by CCW | 13 January 2013 16:13
From Bethlehem to Jerusalem, from kings to kids. In a culture that is ruled by kids, perhaps we would do well to listen to the Kid, the Holy Kid. “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?” Jesus asks.
It is an extraordinary and compelling scene. And it is unique. It is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. And read on the First Sunday after Epiphany which falls this year on the Octave Day of the Epiphany, it reminds us of an essential feature of religion that our world and culture and church has largely forgotten, namely, that religion is philosophy.
I love the story of the Magi-Kings. I am always struck by what they do when they arrive at Bethlehem. They kneel and worship. Philosophy is worship. That is, I think, the deep meaning of the love of wisdom. And it has to do with the whole of our being. It has to do with our commitment to Truth. Which is why this Gospel story of Christ being found in the temple at the age of twelve is so compelling and significant. He is found with the doctors of the Law, both hearing them and asking them questions. “And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” In the Christian understanding, Jesus is student and teacher, both fully human and fully divine. That is the Epiphany lesson. Here we see something which belongs to the larger dimension of redemption, the opening out of the true potentialities of our humanity. It has to do with our being with God in the things of God that are given to be thought about and understood. It is not that we possess the Truth but that the Truth possesses us.
At Christmas we are immersed in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. After that, there is, we might say, a strange silence, almost a lacuna. There is nothing about the boyhood of Jesus apart from this one, solitary yet profound story with which Luke alone provides us. We have seen, of course, how holy imagination adds colour and detail to the Bethlehem story; adding things which are not strictly speaking in the biblical accounts. They appear in story and song, especially, as we have seen, in the carols of the Christmas season. Such things, for the most part, do not detract from the essential story of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in the birth of Jesus Christ; nor do they add anything essential to it. They help us, perhaps, to understand better and more fully the mystery of the Incarnation.
But there is, too, another way that we might begin to comprehend the height and depth of the Incarnation. It is by way of contrast to the biblical accounts. After all, how did the New Testament Scriptures come to be the New Testament? When and how and by whom? For the most part, the questions are unanswerable. They are lost, we might say, in the mists of time. We are not exactly sure of the process. It is enough to say that it happens through a kind of consensus that emerges at a fairly early stage in the life of the little communities of Christians. But it can be said that two principles govern the selection of texts that ultimately comprise what we now know and call the New Testament. They are apostolicity and catholicity. The texts are associated in some way or another with the apostles and the apostolic community and they are widely or universally circulated and read in most of the various Christian communities. And while there is a diversity of perspectives to the New Testament Scriptures, nonetheless they have a marvelous and wonderful consistency, unity and coherence. For orthodox Christianity, the mystery of the Incarnation is about Jesus as true God and true man. The struggle is with the understanding of that mystery and idea.
The absence of information about the boyhood of Jesus means that there is a gap in which imagination has its play, sometimes in ways which help us to understand better the meaning of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in Jesus. That can happen by way of complementary themes and ideas but it can also happen by way of complete contrast. For there were other writings that emerge – for the most part later than the texts that belong to the New Testament – and some of them offer an entirely different picture of Jesus. Just imagine coming to Church and hearing the following from the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas:
(1) The son of Annas the scribe was standing there with Jesus. Taking a branch from a willow tree, he dispersed the waters which Jesus had gathered. (2) When Jesus saw what had happened, he became angry and said to him, “You godless, brainless moron, what did the ponds and waters do to you? Watch this now: you are going to dry up like a tree and you will never produce leaves or roots or fruit.
(3) And immediately, this child withered up completely. Then, Jesus departed and returned to Joseph’s house. (4) The parents of the one who had been withered up, however, wailed for their young child as they took his remains away. Then, they went to Joseph and accused him, “You are responsible for the child who did this.”
“You godless, brainless moron.” I don’t think you want to hear that in Church! The picture of Jesus here and in a number of other apocryphal writings is that of a holy prick, a kind of schoolyard bully who nukes his friends if they do not please him. Jesus becomes a kind of wunderkind, a wonder-worker in ways that emphasize the divine power but at the expense of anything properly or truly human and, at the expense, too, of the natural or material world. The picture is entirely incompatible with what we read in the New Testament. It presents another view and one which does not cohere with the New Testament picture. What is this other view? It is called docetism. Already being countered by John in his epistles, docetism denies the Incarnation. God couldn’t have become man, the Word couldn’t have been made flesh. The distance between God and the world is too great. The mind of God and the matter of the world are radically incompatible. So in order to preserve the divine mind, docetism teaches that in Jesus God only appears, seems to be man, seems to suffer and die. But not really. The docetic viewpoint ultimately belongs to gnosticism which will also decry the material world as something evil. Redemption is about escape from materiality not the redemption of the world to its principle in the God who made it.
In contemporary culture, there is the opposite tendency. The dogmatic materialists assume the primacy of matter at the expense of mind and morality. Yet, despite the claims of the scientific naturalists, science explains neither mind nor morality; in short, our humanity.
It seems to me that the Epiphany mystery speaks to these questions and concerns both ancient and modern. This Epiphany story has been read for centuries upon centuries on the First Sunday after Epiphany. It signals to us what we are about Sunday after Sunday and at every liturgy. We are to be about our Father’s business or in our Father’s house, to allow for another possible translation of the Greek here. We are to be with the holy kid.
Bethlehem and Jerusalem. They are the two centers of Christian contemplation. They are wonderfully concentrated together for us on this Octave Day of the Epiphany, the First Sunday after the Epiphany. The Kings, we were told, departed into their own country another way. There is another journey; the journey to Jerusalem. It is the journey of learning. Here the holy kid goes up to Jerusalem, to the temple at Passover. The scene is rich in its symbolical allusions.
In the ancient world, Jesus, at twelve, stands at the moment of transition from boyhood to manhood. It is, we might say, his bar mitzvah; his transition into an adult world. That world in its Jewish and pagan forms focuses on learning, on the primacy of intellectual life, a life lived in accord with divine reason. The struggles are all about trying to understand the divine will and purpose for our lives, each according to our own capacities. Prayer and praise are about nothing less than our participation in the divine thinking. Prayer is about our thinking and living towards God and with God in God’s being with us. Such is the radical nature of the Truth in Jesus Christ; it engages us and calls us into his heavenly glory.
The lesson of the holy kid is that we are being “transformed by the renewing of our minds” by paying attention to the holy things of God in his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated. The Epiphany mystery opens us out to the highest potentialities of our humanity. They are found in God provided we are found in the temple with the holy kid, learning the things of God and learning how to live in accord with divine reason.
Fr. David Curry
The First Sunday after Epiphany
January 13th, 2013
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