On this the final Sunday in 2024, I preached about the one biblical account of Jesus as a boy.
Sermon
This morning’s message, “Missing Jesus” is based on Luke 2:-41-52.
You can watch the message below or read the manuscript.
Excerpt
Over the last 25 years I have led more than my fair share of youth group retreats, mission trips, and outings of all sorts that involve travel with tweens and young teens. And before I offer a confession, I want you to know that the same number of young people who started each trip returned from it. There may, however, have been a couple of occasions when I temporarily lost a young person or two.
When you travel with groups of tweens and teens you get really good at counting. The larger the group the more of your time you spend counting – making sure you did not lose someone’s child before getting back on a bus, boarding a plane, or hopping on a train. With groups small enough to fit into a single 15-passenger van keeping up with the counting is much easier. Larger groups are more challenging – some much, much more challenging. And this is when things happen.
Did you know that there are young people who are oblivious to what time it is and others who prefer a chose your own adventure experience to what has been scheduled at any given time? Did you know that we would do everything in our power to choose any word to describe a temporarily missing child besides the word lost? Did you know that it is one thing to a child for a few minutes and another all together to lose one for three days?
Yes, Mary and Joseph we are looking at you! They didn’t lose someone else’s child; they lost their own son. Admittedly, they were traveling in a large group and in a different time and culture that didn’t require parents or others to continually count children. They trusted that everyone was keeping an eye on everyone else’s children as had been the case on these trips every year for Passover in years. For days they simply didn’t know that they needed to be looking for him.
The moment you become aware someone isn’t present your perspective changes. Your initial reaction is to start searching, which brings us back to Jesus in the temple at age 12.
I don’t think its an accident that Jesus is portrayed as a child only once in the Bible or that it happens when he is 12 years old. This was a special time in a boy’s life. He was getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah – a religious rite of passage much like Confirmation. To be approaching this milestone, Jesus would have experienced significant preparation.
When Jesus is missing, he was not simply oblivious to the end of Passover nor was he choosing his own adventure by creating alternative programming for himself. Instead, Jesus was being Jesus. He was clarifying his identity.
In the key verse in this morning’s lesson, Jesus’ parents have returned to the Temple and found their son. They ask him why he would behave this way and he answers:
Why were you searching for me?” . . . “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”[1] Or, as another translation renders it, “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?[2]
Jesus is looking his earthly Dad in the face and saying, “Look Mom and Dad, by now you should be recognizing who I am. And, you should know that it is my purpose in life to do the will of my heavenly Father.”
Instead of finding their son and being relieved, Mary and Joseph are perplexed and could not figure out what he was talking about. It would take years for them to really grasp what he had told them that day.
[1] Luke 2:49, NIV.
[2] Luke 2:49, Message.