Dealing with incomprehension

 ‘…Child, why have you treated us like this?..’ (Luke 2:48)

Luke 2:41-52 (Year C: Christmas 1)

This is a story about a family. Custom and tradition. Festival and gathering. A journey back home.  A child goes missing, Worried parents.  Do the cousins know where he is?  Worry. Hell for a time.  Found him. Amazement, relief and anger for a while.  This story has all the hallmarks of one told by Mary to Luke. “Oh I remember the time he was 12. It was unbelievably difficult for me and Joseph.  We were beside ourselves. All the extended family searched for three days in Jerusalem. There were 10,000s of pilgrims from different parts of the world were there like us. Much of the time we could not understand passers-by and they could not understand us.  Some of them thought we were in the city to buy and sell our son!  When we did eventually find him there were words….  He was cheeky and said something about his ‘Father’. I didn’t understand then but I do now. I only wish Joseph were still alive today to understand what happened then. Neither of us could understand what was going on. He was so worried and it had an impact on him for the rest of his life.  But, we gradually began to understand more and more over many years that this child was very special not in a way that all children are special.  The temple officials, theologians and priests even suggested that our son might have a special calling in the Temple given his precociousness and wisdom. But, Jesus had different ideas.”

Dealing with incomprehension was Jesus’s lot in the Temple and it was Mary and Joseph’s lot with the neighbours and cousins ever since Mary was found to be pregnant while not yet with Joseph.

Images of the ‘holy family’ abounded and still abound in religious imagery, poetry and liturgy. Mary, a spotless mother with a Northern European look about her, Joseph carrying a staff or a flower everywhere he goes and Jesus a meek, mild and obedient child as it says in some Christmas hymn. In truth we know very little about Jesus and his family. What little we know is set in the context of Jesus’s ministry, mission and saving power. Family background together with the selection of events uniquely recounted in the first two chapters of Luke and in the first chapter of Matthew is hugely significant for what was the come afterwards and what was foretold according to later Christian faith and understanding of ancient Jewish history and prophecy. Everything fits, somehow, into a story that makes sense of the story of a wandering nomads in the desert (…got that spelling right for once!...) escaping captivity and seeking out a promised land somewhere. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are in that story as they were on the move while seeking refuge in Africa.  How ironic – this Christmas time – that the Saviour of the World as we believe never thought Europe or the America’s a priority. God placed his only son in the Middle East and then Africa among a pilgrim people and a family literally ‘on-the-run’.

We can only image what stresses, tensions and challenges such a way of life entailed for this holy family. It is not the plastic image we so often see and hear about. It is a very flesh and blood and very human family.  The latter-day emphasis on celibacy, other-worldliness and Euro-centric culture and power games may have robbed the story Luke is trying to tell of its vigour and surprise.  Luke was recounting (probably with the help of Mary) a real story about a real family in a real political mess that was and is the ‘Near East’ (note my language here reflects a Euro-centric world view).  Some twelve years later we revisit the family as it undergoes the trauma of losing Jesus for a few days only to find him ‘at his Father’s business’ as some English-language translations have it. Was trauma ever far from the lives of Mary and Joseph?  The little we know suggests that life was a roller coaster of trauma from a potential row over how Mary became pregnant in the first place to fleeing in terror from state terrorists in the ego of Herod Antipas all the way up to Jesus’s crucifixion and the growth of a subversive religious movement that would see Judaism split (but not by intention) and Rome compromised in the fullness of time.  And, at the age of 12, we have another trauma-story.

Some films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ labour the point that ‘war is hell’.  The story behind Luke and the other gospels is quite different. Yes, war is hell and life can be at times for some people ‘hell’ (use of the word is deliberate here) but over and beyond this ‘hell’ there is a new life and new hope that is born in families and communities across the world.  Organisations like churches need to become more family-like at a local level to provide space for people to rediscover the good news about 21^st century whole-some families.