"If You Say So" (Luke 5:1-11)

God’s Frown

I have a friend who, when some minor misfortune befalls her, will regularly joke, “It’s because God hates me.”  She says it with a laugh. But knowing that humor can sometimes hide the truth, I decide on one occasion to press her on the matter. “Do you really think that’s the case?” She responds that, of course, rationally she knows this is not true. But even so, beneath the surface of her consciousness lurks the troubling image of a disapproving God. A God shaking his head. A God wagging his finger. Whenever something goes wrong, she feels God’s frown.

And when you feel God’s frown, life becomes an uphill slog, a thankless chore, a series of exasperated sighs. You work all day and see no results. You throw your net out for a catch of fish and come up empty. Again. And again.

When I hear someone respond to a word of encouragement or reassurance with a cynical or jaded, “If you say so,” I wonder if what they are feeling is the weight of God’s frown.

Of Sin and Shame

Listen again to what Simon says when Jesus invites him to let down his net. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets”  (5:5). I wonder if Simon is living under God’s frown. Some people hear a man already full of faith. They hear “If you say so”—which is to say, they hear a man who trusts in the word of Jesus.

But Simon’s astonishment when the nets begin to break and the boat nearly goes under, suggests to me that Simon was not expecting this.

And his next words—“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”—suggest to me that Simon has lived so squarely beneath God’s frown that he cannot comprehend this sudden turn in fortune, this unexpected grace. In the Greek, “Go away” comes from the same word from which we get the English word “exorcism.” In this sense, Simon was trying to exorcise the spirit of God from his life.

His words—“Go away from me”—also suggest to me the true origin of our sense of God’s frown. Simon is not the first character to tell Jesus to go away, to leave him alone. Just a little while earlier, a demon-possessed man in a synagogue had shouted, “Leave us alone!” (4:34). In both protests, I hear the voice of Satan. Satan gets his name from a Hebrew word that means something like “accuse.” Hence Satan is the “accuser.” His most crippling weapon is accusation. Which is to say, shame. It is not so much that Satan makes us do bad things. All Satan does is the get the ball rolling with the simple message, “You are bad.” The sense of accusation, of God frowning, is the wound that festers. It separates a person from God, not in reality, but in their imagination.

Why does Simon tell Jesus to leave? “I am a sinful man,” he says (5:8), expressing the self-accusation of Satan. He means, “I am bad, unworthy, undeserving.” He means, “I am a disappointment. I live under God’s frown.”

The original sense of the word “sin” was to miss the mark. It indicated the reality of our actions. Sometimes we miss the mark. But Satan’s trick has been to amplify and extend the meaning of “sin” to refer not only to what we do, but to who we are. Sin has become something like a trojan horse for Satan, sneaking into the church what God never intended to be there: shame. Separation.

The Real Exorcism

The verse in which Simon tells Jesus to leave, is the same verse in which Luke refers to Simon as “Simon Peter.” As though to signal that this is a pivotal moment, the moment when Simon will come to learn of his true self (even if the name comes later).

If this is indeed a pivotal moment in Peter’s life, it is Jesus who makes the pivot. To begin, Jesus does not consent to Simon’s request. He does not leave Simon. He cannot be exorcised from Simon’s life. It is, in fact, the opposite. He draws closer to him.

But what is most significant, perhaps, is not what Jesus says, but what he doesn’t say. Just like the loving father to the prodigal son, he makes no mention of sin. He does not say, “Yes, you are a sinful mess, but I love and forgive you anyway.” He does not say, “You’re twisted, but I’ll straighten you out.”

Instead he assures Simon that he is right where he is supposed to be: “Do not be afraid” (5:10). And without a word about shaping up or getting right with God or repentance, Jesus proceeds directly to insist that Simon is a blessing to the world. “From now on you will be catching people” (5:10). I am reminded of how, in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his followers bluntly, “You are the light of the world” (Matt 5:14). Not “You will be transformed into the light of the world” or “One day in the future, you will reflect my light into the world,” but “You are [right this very minute] the light of the world.”

The logic of our world goes like this. When a person is bad, they must repent. They must be changed. Then they are good and acceptable, and then we can welcome them to our tables. But the unruly logic of the gospel, the good news of God’s kingdom, is that a person is unshakably good, a child of God, bearing God’s image and blessing, always already welcome at God’s table. This truth, which nothing can erase, is the starting point for everything else. This truth is not the reward for repentance, but the unconditional blessing that precedes it and makes it possible.

