The Boy Jesus at the Temple

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roseanneb

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When Jesus was twelve and went to Jerusalem with his family for Passover, he stayed behind to teach at the Temple, Mary and Joseph thought he was with other family members in the caravan. When they realized he wasn’t, they searched for him for a total of four days. They were very worried; what parent wouldn’t be?

When they found him, Mary said “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” Jesus replied, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Luke 2, 48-49.

Since Jesus is not capable of sin, how do you explain this disrespectful behavior towards his parents? It seems to me it breaks the commandment “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” He was not a baby; he was twelve. That’s old enough to know better.

Thanks for any insight you might have. These forums are great!
 
roseanneb said:
When Jesus was twelve and went to Jerusalem with his family for Passover, he stayed behind to teach at the Temple, Mary and Joseph thought he was with other family members in the caravan. When they realized he wasn’t, they searched for him for a total of four days. They were very worried; what parent wouldn’t be?

When they found him, Mary said “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” Jesus replied, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Luke 2, 48-49.

Since Jesus is not capable of sin, how do you explain this disrespectful behavior towards his parents? It seems to me it breaks the commandment “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” He was not a baby; he was twelve. That’s old enough to know better.

Thanks for any insight you might have. These forums are great!
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I don’t see the problem. He arrived in Jerusalem with a caravan, and they left without him. Very easy to do, especially with the large number of people. So, he waited for them and, in the meantime, stayed in the Temple. Since he is the Christ, it was only natural that he wanted to stay close to his Father’s house.

When Mary and Joseph arrived, they were frantic and asked him, “Why did you do this to us? We’ve been looking for you for days!” Jesus simply asked them why they were so worried; did they not have faith? And why did they not know where to find him? Wouldn’t it be natural that he’d be in his Father’s house? Or, in other words, it was as if he were saying, “Don’t you recall my miraculous conception and the words of the angel? Why, then, do you fear for my safety? Furthermore, I have gone nowhere; I’ve been right where you’ve left me, so why were you looking?” Nothing disrespectful, just simple honesty spoke in loving charity.

This also has a deeper meaning with regard to our own conversion, our trials, and the “dark night of the soul” in which all spiritual consolation has left us, and we’re wandering blind searching for Christ who we think has left us. But he’s been there all along, in his Father’s house doing the will of God. Either we’ve left without him, or he’s hiding himself from us for a time, for God’s greater purpose.

God is just, both in thought and in behavior. When what we see about God conflicts with what we think is just, we can be certain of one thing: the error lies with us, not God.
 
From Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ (pp.48-50):

In a land where the authority of the father was supreme, it was not Joseph the foster father, but Mary, who spoke:

My Son, why hast Thou treated us so?
Think what anguish of mind Thy father and I
Have endured, searching for Thee.
Luke 2:48

The Virgin Birth was implied in her questioning. Her question implied that the emphasis was more on the fact that He was her Son than upon the fact that He was also the Son of God. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that she added a note about fatherhood, saying, “Thy father and I.”

The Divine Child answered by making a distinction between the one whom He honored as father on earth and the Eternal Father. This answer affirmed a parting of the ways; it did not diminish the filial duty that He owed to Mary and Joseph, for He became immediately subject to them again, but it decisively put them in second place.

These are the first recorded words of Jesus in the Gospels, and they are in the form of a question:

What reason had you to search for Me?
Could you not tell that I must needs
Be in the place which belongs to My Father?
Luke 2:49

This is an evident reference to Mary’s words “Thy father and I.” When He said that His mother should have known He was about His Father’s business, He was evidently referring to what she had learned at the Annunciation when the Angel said to her:

The Holy Spirit will come upon thee,
And the power of the Most High will overshadow thee,
Thus the holy offspring of thine shall be
Known for the Son of God
Luke 1:35

His relationship with His own mother He would take up again at the Marriage Feast of Cana; here He established the nature of His relationship to His foster father. He disowned physical paternity, by claiming His Divine paternity, that of His Heavenly Father. At Cana He would say to His mother:

Woman, why dost thou trouble Me with that?
John 2:4

Then He was implying a motherhood other than that of the flesh, as now He implied a fatherhood other than that which was exercised by Joseph. Never again does Joseph appear in the Gospels.

In the temple, Our Lord alienated Himself from the claim of His foster father, just as later at Cana He would alienate Himself from the claims of His mother. His supreme business was to be a Savior; but for the moment that included obedience to His earthly guardians. The Child was implying that there was something in history which ought to be known to His mother and His foster father, something that justified His being where He was, and forbade their anxiety about Him. It was because of that that He asked, “What reason had you to search for Me?” And added, “Could you not tell that I must needs be in the place which belongs to My Father?” He was saying that He must be in the temple of His own Father. This was the first of many “musts” that Our Blessed Lord uttered during His life to indicate that He was under a mandate, under obedience to be a ransom. The very fact that He associated the word “must” with His Heavenly Father meant that Sonship implied obedience. At the age of twelve, He was girding Himself for something that would be irksome to His human nature, but His whole nature was bent on the accomplishment of a Divine “must”.
 
Jesus probably left them a note and they noticed to see it. I always liked this story, it makes me think of “Jesus, boy genius.”
 
I think “alienate” is not the right word here, especially considering that Jesus did do exactly what Mary wanted and more, at Cana.

He was letting Joseph and Mary know that, although He did honor his father and mother, the claims of God came first. There was a hierarchy of priorities and obediences.

Similarly, we have the coin story, showing that we don’t totally ignore Caesar or totally obey and worship only him. We render Caesar what is Caesar’s, but last and most importantly, we render God what is God’s.

