“But why were you looking for me?” (Luke 2:49).
Even the boy Jesus could not help but ask, “Why?” This question bookends his brief life (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:1).
The above words of Jesus are from a particularly human moment when he was but 12 years of age. Their full depth and import are impossible to know. This vignette of our adolescent Savior has been the subject of much wonder, and rightly so.
It is strange indeed that hardly a word of Jesus’ youth is given to us. His birth shook heaven and earth, and yet there is relative silence from heaven and earth until His body broke the surface of the Jordan thirty years later – except this event in Luke. We can imagine Mary, or the beloved John, her caretaker, were some of Luke’s interviewees, and could have related this to him (Luke 1:1-4).
This occasion is a reminder that the human Jesus was, well, human. The whole scene drips with humanity. Parents, Mary and Joseph, are worried sick and searching frantically, meanwhile the twelve-year old boy seems somewhat indifferent if not utterly bemused by their concerns.
Yet, at the same time, everyone around him is utterly confounded by him. The teachers in the Temple were “amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:47, ESV). That word translated “understanding” comes from a Greek word that refers to the “meeting place of…two roaring rivers” (see: Homer’s Odyssey, 10:515-520). This concept was carried into formal logic, referring to conclusions drawn from true premises. J.B. Phillips translated it “powers of comprehension.” At the least, Jesus’ comprehension of the Scriptures, bringing the rivers together, so to speak, was atypical for a boy not under the tutelage of the scholars.
Perhaps the most curious thing is Jesus’ follow-up question: “Didn’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (v.49, NET). Perhaps couched in this question is something more, “Didn’t you [my parents, of all people!] know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
If Isaiah 53 contains (among other things) a commentary on the early life of God’s Messiah from an outsider’s perspective (“For He [Jesus] shall grow up before Him [the Father] as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground,” Isa. 53:2), then Psalm 22 contains a commentary from Jesus himself:
You [the Father] are He who took Me [Jesus] out of the womb; You made Me trust while on My mother’s breasts. I was cast upon You from birth. From My mother’s womb You have been My God (Psalm 22:9-10).
Where did young Jesus learn that He was the Messiah, God’s Holy One, who was to save Israel? At his mother’s knee. Undoubtedly Joseph, and certainly Mary, taught him who he was. At his baptism the Scriptures, his parents’ teachings, and God’s audible confirmation (Matt. 3:17), made a triple witness of this truth (and Satan soon thereafter seized upon it with full force, cf. Matt. 4:3,6).
Even at the young age of twelve, Jesus was already taking his mission seriously.
One wonders, do we take what God says about us and our mission as seriously?
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