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Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany

“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Only Luke gives us this story. It is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in all of the Scriptures. We go, it seems, from the infancy narratives of the child Christ to the boy Jesus at the age of twelve, and we go, too, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. There are no facebook pages, no Selfies, no albums of pictures, no stories that have been handed down about the boyhood of Jesus – only ones invented many, many years, even centuries later that portray an entirely different Jesus, a kind of super-brat, you might say, a wunderkind, as it were. For where there are gaps, conspiracy theories rush in to fill them. Such are the stories, fantastic and inventive, told in the gnostic gospels about Jesus as a boy. They have no part in the Canonical Scriptures. We have only this story.

But what a compelling and intriguing story! It is an Epiphany story, we might say, for no other reason than something is made manifest, something is made known, about Jesus and about who he is theologically and doctrinally speaking, we might say, in terms of his humanity and his divinity. It illustrates, too, an essential feature of the Epiphany and the Epiphany Season. It is emphatically a feast and a season of teaching.

It reminds us that ‘teaching, teaching, teaching’ is an essential feature of the life of the Church. The Collect for today makes it abundantly clear that “perceive[ing] and know[ing] what things [we] ought to do” is the precondition for doing them, albeit only by God’s “grace and power.” Human reason participates in God’s reason; human reason expresses itself in human action as well. Our doings are but our thoughts in motion.

As Paul makes it clear in the Epistle reading from Romans, we are “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” This underscores the point about being changed by what we hear and see which leads to sacrifice and service in our lives. It complements the Gospel wonderfully. For our transformation is through the grace of teaching, through the grace of Revelation and through our reasoning upon what is made known to us in the witness of the Scriptures about Jesus Christ.

Jesus is found in the Temple in Jerusalem “sitting in the midst of the doctors” of the Law. He has stayed behind after the Passover feast, it seems, and he is found in the Temple by his worried Mother, Mary, and by Joseph. He is found in the company of the learned doctors of the Law “both hearing them and asking them questions,” we are told, but also instructing them, too, it might seem for “all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” An exquisite scene, Jesus is manifest as human student and divine teacher.

Epiphany is about the light of Christ illumining our dark world with the radiance of God’s grace. Our focus is on the divine side of the Word made flesh, the God made man. Humanly speaking, it is Jesus’ Bar Mitzvah. It marks the transition from boyhood to manhood. How? By taking responsibility for one’s own understanding of the Scriptures and the Faith. But it also highlights the divine teaching. Here is a wonderful image of the Word made flesh pondering the Holy Scriptures and wrestling with the understanding of them! The Son and Word of the Father engaged with the doctors of the Law in the study of the Word of God.

That sense of independence, personal responsibility and engagement is further emphasized in the exchange between Jesus and Mary. Son, Mary says with a sense of worry and, perhaps, exasperation, “why hast thou thus dealt with us?” They had “sought [him] sorrowing,” no doubt fearing the worst, like many an anxious parent awake at night listening to hear the car drive into the yard. Jesus’ response reveals something more. Far from being flippant and casual, it reminds us that Jesus is on a mission; indeed, he is the mission. He does not exist in order to fulfil either the well-intentioned or the misapplied ambitions of parents for their children, who so often forget that children are not commodities or products who exist for them. No. They exist for God and his truth.

“Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business,” Jesus says? Some translations say “in my Father’s house.” The Greek is ambiguous enough to allow for both possibilities. Either way, he exists for the Father and only so for us. “I have come to the will of him who sent me.” He has come to teach and in a profound sense he is the teaching!  What are the lessons? The lessons have to do with the grace and power of God manifest in Christ Jesus. He is God with us. Jesus signals something of his divine identity and heavenly purpose that underlies his being with us in the intimacy of his humanity. Something heavenly and divine is made manifest in Jesus Christ.

That isn’t to say that the lessons are grasped immediately. It seems that Mary and Joseph “understood not the saying which he spake unto them.” It remains for us to understand the deeper meaning of Emmanuel, God with us. For while he is “our childhood’s pattern” as the carol puts it, he is far more than just an example and a model.  He is the divine teacher who reveals to us what God seeks for our humanity. The first story of the Epiphany is about teaching. It is about learning what God seeks for us. It is the journey of our lives. The Divine Word in us shapes our lives of service and sacrifice. We are to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” in the holy things of God, the things found in the temple where the Word is proclaimed. They are found when Jesus is in our midst, to be sure, but only because he is about his Father’s business.

“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 1, 2013