Peter’s discipleship does not begin with his resolve to become a better person. It begins with Jesus exorcising a demon, so to speak—Jesus exorcising Simon’s shame, the perceived frown of God, and insisting that he has all he needs to follow Jesus and be a blessing. 

“Behold the One Beholding You…and Smiling”

Jesuit priest and spiritual director Bill Cain encountered something of this exorcism of shame later in life as he cared for his dying father.

“His father had become a frail man, dependent on Bill to do everything for him. Though he was physically not what he had been, and the disease was wasting him away, his mind remained alert and lively. In the role reversal common to adult children who care for their dying parents, Bill would put his father to bed and then read him to sleep, exactly as his father had done for him in childhood. Bill would read from some novel, and his father would lie there, staring at his son, smiling.

“Bill was exhausted from the day’s care and work and would plead with his dad, ‘Look, here’s the idea. I read to you. You fall asleep.’ Bill’s father would impishly apologize and dutifully close his eyes. But this wouldn’t last long. Soon enough, Bill’s father would pop one eye open and smile at his son. Bill would catch him and whine, ‘Now, come on.’ The father would, again, oblige, until he couldn’t anymore, and the other eye would open to catch a glimpse of his son. This went on and on, and after his father’s death, Bill realized that this evening ritual was really a story of a father who just couldn’t take his eyes off his kid. How much more so God?

“Anthony De Mello [an Indian priest] writes, ‘Behold the One beholding you, and smiling.’” [1] What a surprise it was to Simon—to behold the one beholding him, and to see not a frown but a smile. It changed “everything” for Simon Peter (5:11), Luke tells us.

And it changes everything for us, too. It is the root of the gospel, the beginning of the good news. A God who gazes upon us, who cannot take his eyes off us, who smiles in adoration. A God who declares to all of us what Jesus heard so clearly on the banks of the Jordan, “You are my beloved child, in whom I am wonderfully pleased” (3:22). This changes everything.

Prayer

God of tender gaze,
Who sees our goodness
And smiles—
Exorcise from our thinking
The image of your frown,
The idea you are disappointed
With who we are
…
So that we might live well,
Rooted and grounded
In the reality of your love
And our goodness,
And that we might bless others
By looking upon them
With the same tender eyes
And loving smile.
In Christ, who draws near: Amen.

---

[1] Told by Greg Boyle in Tattoos on the Heart (New York: Free Press, 2010), 19-20. 

"Inside Out" (Luke 4:16-30)

Excusing Ourselves from the Table

Chicago pastor Matt Fitzgerald shares quite vulnerably a story from early in his pastoral ministry, when he had the extraordinary opportunity to visit with a death-row inmate, who had been convicted of killing a teenage girl. The man had been awaiting his execution for twenty-one years at the time that Matt met with him. Needless to say, he had had plenty of time to think. To pray.

Seated at a table, his wrists chained together, the prisoner spoke to Matt about how his life had changed the last twenty-one years. “The gospel requires us not simply to be sorry,” he said, “but to be transformed by our sorrow. For me, this is a daily transformation.” He continued, “I will never forget my crime. But there has to come a point where you receive forgiveness and then forgive yourself. Not to justify your actions, but to accept God’s love….It does not matter where you are. It is who you are that matters. I am a person loved and forgiven by God.” Then he lifted his hand and shook his chains dismissively, as though they were false. Not true. As though they were pointless and had no hold on him.

Matt jumped back from the table, unable to stomach what he was hearing. It was the gospel, sure enough, the same gospel he preached on Sundays, but from a man who had committed a most monstrous crime. This man, Matt explains, “[was] claim[ing] the love of God as his own. He claimed that Jesus had already set him free. I could not stand it.” As far as Matt was concerned at the time, the man sitting at the table was a monster. That God’s love could heal him and reveal his true self to be a gentle child of God—that simply did not compute. Matt left shortly after that exchange, unable to remain at the same table, unable to see Christ in the man across the table.

Reversals

The gospel of Luke revels in reversals. The lowly lifted up. The outsiders welcomed in. These reversals and more come to typify the kingdom of God.

