Sermon at Saint Margaret’s Budapest (2024.12.29)
First Sunday of Christmas
1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26; Psalm 148; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-end
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour…”
This idea of increasing – of growing, of developing – is central to Scripture and indeed, literature in general. A healthy person is expected to change over the course of their life – to grow, to develop, to mature – as opposed to the trope of a 40-year-old gamer who still lives at home with his parents.
One of my favourite Hungarian idioms is that ‘A jó pap holtig tanul’ –a good priest continues learning until their death.
And this idea of change, of being on a journey where we are constantly learning and growing, explains an otherwise strange set of readings for today, the first Sunday after Christmas.
Scripture doesn’t provide many glimpses of Jesus as a boy, between his birth and ministry as an adult. Yet here, Luke’s Gospel provides us with a rare window into Jesus as an adolescent, a first-century teenager who is growing in stature – not simply physically, but intellectually, socially, and spiritually as well.
Samuel, another boy-prodigy featured in our Old Testament Reading, ‘grew both in stature and in favour with the Lord’, but his developmental arc is not so surprising. After all, he was just a boy when he began his ministry, having been consecrated to serve the Lord under the care of Eli as a small child. So, of course he matured and developed as he grew older.
Charmingly, we are told his mother made a little robe and brought it to him each year when she and her husband made their annual pilgrimage to offer sacrifices.
With Jesus, however, it is easy to overlook his similar and very natural process of development. The paradox of the incarnation – of Christ being fully human and yet simultaneously also fully God – tempts us to endow Jesus with full maturity, even in his infancy. This tendency comes through most visibly in medieval depictions of the nativity, where the baby Jesus is painted with the face of a fully-grown man.
But our Reading from Luke reminds us that this impulse flattens the developmental arc of Jesus; it resolves the paradox too fully to one side.
Like Samuel’s parents, Joseph and Mary also engaged in an annual pilgrimage to make their offerings and sacrifices, though given the construction of the Temple, their destination was Jerusalem. The vast crowds ascending the Temple Mount for this annual festival must have been a sight to behold. However, in a nightmare scenario for any parent, amid all the hubbub, they somehow lost track of their 12-year-old son.
Thankfully, Jesus stayed put in the Temple, listening to and learning from the teachers, but also offering his own viewpoints as teenagers are keen to do. The difference is that those who heard him speak were amazed at his knowledge of the Torah and level of understanding.
When Joseph and Mary finally found him three days later, in the exasperated tone of any panicking mother whose has been frantically searching for a lost child, Mary reveals her anxiety: ‘What are you doing? You’ve practically given your father and me a heart-attack!’
Here, for the first time in Luke’s Gospel, we hear Jesus speak: Don’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house (Lk 2:49)?
Mary’s response is instructive, because instead of drawing hasty conclusions like so many of the other people around Jesus often did, she knew she didn’t fully understand and chose to simply ponder/treasure that experience in her heart.
Implicit in Jesus’ response is the question of who his father is. Whereas Luke consistently referred to Joseph as Jesus’ father up until this point, here Jesus’ first recorded statement in Luke’s Gospel identifies God as his Father.
In other words, Jesus was ultimately a part of God’s household which also meant that he was under God’s authority.
Furthermore, being in his Father’s house wasn’t simply a claim about being in a particular building. The Temple represented God’s presence on earth, the epicentre from which his reign and rule would extend throughout the whole world. Jesus signals that not only is his ultimate allegiance with his heavenly Father, but ‘he must align himself with God’s purpose, even if this appears to compromise his relationship with his parents.’
No wonder the crowds were amazed with his answers. In some ways, this initial pilgrimage to Jerusalem prefigures the whole arc of his ministry, culminating in his journey to Jerusalem and ultimately to Calvary.
However, that time had not yet come. So as a 12-year-old, still under his earthly parents’ authority, he went home and was obedient to them, where he ‘increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour’ (v. 52).
Finally, while it might be difficult to imagine how exactly this process looked like in the life of Jesus, it reminds us that our own lives are a journey as well, and similarly should involve constant growth and development.
Like the increasingly larger robes Samuel’s mother made for him each year, the Apostle Paul reminds us to increasingly clothe ourselves with Christ’s character – both as individuals as well as corporately. Mirroring the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ described in his letter to the Galatians, Paul highlights five attributes for the Colossians to strive toward: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience (Col 3:12).
All these, of course, are tied together by love and allowing Christ’s peace to rule our hearts.
Over the past month, I’ve been greatly impressed by how our church community responded to Chris Daniels’ illness, demonstrating great kindness and compassion in caring for him during his final weeks of life. It is an experience that I will treasure, and it was certainly a great gift and blessing to Chris to have such a community around him.
Thank you to so many who stepped up when one of our own was in need.
Yet, as the saying goes, a good priest [and parishioner!] never ceases to grow and develop. So, as we enter this new year, in which ways might God be inviting us to continue growing, both as individuals as well as together as a church.
Perhaps that is a question worth pondering as you begin to formulate your New Year’s resolutions.
Comments