Merry Christmas! As we come together on this second day of Christmas, it seems appropriate to remember that the Christmas season begins on Christmas day and continues for twelve days to end just before Epiphany. And so we continue to celebrate the gift of Christmas today.
Over the last few weeks, we have heard stories anticipating Jesus coming into the world. We have heard the visions of the prophets, and we have heard the stories of the angels appearing to Zechariah and Mary. We have heard the stories about John, the forerunner along the way. And we have been told about the shepherds who were tending their flocks when the angels appeared to announce Jesus’ birth. Now on this first Sunday after Christmas, we find a scene of Jesus as a youth (see Luke 2:41-52; cf. 1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26).
One of the reasons I like this first Sunday after Christmas is because it is a reminder that Jesus, God in the flesh, lived a real life here on earth. So often, we read stories of the baby at Christmas and then jump right to full-grown Jesus starting his ministry in the world. We forget sometimes that Jesus lived a life in between.
That is why this Sunday in the Church year is so important. On this particular Sunday, rather than looking at the birth of Jesus, we usually wind up with a story from somewhere early in Jesus’ life. It is a good reminder that Jesus had a life between his birth and his baptism.
This is a point made humorously in the movie, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” For those that aren’t familiar, this movie tells the story of the fictional race car driver, Ricky Bobby, and his rise to fame, but in the humorous style of Will Ferrell. Now, I’m not trying to promote the movie, but Ricky Bobby’s image of Jesus does help to make my point. He prays frequently throughout the movie, and he always prays to the baby Jesus ("Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus," "Dear Lord baby Jesus," "Dear Tiny Jesus," etc.). When his wife finally asks him about it, he says that he just prefers the Christmas Jesus, but that she can pray to bearded Jesus or teenage Jesus or whatever Jesus she wants to. His point, whether he is aware of it or not, is that because Jesus lived a human life, we can pick an image of him at any age. We can find an image of Jesus that we can relate to in our own lives.
Next week, we will return to the earliest days of Jesus as we read the story of the Magi before we jump to Jesus’ baptism, but this week’s gospel reading is the only place in the canonical gospels that we explicitly hear about Jesus’ life between his birth and the beginning of his ministry around the age of thirty. It can be easy to forget that Jesus was born and grew up, going through all of the same things we go through as we get older. But this is in fact the key message in the incarnation: that God became human and lived in the world as we do.
This is the same point that Ricky Bobby is making with his wife, and it is why we have this reading here in the midst of the Christmas season. The point is that Christmas, while we know it as a celebration of Jesus’ birth, is truly a celebration of the incarnation, of God becoming human. God came into the world to be with us, to live life alongside us, to show us what it means to live into the kingdom of God. However else we might understand God walking in the world as a man healing and teaching, it is really in his birth in a stable to a poor woman that we can truly begin to understand that God did in fact live a life like ours.
Jesus was born – he did not spring forth from God’s head as a fully formed individual. He was not formed from the clay and imbued with the spirit of God. He did not merely receive God’s mantle of authority based on his baptism and anointing. He was born of God to human parents, raised by a carpenter and his wife to be a man. But what distinguishes the Jesus story from other stories of divine birth is that God does not just conceive a child in our world; it is God who comes into our world to live as one of us.
I think that perhaps a different character from entertainment might shed some light on what this might have looked like. Consider the story of Superman, an orphan child from another planet who is raised here on earth by the Kents. What does it mean for someone with all of that power at his disposal to be raised as a human, raised with love and compassion in a human family? Obviously, his parents knew there was something different about him. And it must have been confusing to begin manifesting powers that your parents do not understand and cannot explain to you. And yet, the man that Clark Kent becomes is a mixture of both his biological and familial heritage. He is obviously not human in the power that he wields, and yet he is obviously human in his feelings and interactions with other people.
Here in our gospel text we get a glimpse of this in Jesus’ life. Jesus is separated from his parents at the age of twelve and finds himself in the temple conversing with the rabbis. The teachers are astonished at his understanding – there is obviously something special about this young man. And yet, when his parents discover him again, he follows them back to Nazareth as obediently as any parent could want.
This story is important to our understanding of the incarnation because it shows Jesus growing up. This story helps us to understand what it means for God to be born and dwell among us as one of us. God is not some unfeeling deity who gets enjoyment out of our suffering. God has been here as one of us. God knows what our lives are like – the struggles we face; the choices we must make; the pain of betrayal; and the joys of love. Beyond just being our creator, God understands us because of the incarnation.
And this is the good news of the incarnation: that God became like us that we might become more like God. In the person of Jesus Christ we see what it means for us to live as God intended. Through his life, death, and resurrection we are saved. For Jesus’ life did not start at 30. Nor was he born and then placed in hibernation for thirty years. He grew through infancy to become a small boy who played in mud puddles. He became a young man on the cusp of adolescence who wanted to be accepted by the wise ones. He became a young man with choices to make about how to live his life and how to follow the call he felt within him.
Look at how this plays out in our story today. Jesus remains behind in Jerusalem, discussing religion and faith with the teachers in the temple. He was both listening to them and putting questions to them. Questions are the bedrock of our faith. Asking questions is how we learn, how we grow, how we develop our own thoughts and feelings. The questions we ask help to shape us and form us.
In his life, Jesus learned the values of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. He learned to stand with those he cared about and how to forgive those who had wronged him. He constantly gave thanks to God his Father through prayer and praise. Above all, Jesus embodied love, without which all of these other qualities could not exist.
As humans, sometimes we stray from the path that God would have us walk. Throughout history, terrible things have been done “in the name of the Lord Jesus” or of God the Father. People have been slaughtered as heathens; men, women, and children have been forced to convert either at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun; wars have been fought to decide who is right and who is wrong; and people have been killed to save their eternal souls from the fires of hell. But if there is only one important fact that we learn from the incarnation – one little tidbit to carry with us as we go about our lives – it is that these bodies that we have are important. If all that mattered was our soul, why did God need to become a human? If our bodies don’t matter, why was Jesus raised bodily from the grave? If these bodies don’t matter, why heal the sick and feed the hungry? What do these questions tell us about who we are and who we are called to be?
Jesus shows us a different route to salvation. It is not the path of the cloistered spiritualist, content to converse only with God away from the needs and cares of the world. Nor is it the path of the hedonist, concerned only with the needs and desires of the body. Rather Jesus walks a path somewhere in the middle. He was able to appreciate fine food and expensive perfume and to understand the needs of the physical body. And he also found time to get away to a quiet place and commune with his Father.
It is this balance that we must find in our own lives. We are not only bodies; nor are our souls all that matter. We must nourish both as we walk the winding path of life. Through the incarnation, God shows us that these lives we live are of greater importance than merely deciding who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. For if we fail to live our lives in Christ’s image, our bodies will know something of hell before we ever die. If we fail, our bodies and the bodies of others around us will needlessly suffer starvation and thirst and pain and death.
Instead, we must live our lives in concert with one another, caring for one another, loving one another. We must let the peace of Christ dwell within our hearts, for that is at the heart of the body of Christ, the body of which we are all members. For if we let ourselves be guided by Christ, we can know the kingdom of God here and now. If we truly live as that body of which we are a part, there will be food and water and peace for all of God’s children.
May we find balance in our own lives.
May we ask the questions that need to be asked.
And may we increase in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.