Consider a few of the parables that are unique to Luke, that only Luke tells. There is the parable of the rich man and his poor neighbor Lazarus, where the lowly Lazarus is lifted up by the angels and comforted, but the rich man suffers in his own alienation. There is the parable of the good Samaritan, where we find an outsider acting compassionately and receiving Jesus’ commendation while all the insiders think only of themselves. There is the parable of the tax collector and Pharisee, where the tax collector receives God’s mercy but the Pharisee receives only his own flimsy self-justification.

Today’s scripture, which presents us with Jesus’ first recorded sermon (so to speak), is filled with reversals that characterize Luke. To begin, we have Jesus reading Isaiah’s prophecy of “good news to the poor” and “release to the captives” (Luke 4:18-19; cf. Isa 61:1-2). In other words, we have Jesus lifting up the lowly. And as far as his hometown audience is concerned, so far, so good. They are all “amazed at [his] gracious words,” says Luke (4:20). The lifting up of the lowly does not really offend his audience. Most people can get on board with an idea like that, at least in the abstract. It’s a little like saying, wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had the food they need, the clothing, the shelter?

The Insiders Find Themselves Outside

It's what comes next that gets Jesus into hot water. And he had to know it was coming. In response to their awe and acclamation, he pivots hard and tells two stories from the scriptures of the time (our “Old Testament”) about how God provided food for a starving Sidonian widow and healed an enemy commander from Syria of his leprosy. Perhaps  these stories of God’s grace would have been tolerable if Jesus had left them without any of his own commentary. But he doesn’t. He adds his own spin to the stories by pointing out that, at the time of the stories, there were plenty of hungry widows in Israel. But God’s grace went specifically to a foreign widow. And there were plenty of lepers in Israel. But God’s grace went specifically to a foreign army general. In other words, Jesus emphasizes the extensive reach of God’s grace. It’s not just for “us,” he implies, it’s for “them.” In fact, it’s so wide and inclusive, that it even threatens our distinctions of “us” and “them.”

If you think about it, the dynamic here is like how almost everyone agrees that love is a good thing. But the unspoken assumption is that love is reserved for good or deserving people. Talk to someone in the middle of a nasty divorce, or a nation at war, or a minority people oppressed by the prevailing culture, and “love” is likely not considered a good or even viable action plan. The mere mention of it might be enough to fill the person or people with rage.

Certainly it fills the synagogue with rage (cf. 4:28). The old prophet Simeon had foreseen that Jesus would be “destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and … a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (2:34-35). Well, that’s what we see here, as Jesus’ fellow Israelites fall hard against the mention of God’s mercy and find themselves standing opposed to it.

Which suggests that, in the scheme of the gospel, when the so-called insiders find themselves on the outside, it’s not because God has removed them there forcibly. They’re standing on the outside of their own free will—simply because they’re not able to tolerate the mercy of God.

“Come home!”

If one of the main themes of Luke is the reversals of God’s kingdom, another theme is the homecoming of God’s kingdom. Last week, we heard John the Baptizer introduced with a snippet of Isaiah, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’” (3:4; cf. Isa 40:3). When Isaiah first proclaimed these words, the people of Israel were living in exile. The good news that Isaiah was delivering was that God and God’s people would be going home. All four gospels introduce John the Baptizer with this prophecy from Isaiah, which suggests that John the Baptizer is proclaiming this same homecoming. Only this time, it’s not from one place to another place (Babylon to Judea), but from one way of living (the world) to God’s way of living (the kingdom). “Come home!” John calls.

In today’s scripture, Jesus continues the theme, as the scripture that he reads in the synagogue—also from Isaiah!—refers to “the year of the Lord’s favor” (4:19). Which is the Jubilee year, an almost mythical time legislated in Leviticus (but in all likelihood rarely if ever fulfilled in practice) when all land returns to its original owners and debts are cancelled and slaves are freed. In other words, the Jubilee year is a year of homecoming. If you had lost your land, or even lost your freedom, the Jubilee year is when you returned home. Like John, Jesus is proclaiming, “Come home!” 

Welcoming Others Home

The paradox that we see in today’s scripture is that coming home is perhaps harder for the so-called “insiders” than for “outsiders.” We only have to think of another parable unique to Luke, the parable of the prodigal son. It is the good son, who has lived his whole life at home, who misses out on the party.

