KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 19 January
Wist ye not?
‘Wist’ is an Old English word with Germanic derivations from wissen, to know. We still use words like ‘wit’ to describe a certain form of thinking usually connected to clever play with words such as in puns. It is good to be reminded that the English language has both Germanic roots as well as Latinate roots. At the heart of this remarkable Gospel story from St. Luke, about the boy Jesus being found in the temple in Jerusalem at age twelve, is the rhetorical question that he puts to Mary who was worried about where he was. He had stayed behind in the temple among the doctors of the law, “both hearing them, and asking them questions,” to the amazement of all that heard him.
“Did you not know,” he says, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” The whole scene is a kind of epiphany, the making known or manifestation of the things of God in our midst. The story is always read on The First Sunday after the Epiphany, just after the celebration of the coming in and going out of the Magi-Kings. Like that story, it, too, is all about teaching. There can be no knowing without the idea of things being made known, or manifested. In this story, as it has been received and understood in over fifteen hundred years or more of liturgical use and commentary, is the Christian idea and teaching that Jesus is both true God and true man. Here he is the divine teacher and the human student.
It is the only story of Christ’s boyhood, found only in Luke’s Gospel following upon the infancy narratives. An infant is, literally, one without speech. Thus this story marks the first time that Jesus is reported as having spoken. The whole scene signals what we might call, to use a later Jewish term, Jesus’s bar mitzvah, the transition from childhood to adulthood, and which carries over into the Christian traditions of ‘confirmation.’ What that entails is a knowledge of the Law, the Torah, for which the individual within the community’s life of prayer and devotion undertakes personal responsibility. It is about growing up into an understanding of ideas that are made manifest and which you undertake to grasp and make them part of yourself. It is about taking responsibility for your own education and learning, humanly speaking. That presupposes that there are things which are to be known and embraced in the constant pursuit of learning. There is the teaching but then there is the struggle to learn for us all; each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold.
