Luke 2:41-52 Commentary

The Boy Jesus at the Temple
41 Every year Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. 42 When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Festival, according to the custom. 43 After the Festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. 44 Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. 45 When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."

49 "Why were you searching for me?" he asked. "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?" [e] 50 But they did not understand what he was saying to them.

51 Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. 52 And as Jesus grew up, he increased in wisdom and in favor with God and people.


Dig Deeper
A few years ago a friend of mine and I were doing some simple car work on a car in the street in front of my house. We each have two children who were outside playing for awhile. After a time, the three older children went inside while his two year old son remained outside playing in the front yard. After a couple of minutes we looked up and didn’t see his youngest in the front yard where he had just been and assumed that he had gone inside by the older kids but went in just to check. We were surprised to find that he hadn’t gone inside after all and so we made a quick search of both the inside and the outside of my house and yet he was nowhere to be found. I walked by my mini-van that was in the driveway and found that the doors were locked so I knew he couldn’t be in there so we immediately went to the next level. We called the police and began to check the entire neighborhood. Within minutes the police had arrived and there were a number of neighbors helping us look, some on foot and some on motorcycles or in their car. The panic that you experience when your child or a child close to you is missing is nearly indescribable unless you’ve felt it yourself. As I completed a circle of our block looking for my friend’s child and calling out his name, my brain was already in organization mode. A few years earlier I had been closely involved with the immediate response and search for a six year old girl who went missing. A girl in our town was reported missing so the next day I heard about it on the morning news and took my history to class to help look. Because they didn’t know any better, the family had lost some important opportunities in the first few hours and never found the girl (who is still missing to this day), so I had learned some important things about how to respond properly. Just as I was organizing all of my thoughts on what we would do next, my oldest son ran up and told me that he had been found. Apparently he had gotten tired, crawled in my mini-van, locked the doors and laid down to take a little rest. We were relieved, to say the least, and the frantic search to find him was over.

One of the things that you have hopefully noticed by now is Luke’s unique ability to convey God’s larger activities and purposes through the very real and human stories that he is reporting. This is another of those stories that has larger theological purposes for Luke as he continues to demonstrate how God is going to work out the promises that he made going all the way back to Abraham. These things are immensely important and yet, we can see Luke’s masterful ability as a writer, as these larger purposes never overshadow the very real and raw emotions behind something like these two devout and loving parents who have lost Jesus, their son.

It was quite common for Jewish people of this time to make at least one trip to Jerusalem per year for the Passover and many often went more often for other important Jewish festivals. Only men were required to go to Jerusalem for Passover but most pious families took everyone along with them. As we read this story of a Jewish family going to Jerusalem for Passover and returning home, however, we have to wonder how they could possibly have lost their son for an entire day of travel and not known it. The most likely answer has to do with Jesus’ age. Passover pilgrims would travel in large caravans for safety, and usually the men and women would travel in separate groups though still in close proximity. Being a twelve year old boy, Jesus was in that middle area where he could have been considered close enough to a man to be allowed to travel with the men, or still a child enough to travel with the women. Thus, it is likely that Joseph assumed Jesus was with the women while Mary assumed that he was with the men.

Whatever the cause, their response was one of extreme anguish and panic (the meaning of the words translated “anxiously” in verse 48). Luke paints a heart-rending picture of two loving parents who have discovered, to their horror, that they have left their beloved oldest son in Jerusalem, a place full of travelers, revolutionaries, bandits, and dark alleys, not the place where you would want to leave a child unattended. The thought of what they must have been going through on the day that it took them to get back to Jerusalem and the day that they spent searching in Jerusalem is crushing and is only balanced by the realization that they did eventually find him unharmed. We can certainly understand their reaction when, after two days of furiously searching for their child, their reaction is to let off a bit of steam in a mixture of relief and the mild anger that usually follows extreme fear as they ask Jesus how he could have possibly treated them in such a way. Jesus’ response is a mixture of respect, an intense focus on his vocation in life, and a gentle rebuke for his parents.

Luke doesn’t give us all of the details that we might like, here and surely we have questions like where did Jesus stay during those wayward days but Luke is not concerned with details that aren’t directly related with his theological purposes. And as usual when it comes to biblical texts, if the questions we want to ask aren’t being answered, we’re probably asking the wrong questions.