Matt, the pastor who visited the death-row inmate, was unable to compute that the man in front of him was not the monster he’d expected. He was unable to sit with him any longer at the same table. But years later, he reflected on the encounter in the light of today’s scripture, particularly where Jesus says, “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives” (4:18). “What does it mean,” he ponders, “to believe in a God who opposes imprisonment, be it behind bars of iron or bars of guilt? It is good news to the captives, but those of us who think that we are free tend to receive it as the opposite”—as Matt himself received it on that day. I think that as long as we see other people through the eyes of our culture, as deserving and undeserving, as good and evil, the mercy of God will enrage us. It will be intolerable. Like the good son, we will miss out on the party.

The good news is that the invitation that Jesus offers us never expires. “Come home!” he calls. The difficult part of the good news, is that to come home may actually be a matter not of where we go, but whom we receive. To come home may mean welcoming others home—especially the people whom we cannot comprehend, or whom we think extremely annoying, or whom we think undeserving.

The Jesuit priest Greg Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries, which has become the largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program in the world, recounts a story where he finds one of the program participants, a former gang member and drug addict, Maria, distressed at the possibility that she might not get into heaven. Maria had gone to a church and heard a sermon that had warned about God’s judgment. After numerous attempts to assure her of God’s love and mercy and forgiveness, Greg looked into the eyes of the gang member and said, “Maria, how about this? If you’re not heaven when I show up…then I’m not going! I’ll go wherever you are.”

It’s certainly an unconventional take on our perennial speculations about the afterlife, but I think it captures very well the Spirit of the Lord that was upon Jesus in his hometown synagogue.

The irony is that when so-called “insiders,” such as Jesus’ audience in Nazareth, claim their inside privilege or heritage against others who are undeserving, they find themselves standing opposed to their own God, a God of mercy. They find themselves on the outside. Like the good son, missing the party. Like Pastor Matt years ago, excusing himself from the table.

On the flipside, Jesus invites “insiders” to join him as he goes outside to extend God’s mercy and God’s welcome home. So, when Greg believes so much in God’s mercy for Maria that he would prefer to join her on the outside, I think ironically enough he finds himself ever deeper inside the heart of God. He turns things inside out, just as Jesus is always doing. In the process, a beautiful thing happens. Both he and Maria find themselves home. At a party, at a banquet. Together in God’s mercy.

Prayer

Merciful God,
Whose love makes possible
The most stunning reversals:
Attune our hearts to our own need
…
That we might know our common humanity
With others, who have the same need;
That we might know our homecoming
To be one and the same as their homecoming;
And that we might indeed
Come home
To the banquet of your love.
In Christ, the welcome of God in the flesh: Amen.

"The Holy Spirit and Fire" (Luke 3:1-22)

 

Fire-and-Brimstone Preaching

John the Baptizer does not mince words. He addresses his audience as a “brood of vipers!” (3:7). He warns them about “the wrath to come” (3:7). He talks about a mysterious ax and unfruitful trees being cut down and thrown into the fire (3:9). Later he talks about the messiah carrying a “winnowing fork,” separating wheat from chaff and burning the chaff with “unquenchable fire” (3:17).

Is John the Baptizer the father of fire-and-brimstone preaching? I wonder. The tradition of fire-and-brimstone preaching revolves around fear, which can be a powerful motivator. If your audience is faced with the threat of a fiery torment, they will likely be willing to do whatever you say.  Perhaps fear is the reason that the crowds are willing to change. Perhaps it is why they ask John, “What then should we do?”

Fast-forward two thousand years, and we now have an ample amount of data to study the effects of fire-and-brimstone, fear-based preaching. We can ask, “So, how’s that been working out for us?” For a long time, it worked well enough, institutionally speaking. It kept bottoms in pews. But one of its side effects is what we might call “moralism”—a tendency to see the world in good and bad, right and wrong, so that we can ensure that we are on the right side of the divide and out of the fiery flames.

But as Jesuit priest Greg Boyle observes, moralism hasn’t actually kept us moral. It’s only kept us apart. It doesn’t result in a genuine transformation of character, but rather leaves us jittery with judgement toward others and shame toward ourselves. Fire-and-brimstone, fear-based preaching is to our faith what sugar is to our body—an immediate rush of energy, followed by a crash; an unhealthy diet, an unsustainable way of living.

Is Fire Part of the Equation?

So I’m inclined to think there’s more going on in John the Baptizer’s wilderness escapades than simply fire-and-brimstone preaching. To be sure, his message of repentance is meant to deliver a shock to the system. But perhaps the shock isn’t what we, through centuries of fire-and-brimstone preaching, have been conditioned to hear. The whole point of fire-and-brimstone theology as we know it is to avoid the fire. But John the Baptizer says that the messiah will baptize with “the Holy Spirit and fire,” which to me sounds like saying that fire is part of the equation, a part of what it means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.

