In Jesus’s day, it was Jewish practice for every observant male to go to Jerusalem to make an offering in the Temple three times a year: on Passover, which commemorates Israel’s deliverance from Egypt; Shavout, or, in Greek, Pentecost, which recalls God’s giving the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai; Tabernacles, which marks Israel’s forty-year sojourn in the desert. In today’s Gospel Jesus had just reached the age at which he was required to fulfill this obligation.
Like the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, eight days after his birth, Saint Luke uses this episode to highlight the Holy Family’s fidelity to Torah. Like so many episodes in his life, this observance results in a surprise: an early manifestation of Jesus’s messianic and divine identity. What is surprising about this narrative is what appears to be our Lord’s impertinent answer to his mother’s question, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety,” an anxiety that any parent would feel upon realizing a child was missing or lost.1 For those of us who are parents, just think about what goes through your mind when you lose track of a child at a busy store.
But Jesus responds, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”2 Finding Jesus in the Temple is the fifth Joyful mystery of the Holy Rosary.
Our Lord’s seemingly impertinent response to his mother leads us to consider our reading from Sirach, which is seen by many scholars as a commentary on the fourth commandment, which enjoins us to honor our father and our mother. This commandment serves as something of a bridge between the first three commandments about loving God and the final six about loving your neighbor. In this schema, parents are rightly situated between God and other people. This unique place parents occupy in our lives entails mutual responsibilities. We should honor our parents because they gave us life and our elders because they are the repositories of life’s wisdom. Very often it is their hard work and selfless sacrifice that earned the benefits we enjoy.
There is much said and written today about the Church’s magisterium, her teaching authority. Most of this speaking and writing focuses on the authority of the papacy or the episcopacy. On this feast, we are reminded that parents, because their authority is also divinely derived, constitute part of the Church’s authentic magisterium because, as we read of the Compendium of the Catechism: in “Christ the family becomes the domestic church because it is a community of faith, of hope, and of charity.”3
With authority comes responsibility. Hence, the responsibilities of parents exceed the duties of their children. When presenting their children for baptism, after requesting the sacrament for their children, Christian parents willingly accept “the responsibility of training [them] in the practice of the faith.”4 They assume the “duty” of bringing their children “up to keep God’s commandments as Christ taught us, by loving God and our neighbor.”5 Parents are the primary catechists of their children. And so, faith must be lived, practiced, taught, and handed on at home.
Much of every child’s image of God is derived from his/her parents. Therefore, Christian parents must be mindful that their authority, like that of the Church, “is not above the word of God, but serves it.”6 In order to serve the word of God, parents must listen “to it devoutly.”7
In our second reading from Colossians, we are given a list of values that are to be nurtured in God’s family, the Church, and in our families, the domestic Church. More fundamentally, the family has a value that itself needs nurturing. As Pope Benedict XVI observed some years ago: “The family is the indispensable foundation for society and a great and lifelong treasure for couples.” The family, he continues, is also “a unique good for children, who are meant to be the fruit of love, of the total and generous self-giving of the parents.”
Total, generous self-giving is a tall order. It sounds good at Church but presents difficulties in life. It is one that can be fulfilled by Christian parents, strengthened by sacramental grace, as the seek to live matrimony as a holy state of life, a sacrament, that is, a visible and tangible sign of Christ’s presence in and for the world.
It’s important to keep in mind that, along with holy orders, holy matrimony is a sacrament at the service of communion, which two sacraments Owen Cummings has called “diaconal” because of their service-oriented nature. This seems fitting on the day that would otherwise be the Feast of Saint Stephen, whom the Church reveres as one of the first seven deacons and who is the Church's first martyr.
Getting back to Jesus’ response to his mother, on closer examination, we see that Jesus is not being impertinent or disrespectful. While he is and will always be the son of Mary and was beholden to Joseph as to a father, he is most profoundly the Son of God. His words, therefore, are a reminder to Mary and Joseph bear in mind the reality of who he is, as they daily encounter the great mystery of God-made-man for us. It is also a subtle reminder that the Holy Family is not a “traditional family,” in the strictest sense. As Christians, we need to remember that the water of baptism, through which we are reborn, is thicker than the blood of hereditary relation.
Our Gospel ends with a portrait of family life that gives us some insight into the life of Jesus between the ages of twelve the beginning of his public ministry:
He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man8By humbly submitting himself to the parental authority of Mary and Joseph, Jesus made known to them what they were not able to understand that day in the Temple. It is by our humble obedience to the Father that we make the Lordship of Jesus Christ known to those who do not understand. As you continue to enjoy your celebration of Christmas, may all of you enjoy the sweetest fruit of all, which fruit we contemplate as that of the fifth and final Joyful mystery of the Rosary: the joy of finding Jesus, who is Christ the Lord.
1 Luke 2:48.↩
2 Luke 2:49.↩
3 Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 456.↩
4 Rite of Baptism for Several Children, sec. 39.↩
5 Ibid.↩
6 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation [Dei Verbum], sec. 10.↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Luke 2:51-52.↩
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