The Adolescent Christ
“And Jesus grew in wisdom and maturity, and in favour with God and men.” Luke 2.52
I was sitting with old friends this week discussing their children. I remember each of the five being born and have seen the two oldest married. The fifth child, a precocious twelve year old, had come to London this week to see the spectacular new production of Much Ado with her parents.
But our conversation was taken up with the fourth child; an unusual child, now a teenager; his parents describe him as ‘special’. There’s nothing as far as anyone knows ‘wrong’ with him, but since 11 or 12, he has been a strange boy, completely unlike his four siblings.
As parents, they are mystified. His upbringing was no different to the others and yet they wonder how this delicate soul will cope in the world as he grows older and hopefully more independent.
Most parents experience a degree of wonder, bewilderment and sometimes anxiety, as they watch their children pass through adolescence. Where will it all end?
Ten years ago I visited Nazareth, and climbed the 250 steps up to the Church of Jesus the Adolescent. Although it’s French Gothic in style, its foundation stone was laid just 100 years ago. It affords a wonderful view over Nazareth’s rooftops and the Galilean hills.
It is the chapel of a trade school, run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, where teenage Palestinians are trained, some still to be carpenters – a church dedicated to a boy their own age – the adolescent Jesus.
We can visualize the baby Jesus (although cannot grasp exactly how he is God). We have a mental image of the man Christ Jesus, although almost invariably framed by those blue-eyed, blond Jesuses around the Sunday School walls and in our confirmation bibles.
But an adolescent Saviour? - gawky and spotty with a voice that can’t make up its mind – it’s difficult to imagine. And as for a ‘sinless’ teenager – it makes us redefine our understanding of the sinlessness of Christ.
The Bible is remarkably silent about the years between Christ’s birth and his final three years of public ministry.
There is just this one incident recorded, which Luke introduces with the verse before today’s Gospel: "the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him." (40) This is to look back on the previous 12 years. Then Luke finishes the story by looking forward to the adolescent years and early adulthood: "Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour". (52)
Perhaps the purpose of the story is to remind us that the incarnation was a reality at every stage of the human life of Christ, from conception to death on a cross. He was as we are, and yet always lived in perfect harmony with his heavenly Father.
I wonder what his self-understanding was as a 12 year old? We all dreamed then, didn’t we, that we were someone special; we were somehow different; our thoughts were somehow more profound than others’. We had a destiny. And when we discovered what sex was, we knew we must have been adopted, for our parents could never have done anything like that!
Jesus must have had such thoughts and shared them with close friends on the hillsides around Galilee. He wondered who he would marry, or if he would marry.
And here in the Temple, as he approaches his thirteenth birthday and official Jewish manhood, he is caught up in the spiritual and religious discussions of the day.
Luke’s account mirrors the story of the boy Samuel. Interestingly, throughout world literature, you will find endless stories of precocious 12 year olds discovering their destiny. We were thinking of Harry Potter and the more recent Eragon at Midnight Mass, but there are parallels in Moses, Cyrus, Alexander, Apollonius, Si Osiris and Buddha, to name but a few.
There is nothing supernatural here in Luke’s account however, and although the boy discusses well what he would have been taught in school, he is not ‘teaching the teachers’. You only find that in the apocryphal writings such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Arabic Infancy Gospel.
Jesus is simply growing in his spiritual awareness and understanding of the grown up world.
A point John Pridmore makes in the Church times this week when he writes: “There is a life in relationship to God appropriate to the years when the child is becoming an adult. It’s good news for Year 7s.”
Jesus tells his parents, who have been so desperately looking for him, that he must be "about his father’s business", or “in my father’s house” – the Greek is impenetrable here, but either translation gives the right flavour.
Mary and Joseph are not the first parents of adolescents who are baffled by their behaviour and their answers. Jesus is not the first teenager who doesn’t know what his mother is so worried about. It happens again in his adult life when she is worried that he isn’t eating well. He is possible the only creator of the universe who has ever been told by his mother to put a vest on because it’s cold out!
All parents must go through the pain of letting their children grow away from them. They must know how gradually to let go. For if they hold on too long or too tightly, there will be tears before bedtime and probably years of therapy.
We don’t know what Jesus meant by this strange reply. Had he at this age grasped that he was in some unique relationship with God? He knew the village gossip about his own birth. The other boys at school must have made jokes about his mother.
But it would not seem possibly for a 12 year old even to entertain the possibility that he was God made human. On the other hand, maybe it was easier for a 12 year old than a 33 year old?
Whatever, it is evident that he had at this age a clear sense of vocation, even if it was as yet unclear as to what this would mean.
As we pray for those around us who are ‘growing up’ we should remember that early aspirations are often correct indications of where they are heading.
I’m just reading John Cornwell’s fascinating memoir, A Seminary Boy (Fourth Estate, 2006), which is a deeply moving account both of a child’s powerful sense of vocation and of the bewilderment of perplexed and sometimes angry parents failing to make sense of it.
So as we continue to keep the Christmas Feast of the Incarnation – God as baby, boy and man;
as we stand at the door of the 2007th Year of grace;
let us pray for and nurture the adolescents among our families and friends;
some of them ‘special’, like my friends’ son;
and let us pray for ourselves, that as the years go by, it may be said of us as it was said of our Lord:
“And Jesus grew in wisdom and maturity, and in favour with God and men.” Luke 2.52