What would it mean for fire to be part of the equation? Let me offer up a parable to explore the possibility that fire is not damnation but part of salvation. Like John the Baptizer’s preaching in the wilderness, this parable—which was originally crafted by Peter Rollins, a Northern Irish theologian—may be a bit of a shock. My hope is that, like John the Baptizer’s preaching, the shock might be constructive.

A Parable: Finding Faith

Once upon a time, there lived a fiery preacher. Early in his ministry, he discovered that he had a “powerful but unusual gift.” Whenever he prayed for someone, they would lose their faith. The preacher quickly learned to delegate the task of praying to others, lest he cause his parishioners to lose their faith.

One day, the preacher was flying across the country to attend a conference. The man beside him in the airplane struck up a conversation. The preacher learned that his neighbor was a businessman, “a very powerful and ruthless merchant banker.”[1] When the businessman noticed a Bible in the preacher’s hands, he shared that he was a Christian himself. “‘The world of business is a cold one,’ he confided to the preacher, ‘and in my line of work I find myself in situations that challenge my Christian convictions. But I try, as much as possible, to remain true to my faith. Indeed, I attend a local church every Sunday, participate in a prayer circle, engage in some youth work, and contribute to a weekly Bible study. These activities help to remind me of who I really am.’”[2]

“After listening carefully to the businessman’s story, the preacher began to realize the purpose of his unseemly gift. So he turned to the businessman and said, ‘Would you allow me to pray a blessing into your life?’”[3] The businessman nodded enthusiastically and bowed his head. The preacher prayed a short prayer as the plane landed, and the two men parted ways.

A few years later, the preacher was taking the same flight across the country to a conference when—lo and behold!—the businessman was sitting beside him. As soon as they recognized each other, the businessman broke into a story of how his last few years had gone. “You won’t believe it, but when you prayed for me, I lost my belief in the Bible, church, and even God. Suddenly, the rest of my life became incredibly unpleasant—like being enclosed in a hot, stuffy room without a fan or air conditioning or anything cold to drink. Without religion to make me feel good about myself, to assure me of salvation when I died, I had to face the reality that I was a hard-nosed and cruel businessman working in a corrupt business. I began to despise what I did. Within months, I had a breakdown. I resigned from my job, gave all the money I’d made to the poor, and began to use my expertise to help others.” He paused, and tears began to fall down his face. “I have to thank you, dear friend—for helping me discover my faith.”

A Refining Fire

The word religion comes from a Latin root that means “to bind.” In one sense, religion is the glue that keeps our world together, the center of gravity that holds everything in place. This can become problematic, though, when God is trying to change things as they are, to make all things new. “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’” (3:8), John the Baptizer tells his Jewish audience, perhaps because their heritage as God’s chosen people has led them to settle and become comfortable in a status quo that serves neither them nor the wider world to whom they are meant to be a blessing. In a similar way, the promise of eternal salvation held everything together for the businessman from our parable. Only when his original beliefs went up in flames and he no longer had that promise to hold everything together, could he become honest enough about reality to make some real changes. The parable is left open-ended, but I choose to interpret that the businessman has actually returned to church and reading the Bible and praying to God. Only now, he does all of this in a different way. He no longer lives for the afterlife. He lives for the present life. He trusts that God’s kingdom is in his midst and that he is called to receive it by learning from the gentle and humble heart of Jesus. He changes his way of living so that he might enter the kingdom of God now, rather than later.

When John the Baptist talks about fire, about unfruitful trees being cut down and burned, about chaff being separated from the wheat and burned, perhaps he is not telling the crowds to avoid the fire, but rather to welcome it. Perhaps the fire is part of his way of describing repentance (and how it sometimes feels). Perhaps he is describing how God’s salvation works. We are baptized, he says, not only with the Holy Spirit but also with fire. There is a rich tradition elsewhere in scripture of fire as an image of refinement. The Hebrew prophets occasionally spoke of God as a consuming fire that refines us as fire refines precious metals.