What Luke really wants to tell us about as it relates to his overall purposes in his gospel is to see the young Jesus hinting at what will be the singular focus of his life. Jesus’ question as to why they were searching for him doesn’t imply that he would have been just as well if they had continued on home and not come to get him. His point was that they need not have searched through Jerusalem. They might have known precisely where he would be. He would be in his Father’s house. Luke, no doubt, found this interaction quite remarkable on many levels, not the least of them being the hint here that part of Jesus’ vocation that he understood for himself was to be the Son of God. In the Old Testament this moniker could be given to Israel (Ex. 4:22) and even to God’s messengers, the angels (Job 2:1). But by the time of Jesus, the term “Son of God” had come to be applied virtually exclusively to the promised Messiah. Jesus was telling Mary and Joseph that above all else, he was wholly focused, in essence, on doing the will of God. Thus, Luke sees in this account, the seeds of Jesus’ mission in doing God’s will above all else and his identity in being the Son of God, which meant that he was not only the Messiah but the representative of Israel and the one through whom God would fulfill all of his ancient promises.

Luke, in recording that Jesus referred to God as his father, was also hinting at the redefinition of family that Jesus will bring as part of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham to bless the world through one family of many nations. Jesus would define this new family of God not through ethnic descent or a Jewish birth but those in the family of God would be those who hear God’s word and put it into practice. In other words, those who followed Christ as his disciples would be the family of God. God is his Father and part of his work would be to form this new family. Jesus would align himself with his Father’s will even it appeared to compromise his relationship with his earthly parents.

There is little doubt that Luke also found this story significant in that we find Jesus in the Temple. Jesus’ relationship with the Temple will become a vital theme for Luke as he unfolds his gospel. We have already been taken to the Temple with Zechariah’s vision, with the encounter with Simeon and Anna, and now with Jesus himself amazing the learned teachers of the law of the Temple with his acuity and knowledge of God and the Scriptures. As we follow Luke’s narrative, this will not be the last time the Temple will take center stage. Much of the Gospel follows Jesus’ resolute march towards Jerusalem and the Temple, a theme which will take on increasing importance. Some of Jesus’ harshest warnings and most defiant acts will take place when he finally does reach the Temple, and the Gospel will come to a close with Jesus’ disciples in the Temple praising God for all that he had done. It is, in fact, difficult to overstate the importance of the Temple for Luke as he infuses the historical events of Jesus’ life with their theological significance.

Yet, in all of the mind-blowing theological significance that we find in pieces of Luke’s narrative like this one, he never loses sight of the human details and neither should we as relate these accounts to our own walk as disciples. At it’s core, we find a story of two people puzzled and anguished over the fact that they have lost Jesus (a phenomenon that is echoed and balanced at the end of the Gospel by two people who are on their way to Emmaus and who are also puzzled and anguished over the fact that they seem to have lost Jesus). It should cause us to reflect on the fact that there are times when we can be busy, scurrying around and taking care of our business that can fill our days so quickly, only to find out that we haven’t had Jesus’ presence with us for quite a while. Maybe it’s only been a few days, maybe much longer. We assumed that he was with us, but somewhere along the line we left on our journey and realize that he is longer with us. What is our response? What would you be willing to do in order to search for him and find him again? Would you drop everything and search for Jesus with the same passion, anguish, and determination that Joseph and Mary did (or that we did when we thought my friend’s child was missing) or that you would if it was your own child that came up missing? Would you even be alarmed at all? When we find those times that we have drifted away from Jesus we need to be prepared to search for him in prayer, in the Scriptures, in our fellowship with his people, and not give up until we find him. And when we do find him, don’t be surprised to find him doing exactly what Mary and Joseph found him doing. He will be about his father’s business waiting for us to join him. In fact, when we find that Jesus isn’t accompanying us the way we might have thought, it’s almost always because we went off doing our business rather than our Father’s. Jesus knew that he needed to be about his Father’s business and so do we.

As Luke brings this section to a close he notes that Mary once again treasured these things up in her heart, not fully understanding their meaning at the time, but understanding nonetheless that they were important. We have already discussed that Luke has made clear that his gospel was based in large part on eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life. Could this second reference of Mary storing things up in her heart indicate that Mary was somehow one of Luke’s sources? It’s not, of course, something that we can say for certain, but it is surely a distinct possibility and it’s just plain fun to speculate over.

Devotional Thought
When you drift in your relationship with Christ are you anguished? Do you search for his presence again like you would a lost child or do you treat it with little urgency? Take stock of your spiritual status right now. Is Jesus truly with you or have you wandered off on your own business and haven’t even noticed that you have left Jesus behind to do the work of his Father without you? If so, what are you prepared to do to find him again?