by CCW | 9 January 2011 15:12
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.
The Epiphany season provides an instruction in the divine attributes of God: the qualities that belong to the essential divinity of Christ. Among the divine attributes are the simplicity, the infinity, the immutability and the indivisibility of God which relate to the ways in which God is radically different from us, hence these are known as the negative attributes – they all have to do with the radical otherness of God. Then there are the so-called positive attributes such as the unity, truth, goodness, beauty, omnipotence and omniscience of God which have to do with qualities that are in God in a superlative way but which relate to us in a derivative fashion. They are all important concepts which belong to the integrity of the idea of God. Without an understanding and an appreciation of the divine attributes, God very easily becomes little more than a false idol of our imagination, a projection of some aspect of ourselves or we lose sight of God altogether in the worship of ourselves as gods.
Central to the great wonder of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons is the Incarnation which celebrates the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, a union in which both the divinity and the humanity are preserved and upheld in their integrity. Our attention at Christmas is on the divine condescension, God becoming man, the Word made flesh. Now, in Epiphany, our thoughts turn to the God who became man, to the Word that was made flesh.
Epiphany helps us to realise that the mystery of Christmas does not mean that God is collapsed into our world and day. His becoming one with us does not mean that God ceases to be God in his majesty and truth as if God has somehow become unGod in becoming subject to us, or because somehow we think that we are God. No. The whole mystery of the Christian Faith turns on maintaining the distinction between the divine and the human in their union and upholding each in their integrity and truth.
Epiphany is the season of teaching. Teaching, of course, is an inescapable feature of the Christian religion. Two things are implicit in this idea of teaching. First, there is something that can be and must be made known; secondly, we need a teacher. In other words, all that we can know by ourselves is really darkness; it is in the light of God that all things are known and seen more clearly.
We need the teaching because we don’t know it all. Our minds are darkened; our hearts are hardened. We are in the dark about the great light and wonder of God. We need to be taught because the loving knowledge of God is not something that we can simply get on the strength of our own intellectual prowess or on the basis of our own heartfelt longings, though both our minds and our wills belong to the journey of the soul to God.
The scene here is most instructive. Quite apart from the distress of Mary and Joseph in discovering that the child was not with them in the pilgrimage caravan at the end of the day – I suppose today there would be a hew and cry about bad parenting! – there is this amazing scene of them finding him in the temple in Jerusalem, “sitting in the midst of the doctors”.
Jerusalem. We have had occasion to remark about the interplay between Bethlehem and Jerusalem in the Christian understanding. In terms of the Gospels, this will be the second time that Jesus is explicitly said to be in Jerusalem and in the Temple. The first time is forty days after Christmas upon the occasion of his presentation and Mary’s purification, the feast which we celebrate as Candlemas.
Here Jesus is with the teachers both listening and asking questions and answering questions, all to their amazement. And he is in the temple, the temple that symbolizes the unity of the tribes of Israel in worship; a unity that was first accomplished by King David. It will be this temple which Jesus will cleanse in righteous indignation and fury because of our misuse and neglect of the holy places.
But there is something more here that Luke has noted. This story that marks the transition from boyhood to manhood also signals the divine purpose of Christ’s Incarnation. Joseph and Mary are understandably worried and upset at having lost him. Why have you done this? they ask. Jesus’ response is revealing. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Some translations say “in my Father’s house”. Either way, the point is clear and perhaps is best expressed by Jesus himself in another context, namely, “I have come to do the will of him who sent me”. He has come to do the Father’s will. That is what defines him as the Son of God.
Epiphany signals an important lesson. There are things which God wants us to know. Jesus is the divine teacher who reveals to us the things which belong to human redemption. The lessons will be about what God wants for our humanity: joy and delight, healing and wholeness, truth and integrity, sacrifice and service, and above all the divine love which is really worship.
The Feast of the Epiphany was about the Magi-Kings of Anatolia, the wise ones who came from afar, from outside of Israel, from the East, to worship the child. Today, we are being reminded that teaching is part of our worship, part of our fellowship, and part of the meaning of our being with the one who has come to be with us.
What is opened out to us through the prayerful study of the Scriptures are the high things of God that speak to the dignity of our humanity, at the same time as they are a check on our hubris and pride. God teaches us because there are things that he wants us to know that we can’t really get on our own.
Jesus is the divine teacher who is with us; the light of Epiphany shines out from within the world, from within the face of Christ. The divine and holy lessons of Epiphany are meant to transform us. Paul sounds that note most clearly in today’s Epistle; exhorting us to “be not conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.” In Christ we see the light of glory and the light of grace. We pray with the psalmist that “in thy light we may see light”, and, with Lancelot Andrewes, that we may see “the light of thy grace today and the light of thy glory hereafter”.
It will mean, however, finding him in the temple; finding him where the Word is proclaimed and the Sacraments are celebrated.
Fr. David Curry
The First Sunday after Epiphany
January 9th, 2011
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