Every year Jesus’ parents traveled to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up as they always did for the Feast. When it was over and they left for home, the child Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents didn’t know it. Thinking he was somewhere in the company of pilgrims, they journeyed for a whole day and then began looking for him among relatives and neighbors. When they didn’t find him, they went back to Jerusalem looking for him.
The next day they found him in the Temple seated among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. The teachers were all quite taken with him, impressed with the sharpness of his answers. But his parents were not impressed; they were upset and hurt. His mother said, “Young man, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you.” He said, “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?” But they had no idea what he was talking about.
my daughter is about to turn 12. We would definitely be “half out of our minds looking for ” her!
I’d love to know what questions he was asking the teachers. What his understanding of the passover was and at what age he began to realise that it all pointed to him.
I was thinking about May and Joseph’s response and whether it was intensified by the need for their flight to Egypt when he was a baby. I wonder if it brought it all back. They enormity of their responsibility as parents over and above that of all parents must have been hard to handle.
Also how did they then handle Jesus’ response and did everything just go back to normal once they then went home?
It’s funny how Jesus’ explanation seems so sensible to him… “Why were you looking for me?… Didn’t you know…?” he says, as if his parents should have known where he was if they’d just given it some more thought!
I wonder if Jesus really did think his parents should have known where he was, or if it’s written that way to signal to the readers of Luke’s gospel that Jesus was starting to understand his role in the world. Maybe this story also foreshadows how difficult Jesus’ life will be for the people closest to him to understand.
But what a strange thing for Mary and Joseph to do… wouldn’t you make sure your son was with you before you left? How could they be so sure that he was in the larger group and still travel for a whole day with no sight or sound of him?!!! I think I would be worried less than a day in!
I think it can be easy to read a story like this through the eye of today’s culture; my daughter is celebrating her 11th birthday today and if we did not know where she was for an hour we would start looking for her.
I am no bible expert but I suspect that people were just not as paranoid as we are today and families shared child care a lot more; I think there would have been a trust that if Jesus was not with his parents then he would be with his Grandparents, aunty, neighbour etc.
It is one of the frustrations of not knowing much about the culture in which the story is based.
I think that the fact that Mary and Joseph assumed that Jesus was in the ‘company of pilgrims’ says something of the worshipping community that they were all part of this was a group as well as personal pilgrimage, and in that journeying together was that huge level of trust…..something to aspire to in Dream?!