Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany
“They found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors”
It is an arresting and an intriguing scene. Only Luke tells this story, the only story that belongs to the boyhood of Jesus really. And yet, even that is only partly right. The story really marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. There is, I am afraid to say, no teenage Jesus! We might wonder what we have created in our world of arrested adolescence!
The scene, in a way, is Jesus’ Bar Mitzvah, his coming of age through the study of the Scriptures, meaning the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. The parallel in the Christian tradition would be Confirmation, undertaken once again through the study of the essential principles of the Christian Faith revealed in the witness of the Scriptures, meaning the Old Testament and the New Testament.
This is an epiphany story. Something is being made known to us about Jesus. And in a way, this story, which has been read for centuries upon centuries on The First Sunday after Epiphany, signals and proclaims the Doctrine of the Epiphany. What is that? Epiphany turns our attention to the divine reality of Jesus Christ, emphasising the aspect of the divinity of Christ in the story of his Incarnation. The light of Epiphany is the light of divine teaching made manifest in and through the humanity of Jesus.
In this arresting and intriguing scene, Jesus is both student and teacher: student in terms of his humanity; teacher in terms of his divinity. God is the teacher. About what? About the high things of God which are revealed to us through the humanity of Jesus.