In the story of the Finding of the Temple, we see Jesus carefully rendering what was due to His Father, and expecting His earthly parents to understand that His work as God, and familial obligation to His Father, naturally came first at all times and especially in Jerusalem.

Our society has a hard time understanding this story, because our society tends to imagine that everybody has an absolute claim on everybody’s time. I remember when I was a kid and my parents were at work when I got home from school, that it was an absolute rule never to call them unless there was a real emergency. They had an obligation to their employers and the people they served; I had an obligation not to get in the way of their work without good reason. Nowadays, with cellphones so easy and with working conditions so relaxed, this would be an incomprehensible idea to many.

But parents, despite their God-given authority or as part of their responsibilities as parents, do have an obligation not to get into the way of their children’s moral obligations and relationship to God. Reciprocally, “honor your father and mother” doesn’t include obeying unlawful/immoral commands, or allowing your parents to do unlawful/immoral things. Everybody is supposed to exercise prudence and love.
 
roseanneb said:
Jesus replied, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Luke 2, 48-49.

Since Jesus is not capable of sin, how do you explain this disrespectful behavior towards his parents? It seems to me it breaks the commandment “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” He was not a baby; he was twelve. That’s old enough to know better.

Thanks for any insight you might have. These forums are great!
Click to expand...
his actions were not disobedient and his reply was not disrespectful. Ask any parent of a 12 yr old who has done something which seems dangerous or silly from the adult POV but made perfect sense and was a good and sound decision from the child’s POV.
 
roseanneb said:
. . He was not a baby; he was twelve. That’s old enough to know better. . . .
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I think at that time 12 was about the age of maturity. I read someplace that at about that age a young man was supposed to start participating in his father’s trade.
 
The phrase that Mary used could be heard as “Why have you hated us this way”. The problem with hearing it is that we think of hatred as something different than what she asked. This is a parallel teaching to when Jesus said that you must hate your parents to follow him.

Hatred is simply not putting the other person first. Love is putting the other person first. So Mary asked why she was not put first, and Jesus properly responded that he was doing God’s will first. This was prophesied in Genesis in the narrative of the nine kings.

In the narrative of Samuel it is prophesied that he wouldn’t be ‘weaned’ until he went to the temple to serve as judge. And in the narrative of Manasseh that when he returned to Jerusalem he would know he was God.

The wedding at Cana was his ‘weaning’ and he went to the temple to cleanse it in the role of the judge, knowing he was God. Everything he did was prophesied in the sensus plenior of the OT.
 
I wonder where those learned men were 21 years later. They no doubt remembered him since for a teacher, an encounter with a brilliant student is a lifetime memory.
I wonder if there are any legends about whether those who heard him and learned from him in that event ever became his followers or if they joined in with the crowd who called for his crucifixion?
 
I sense sincerity and even love in Jesus’ statement. At 12 He had probably already gone through the Jewish coming-of-age process call Bar Mitzvah. This is the age of accountability where, if I understand this, Jesus would be considered to be responsible for following the laws of the Sinai covenant.

At this time, Judaism was well into the period of Rabbinic Judaism, where Jesus would have also been very oriented towards studying the Torah, and naturally been very eager to do so.

We can sense Jesus’ commitment to love the LORD His God with His whole heart, His whole soul, and with all His strength (Deut 6:4).

After His birth, at age 12, and then during His public ministry, we see Jesus going to the Temple. It is so awesome to meditate on Jesus in the Temple.
 
Cactus said:
I wonder where those learned men were 21 years later. They no doubt remembered him since for a teacher, an encounter with a brilliant student is a lifetime memory.
I wonder if there are any legends about whether those who heard him and learned from him in that event ever became his followers or if they joined in with the crowd who called for his crucifixion?
Click to expand...
Rabbi Eliezer was the disciple of one of the teachers who was likely there. He formalized the rules for Jewish Midrash. The method reveals Christ in all of the Old Testament. Jewish children were taught to ask, “What are these stones?” about a pile of rocks by the water. But when Jesus asked it, he asked about Jacob’s pillow which was many stones in the evening and one stone in the morning, about the rock that was split and gave water, about the cleft in the rock where Moses hid, and about the five smooth stones which David put in his shepherd’s vessel. As he asked about these rocks which each are a picture of Christ, he painted a picture of the Messiah that the teachers had never seen before.

During the next 21 years they learned who the Messiah was to be. Since they did not want to lose their authority over the people, they started telling lies about him even before he started his ministry. When Jesus confronted them, he called them liars because they knew exactly who he was.

After Jesus resurrection, they perverted the method into what is now known as Cabala in order to lead people away from Christ. When they learn Cabala, they are taught that when they see the white rock, they are not to say “water, water”. Using the method, it means that when they see Christ, they are not to call him the Torah in heaven and on earth. The parable that goes with learning Cabala uses Eliezer’s name as one who lost his faith because he did not take care. This suggests he became a Christian.

Later yet they added vowels to Hebrew to further obfuscate the pictures of Christ in the Old Testament.

The sensus plenior which I have been sharing in other threads is based on using the methods of Rabbi Eliezer to see Christ in the scriptures.

I go through some tedious proofs that God speaks in riddles, and teach how to interpret the riddles using the rabbi’s methods. I have also started a wiki to document the pictures of Christ in all the scriptures. The first few dozen pages should be read sequentially, but pass over the tedious pages if you like.

sensusplenior.net/?page_id=2
 
Thanks for the link to your blog about Sensus Plenior. It looks interesting and I plan to read it.

I thank everyone for your answers about Jesus at the temple. I appreciate the different points of view. I really like the thought of “Jesus, Boy Genius.”

Roseanne
 
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