Some of our prayers in today’s service have borrowed words and images from a poem-prayer of pastor Ted Loder (which I’ve printed extra copies of and left in the fellowship hall).[4] It is a challenging prayer, but one worth wrestling with. Loder acknowledges a host of difficult or negative experiences, such as hurt and fear and confusion and shame, and he finds God’s grace in each experience. Which is to say, he finds God’s refining fire in each experience. This does not mean that God causes these experiences, but only that God calls to us through them. God uses them. They become instruments of grace, axes lying at the root of unfruitful trees, winnowing forks separating wheat from chaff—inviting us to let go of perfection and grand expectations; inviting us to drop our masks and share more vulnerably with each other; inviting us to surrender our designs on the future (and our regrets for the past) and instead to find God in the present moment.

Fear-based religion and moralism hasn’t kept us moral. It’s only kept us apart. It hasn’t changed us, it’s only entrenched us in judgment and shame. As we hear John the Baptizer’s preaching today, maybe this time we can hear something a little different. Not the threats of a fire to avoid, but the encouragement to welcome the full baptism of our Lord, which includes fire. Maybe instead of running away from the pain in our lives, we can go through it, as precious metal passes through flames, as a baptized person passes through the waves.

Maybe…it’s only a suggestion. As always, you can take what rings true in all that I’ve said, and you can leave the rest.

Prayer

Holy God,
Whose love refreshes like water
Even as it burns like fire—
With the assurance that we are your children,
Beloved and pleasing in your eyes,
May we be encouraged and empowered
To welcome the fiery side of baptism,
To find your presence in the flames.
…
Help us to change and grow
In the manner that Jesus grew in wisdom and grace,
Not through gritted teeth and white knuckles,
But through a gentle and humble heart.
In Christ, who reveals God with us: Amen.

---

[1] Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2009), 57-58.

[2] Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic, 57-58.

[3] Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic, 57-58.

[4] Ted Loder, “Pry Me Off Dead Center,” in Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1981), 102-103.

Child of God (Luke 2:41-52)

The Darndest Things

I’ve never watched the television show Kids Say the Darndest Things. But as I read today’s scripture, I wondered whether the sentiment didn’t cross Mary’s own mind. I decided to do a bit of research and see just what kind of “darndest things” kids have said on the show. Here are a couple of my favorites:

In one exchange, a boy is asked, “Do you like school?” “Yes,” he responds, before explaining: “I like it when it’s over!” This begs the question, “What don’t you like about school?” to which the boy responds, “The homework. It’s like getting a job [and] you’re not even paid.”^[1]

In a more recent iteration of the show, the host Tiffany Haddish asks a six-year-old boy, “What does love mean?” The boy responds with a very relatable metaphor. “It means giving someone your last piece of candy … even if you really want it.” The host marvels at the response, “Aww, that’s so sweet! So, would you give your candy to someone?” The boys responds, “Only if it’s a lollipop. If it’s a chocolate bar, I’m keeping that.”^[2]

“Darndest” may be the word in the show’s title, but I wonder if “honest” or “truest” isn’t a more accurate description of the things children say. Children say the honest truths that we think or feel but have learned to hide. For example, love is a big sacrifice, and there are some things that maybe we’d prefer to hold onto—whether that’s chocolate or our independence!

When Jesus later recites from scripture, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies, you [God] have prepared praise for yourself” (Matt 21:16; cf. Ps 8:2), I wonder if he’s not referring to this childlike honesty. What else is a child’s honest happiness (or hunger for happiness) but the praise of all the goodness of life, all the gifts of God?

Jesus’ Jewish Childhood

Today’s scripture records the only words attributed to Jesus before his ministry begins. He is only twelve years old. And it is only the briefest of snapshots. Yet all who hear him are “amazed” (2:47). It seems that Jesus may have said some of the darndest—or truest—things. I wonder what he said.

Luke sets the scene by explaining that Jesus has gone with his parents to Jerusalem for the Passover. It is a curiosity that in Luke, although Jesus grows up in the hometown of Nazareth, we only ever see him as a child in Jerusalem. The point is clear. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus are a faithful Jewish family. They order their lives according to the stories and symbols and laws of the Jewish faith, first circumcising the baby Jesus (Luke 2:21), then going to the temple to dedicate the infant Jesus as a firstborn child (Luke 2:22-24), and now going to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover (Luke 2:41), the festival that celebrates how God liberates us from the forces that enslave.

