Gospel
THE HOLY GOSPEL OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
ACCORDING TO LUKE
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 travellers, 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. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour.
LUKE 2:41-52
Sermon: The Rev. Dr. Maryann Amor
“What are you doing?” Biff asked.
“Playing,” Joshua said, holding up a lizard by the tail. “Watch.”
Joshua set the lizard on a rock, picked up another rock, and smashed it flat.
“Why did you do that?” Biff asked.
“Watch,” Joshua said again. He put his hand on the lizard, waited a few seconds, and then lifted it away. The lizard’s tail twitched once, then twice, and the creature scurried off the rock into the weeds.
“How did you do that?” Biff asked.
“I don’t know,” Joshua said.
“Can I try?” Biff asked.
“No,” Joshua said. “It only works for me.”
This quote is from one of my favourite books, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. Published in 2002, it imaginatively tells the life of Jesus (or Joshua, as he is known in the book) through the eyes of his childhood friend, Levi bar Alphaeus, nicknamed Biff.
Moore’s work provides an answer to a question many of us might have: what was Jesus like as a child? Was he like the toddlers we know—who, in my experience, scream to get whatever they want, have potty accidents, and constantly want snackies? Or was he a teenager, going through the same awkwardness and hormones so common during this time of immense growth and change? For Moore, Jesus was not like this at all. He wasn’t a normal kid but could do amazing things, like bring lizards back to life, because he was the Son of God and had powers.
If we look to Scripture for a picture of Jesus’ childhood, we find very little. We have the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke and the visit of the Wise Men…which probably happened when Jesus was a toddler. Only Luke offers a brief glimpse of Jesus at age 12. As we heard today, he is separated from his parents during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and amazes the temple teachers with his wisdom. Luke sums up Jesus’ entire childhood with this line: “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” After this, we hear nothing more until Jesus begins his ministry at age 30.
With such a significant gap in the biblical narrative, writers have long tried to fill it. Millennia before Christopher Moore’s book was published, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, written in the 2nd century, gave a shocking portrait of young Jesus. In one story, Jesus curses a boy who accidentally bumps into him, causing the boy to die. Outraged, the villagers demand that Joseph control his son. Joseph rebukes Jesus, who replies, “I’ll keep quiet for your sake,” but then blinds those who accused him.
In another story, Jesus molds clay birds and brings them to life, astonishing his friends but alarming their parents, who warn their children to avoid him and call him a wizard. In another episode, Jesus heals a man who has split his foot with an axe. He takes the man’s foot in his hands, and it is immediately healed. Witnessing this, the crowd worships little Jesus, recognizing God’s spirit at work in him.
Hearing these stories, it’s hard not to think of Harry Potter—I know my mind went there. Like Harry accidentally releasing a boa constrictor from the zoo before discovering his magical powers, the young Jesus in Thomas’s Gospel displays extraordinary, uncontrollable abilities. These accounts, strange as they are, serve the same purpose as Moore’s book: they fill in the gap surrounding Jesus’s childhood found in Scripture.
With all that we don’t know about Jesus as a child, the lack of evidence in the Bible, and all these crazy tales about little Jesus, we are left wondering: is there anything important here? Anything we can learn?
In reflecting on this, I wonder if maybe the Bible doesn’t bother with Jesus’ early years because they weren’t all that remarkable. Perhaps Jesus, as Luke suggests, simply “grew in wisdom” over time, maturing into the person who would carry out his ministry. Nothing out of the ordinary happened when Jesus was young, so none of the Gospels bother with that time, instead focusing on the most important period of his life—his ministry between the ages of 30 and 33.
The likelihood that Jesus was nothing amazing as a kid is, in itself, quite profound. It reminds us that Jesus was human. Like each of us, he grew up, made mistakes, and learned through all his life’s experiences. And through his growth and development, his failings…so common through childhood and adolescence…God stuck with him. God did not need a perfect child Jesus; God did not need a super-holy, magical, wonder-working kid, but God used someone completely normal. God used a kid so much like all of us.
And this means that God doesn’t expect us to be super-holy, to be anything more than the ordinary people we are. God became fully human in Jesus, and God has an intimate, firsthand understanding of our struggles and imperfections, of what it means to grow, learn, and develop. God worked through Jesus’ average childhood and used him to enact such amazing good in his world, and God works through our averageness to work amazing good in our world, too.
So, instead of imagining the child Jesus as Moore did, performing miracles, or as in the Gospel of Thomas, a Harry Potter-like boy who wields uncontainable magical power, let’s embrace the image of Jesus that the gap in the Gospels leads us towards…Jesus as an average child, who grew as we grow, stumbled as we stumble, and learned as we learn. The child Jesus was just like us, and this is extremely good news, because it reminds us that God works through every part of who we are…including our ordinary lives, our missteps, and every stage of our development…to turn us into people who can carry out God’s mission in this world.
Amen.
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