Year: 2020

They found him in the temple

“They found him in the temple,” Luke tells us. The only question for us and for our world is “will we?” Nothing highlights better the symbolic significance of Epiphany than the story of Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the Temple. Doing what? You might ask. Asking and answering questions, teaching and learning, we might say. Nothing counters more completely the anti-intellectualism of our contemporary age. If anything we are in flight from thought and its demands. Epiphany suggests otherwise.

The Magoi of Anatolia, “wise men from the East”, as Matthew tells us, show us something of the universal desire for truth. They reveal the eros to know as Plato and Aristotle suggest about the desire to know truth in accord with each of our capacities to know. At issue is whether those capacities are alive in us or not.

Luke’s account is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. There are various stories invented much later that seek to fill in the gaps between the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke and the stories of the ministry of Christ as an adult, stories which, in my view, diminish and distort both the humanity and the divinity of Christ presented in the Gospels. Only Luke gives us this rich and powerful story of Christ as a boy of twelve. It is, we might say, his bar mitzvah. It marks the transition from boyhood to manhood, to the responsibilities of adulthood and conveys to us the idea of maturing in faith.

But even more, it highlights the important Epiphany theme of teaching, of the idea of things being made known to us about the nature of God through the humanity of Jesus. Here Jesus is found in the company of the learned doctors of the Jewish Law, the Law or Torah of our humanity, we might say, at least in terms of its concentrated form in the Ten Commandments, something given and yet given for thought, known and grasped as belonging to universal reason. Christ is placed with the doctors of the Law in the temple of Jerusalem, a place dedicated to the honour, the glory, and the truth of God. There is a rich significance to these allusions. That Christ is found in the temple amidst the doctors of the Law is not accidental.

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One thing is necessary and Mary hath chosen the better part

The rich fullness of Christmas is often matched by a frantic busyness like Martha in the story of Mary and Martha, “anxious and troubled by a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). The anxiety of Martha is literally about being too careful, too full of cares and worries. Not that there aren’t care and worries, to be sure, especially in the confusion and nonsense of the disordered world of the past two decades. But there is a wonderful counter to our fears and anxieties, of busyness and worries in Jesus’ gentle response. One thing is necessary.

What is that unum necessarium, the one thing necessary? What is “the better part” chosen by Mary? It is another Mary who shows us what is the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, the Mary of the Christmas story, the Virgin Mary through whom God becomes man and dwells among us. This is the Mary of the Gospel reading today on what is the Second Sunday of Christmas and the Eve of the Epiphany. The one thing necessary is our contemplation of the wonder of Christ’s holy birth. We contemplate the wonder of God and of God with us just as the Magi-Kings will fall down and worship offering gifts which teach the wonder they acknowledge. Christ is God, and King, and Sacrifice.

Both stories of the Marys are told to us by Luke. “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” What are all these things? They are “those things which were told them by the shepherds who went “unto Bethlehem” to “see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” The Mary of the Christmas story shows us what belongs to the true response of our humanity to what is made known to us by God with us. God speaks to us in human vesture even through the unspeaking Word and Son of God in the infant Christ. What is said about him belongs to who he is for us even as the unspeaking babe of Bethlehem. An infant is one who cannot speak. Mary’s attitude is the essential attitude of faith. It is contemplative wonder at all that is said about the child Christ.

This does not deny or diminish the importance of human actions and busyness. It does however challenge us about our busyness and our practical activities by reminding us that ultimately they are grounded and have their real truth and meaning in the activity of contemplation which is the highest activity of our humanity. This redeems our everyday busyness from its frantic mindlessness and frightening emptiness.

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