the Roman Empire.

At the end of the week,

the Passover concluded,

all of the pilgrims would have

streamed out of Jerusalem,

heading east, west, south,

and for Joseph and Mary, north,

back to Nazareth.

In our story, a day into their return trip,

in a scene reminiscent of the movie, “Home Alone”,

Joseph and Mary realized

that their son Jesus was not with the group,

that he must have been left behind in Jerusalem.

Reading the story as Luke wrote it,

we can almost feel Joseph and Mary’s anxiety

as they raced frantically back to the city,

and then, once they were

inside the gates of Jerusalem,

desperately scouring the dusty alleys,

shouting out their son’s name – Jesus! Jesus!

searching for him everywhere,

their fear growing with every passing moment.

Could the boy have been abducted

and sold into slavery?

Could he have had an accident –

might he be lying bleeding and with broken bones,

perhaps even unconscious,

no one to care for him,

no one even noticing him.  

And then,

after three days of feverish searching,

Joseph and Mary finally found their son,

found him in a place

they never would have imagined he’d be,

a place they never imagined

he’d have any interest in –

the Temple!

But there he was: a 12-year-old boy,

sitting among the Elders and Teachers

“listening to them and asking them questions.”

Exhausted by worry,

Mary blurted to her son,

“Child, why have you treated us like this?

Look, your father and I

have been searching for you in great anxiety.”

Surely any child would have responded

with some form of apology,

some form of the words, “I’m sorry”,

some acknowledgement that he recognized

that he’d done something wrong in staying behind;

that he’d been wrong

not to say anything to his parents;

that he understood that he had

caused his parents painful anxiety.

But Jesus didn’t respond that way.

His was almost a dismissive, unconcerned response,

“Why were you searching for me?

Did you not know that

I must be in my Father’s house?”

(Luke 2:41-52)

Jesus seemed to be saying to his mother and father,

“If you knew anything about me,

you would have known where to find me;

you would have known that I’d be here,

here in my Father’s house.”

We read this passage from Luke’s gospel

usually on the Sunday right after Christmas

to help us transition,

to help us make the jump from Jesus’ infancy,

which we celebrate each year

with such joy on Christmas,

to Jesus’ ministry as an adult,

as a 30-year-old man.

We race through this story,

eager to get on to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry,

without stopping to ponder the story,

to ask questions about it,

to read it closer,

to read it with deeper eyes,

as one writer puts it.

Why, for example,

is this the only story we have

in the four gospels

that captures Jesus as a boy?

Why didn’t Matthew, Mark or John

tell us anything about the years

between Jesus’ birth and

the day he stepped into the waters of the Jordan

to be baptized by his cousin John?

Why are those years otherwise a complete blank

in the Bible?  

As Jesus sat in the Temple,

was he truly aware of his divinity,

as the story seems to suggest?

When he spoke of God as his Father,

did Jesus think of himself as the Son of God?

What questions could Jesus have possibly

asked the Teachers?

What could they have taught him

that he did not already know?

What was it that he sought to learn?

Here’s where screens would be helpful

because I’d show you how some of the great artists

of the Renaissance imagined the scene,

artists like Durer, Veronese, and Rembrandt,

artists who could not imagine

Jesus learning from the Teachers,

painting the scene instead

with Jesus clearly in charge,

Jesus teaching the teachers.

Was that how it was?

Why did he stay behind?

He’d been in Jerusalem for a full week –

hadn’t he had ample time to sit among the teachers

and ask them his questions,

learn from them?

What did Jesus mean when he said,

“I must be in my Father’s house?”

In fact, is that the best translation of the Greek,

or should we read it as Jesus saying,

“I must be about my Father’s business,”

as some scholars argue?

Eugene Peterson’s The Message has Jesus saying,

“I had to be here,

dealing with the things of my Father.”

What things?

What business?

What was he thinking?

And of course,

why didn’t Jesus say something to his parents?

Surely he could not have been that uncaring,

that unkind.

Surely he must have known that his parents

would have been frantic with worry

once they realized he was missing.

We’re about to start the Year of the Bible,

many of us committed to reading through

the entire Bible over the course of the next year,

the next 365 days.

Actually, we will have 366 days –

we get an extra day’s bonus

because 2016 is a Leap Year!

We’ll read texts and stories that sound familiar,

texts and stories we think we know well;

but if we read with deeper eyes,

read deeply, closely,

we will surely find much that is unfamiliar

even in those texts and stories

that are most familiar.

Why, for example,

are the two birth narratives so different?

We have conflated the two stories over the centuries,

braided them together for Christmas,

but Matthew and Luke tell us

two quite different stories.

Why?

And why didn’t Mark and John tell us anything

about Jesus’ birth?

Every Sunday we join our voices together

in the Lord’s Prayer,

but when we get to the gospel of Matthew’s version

of the prayer,

it will look only somewhat familiar.

The same, too, for Luke’s version:

different from Matthew’s,

different from the familiar words

we say on Sunday morning.

Familiar, but unfamiliar.

You’ll read through stories about Adam and Eve,

Noah and the Flood,

Moses, King David, Solomon—

you’ll find much that is unfamiliar

even in the familiar.

The familiar portrayal of God in the Old Testament

is as an angry God,

the God the children of Israel feared so much

that they said to Moses,

‘You speak to us, and we will listen;

but do not let God speak to us,

or we will die.’”

(Exodus 19 & 20)

But you will also read passages in the Old Testament

that portray God as nurturing, tender,        

caring,

passages that will likely be be unfamiliar to you:

Who could imagine

the Old Testament God saying,

“As a mother comforts her child,

so I will comfort you.”

(Isaiah 66:13)

We begin on Friday,

We begin our journey through Holy Scripture,

God’s written word to us,

through the familiar, and the unfamiliar,

all the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

AMEN