“They found him in the temple”
Where do we find God? In the places where he is named and praised, honoured and worshipped. “This is none other but the house of God … the gate of heaven” is written on the walls of this Church. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God” is written in the narthex above where you enter into the Church. How little do we notice these things that remind us that this place, this Church, is and must be a place of teaching, a place where we find God because this is his temple. This is the house of God, where God is to be sought and found, where the things of God are to taught and learned. If the Church is not the place of teaching about God then it is not the Church.
This doesn’t mean that only the Church is the place where God is sought and taught. No. One of the sad tragedies and peculiar paradoxes of our contemporary culture is the failure to realise that there is not a single discipline of the mind, not a single aspect of human intellectual and spiritual culture that is not shaped and formed by religion and religious discourse. And the churches, more sadly, have been complicit in an atheist agenda – trying to make religion acceptable to the age, accommodating the teachings to the assumptions of the culture. From this standpoint, Christmas has become the atheists’ delight since it seems to confirm the essential atheist insight that God is made in the image of man. In the God made man, we see, the atheist claims, the fundamental point that we make God in our image. Nothing could be further from the truth of the Christmas story yet it is easy to see how Christians so easily collapse the Gospel into their own lives and expectations. Christmas quickly and easily becomes a form of self-worship.
Epiphany to the contrary is the atheists’ nightmare. Why? Because it is so resolutely set upon the themes of divinity. Its primary focus is the argument for the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and as such it argues for the essential attributes of God. We “turn ourselves” as John Cosin, the 17th century Bishop of Durham in northern England puts it, “from his humanity below to his divinity above,” a turn from our contemplation of “His coming in the flesh that was God to His being God that was come in the flesh.” Epiphany is full of divinity.
Which is why this story read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and usually within the Octave of the Epiphany is so important. It reminds us that the Epiphany, meaning the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem, is at once the completion of Christmas and the beginning of a new journey, a new orientation. The Magi-Kings, to be sure, came to Bethlehem by way of Jerusalem but “they departed to their own country another way”, being warned in a dream not to return to Herod. And yet, for all of that, Epiphany marks on this Sunday a distinct turn to Jerusalem, a new journey, a journey of the understanding. It is all about teaching. What is the teaching? It is altogether about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ. What does that have to do with us, we might ask? It is a question that so easily leads us in the direction of atheism but that would be to miss the point. The essential divinity of Christ has everything to do with us because the truth and dignity of our humanity is found not in ourselves but in our life with Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” St. Paul powerfully reminds us. “Be not conformed to this world,” for that is atheism.
Epiphany is full of the things of God, the teaching about God and about our thinking God. In that teaching about God we discover the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It is simply this. We are made capable of the things of God. God seeks to redeem us from the folly of ourselves. The truth of our humanity is found in our being with God.
This is why the story of the child Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the temple amidst the doctors of the Law is so significant. It marks the fullest justification of the ancient religion of Israel and of Christianity and, by extension, Islam. The teaching is entirely about the things of God, indeed, about the very idea of God himself. For Judaism, that idea of God in himself is concentrated on the Word as Law; for Islam it is concentrated on Word as the will of Allah; for Christians it is focused on the Word made flesh. Epiphany would recall us to the matters of divinity, to the necessity and the self-sufficiency of God without whom our lives are nothing and nothing worth.
Where will we find God? Where we are challenged to think God. It should be the Church, to be sure, though not exclusively. There is no truth, after all, that does not belong to God and to his being with us. God is everywhere. It belongs to the Church to proclaim that message.
The Gospel story is Jesus’s bar mitzvah and yet it extends beyond cultural and religious customs and practises. Here we have a succinct and unique image of our humanity engaged in the things of God at once in the Law and in human experience. Such is redemption. We discover the truth of our humanity in the contemplation and enjoyment of the things of God. Epiphany proclaims the reality of the idea of God as thinkable without which nothing else is thinkable. God is the necessary existent without which nothing else is thinkable or even able to be.
To be the Church means to recover this vocation, the vocation to teach divinity, to teach the idea of God. For Christians it happens through the stories of the Epiphany season. They turn us to God, to the God who is with us and yet remains God. Think it and love it. Be where he wills to be found.
“They found him in the temple”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 1, 2016