Although the tradition of the bar and bat  mitzvah, when a Jewish child becomes responsible for their faith and behavior, does not evolve until centuries later, commentators suggest that Jesus’ age of twelve is about the time when boys would begin studying the law. So it’s no surprise that we find Jesus “sitting” among the teachers in the temple (Luke 2:46), the position that disciples would take before their rabbis (cf. Acts 22:3). And it’s no surprise that we find Jesus “asking them questions,” which is what disciples would commonly do in the presence of their rabbis (Luke 2:46). Thus far, we see Jesus growing up as any faithful Jewish boy would grow up. He goes to Jerusalem for all the required rituals.He celebrates the Passover. He positions himself as a disciple learning from the rabbis. No surprises here.

But then Jesus opens his mouth, and there is a surprise. “All who heard him were amazed,” Luke reports, “at his understanding and his answers” (2:47).

Epiphany: Appearance and a Light-Bulb Moment

Today we are celebrating the beginning of Epiphany, the season that follows on the heels of Christmas. The word “epiphany” literally means appearance. Accordingly, Epiphany is the season when we celebrate the ways that Christ appears to the world. One traditional Epiphany story is the wise men, or magi, who come from afar to see Jesus. Because the magi come from distant lands, their encounter with Jesus symbolically marks Jesus’ appearance to all the world—not just to King Herod and the Judeans, but to distant kings and other peoples too.

But Epiphany is about more than Jesus appearing. Our common usage of “epiphany” as a light-bulb moment—such as, I was just washing the dishes, thinking about nothing in particular, when I had a sudden epiphany—suggests the significance of Epiphany. Not only does Jesus appear. His appearance opens the eyes and the minds of onlookers. His appearance results in a light-bulb moment for others.

But after Luke gives us the tantalizing detail that all who heard Jesus were “amazed” at his understanding and answers, he disappointingly reveals nothing about what Jesus actually said that amazed his teachers and all the onlookers. We’re left to wonder what the light-bulb moment was for his audience.

Son of God:
Exclusive Privilege or Shared Identity?

Just moments later, however, Luke does tell us the words that come out of Jesus’ mouth. In fact, these are the first words in Jesus’ life that are recorded in the gospels. When his mother chastises him, “Child, why have you treated us like this?” he responds with the darndest—or truest?—response, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). However you hear this response, Luke goes on to assure us that Jesus is not being a smart-alec; he returns with his parents to Nazareth and is obedient to them (Luke 2:51).

As these are the only words that Luke lets slip out of Jesus’ mouth, I wonder if they are not representative of all that Jesus has been saying that has amazed and astonished the people around him. In other words, I wonder if these words do not serve as a summary of Jesus’ stunning insight. And the insight is stunningly simple: I am a child of God.

Of course, we might think this is obvious. After all, we’ve already read the story of Mary’s miraculous conception and Gabriel’s revelation that Jesus is the Son of God. But I wonder if “son of God” is meant to be the exclusive, unique designation that we have traditionally made it out to be, as though Jesus is something we’re never meant to be. The gospel of John explains in his prologue that Christ has given to all who trust in him “power to become children of God” (John 1:12). Athanasius, an Egyptian church leader in the fourth century, explained the purpose of the incarnation in similar terms, saying, “God became what we are, so that we might become what God is.” (He did not mean to imply, of course, that humanity would take the place of God, but rather that in Christ humanity might come to know their place in God—as, for example, children know their place in a family.)

Wondering What the Boy Jesus Said…

So I wonder if in the temple Jesus didn’t say some of the darndest—and truest—things revealing his sense of God’s nearness, God’s intimacy, God’s love. I wonder if he talked about God as his “abba,” his dad. I wonder if he talked about God’s kingdom as a world in which he was already living, a world that was already among the people, available to anyone who would live in God’s love. I wonder if he talked about other people—including the poor, the blind, the Roman centurion, the tax collector—as his brothers and sisters. I wonder if what so amazed the people at the temple was the same thing that so astonished his mother, namely, that he spoke with the precocious assurance that he was a child of God and this was God’s world and we could all enjoy and share God’s goodness if we but believed in it.

Prayer

Tender father and mother of us all,
Whose love we come to know most fully
Through our brother Jesus Christ—
Some days our faith is full,
Others it verges on empty.
May the words of Christ,
The darndest things he says,
Dwell richly in us
…
That we, like him, might grow
In wisdom and grace.
In Christ, a child of God: Amen.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmcJCFFGGSM&ab_channel=Kyoot, accessed December 30, 2024.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWVWUYxlD7A&ab_channel=27BoysFamily, accessed December 30, 2024.