December 27, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Filial Piety

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
1 Samuel 2:18–20
Luke 2:41-52

“Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Luke 2:49 (NRSV)

Let this, too, be a source of praise,
that trees meet in the park like six-
winged seraphim, stooping low enough
for a boy to find foothold
and swing himself to a crooked seat. . . .

Surely Jesus, too, climbed trees in Galilee,
frightening Mary by exceeding her grasp,
then flinging his body from the upper branches
and returning to earth, triumphant and flushed.

Anya Silver
“Jesus Climbing Trees”

Though this story about Jesus as a boy is told near the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, like the birth and infancy narratives preceding it, it was most likely written and added last to the growing body of stories about Jesus. Unlike the stories that came to life and began circulating as people actually encountered the words and deeds of Jesus in his adult ministry, the stories about Jesus’ birth, infancy, and childhood developed only after his followers experienced his death and resurrection. Only after Easter did they come to wonder about how miraculous his birth must have been and to ask about what Jesus must have been like as a child. Had he been a child prodigy? Had there been signs from very early on telling who Jesus was?

You can imagine the desire people had to know more about Jesus. Turning to tabloids, biographies, or personal memoirs, we can hardly satiate our desire to know more about the lives of people in the public eye. So it was also for the early Christians.

So much interest was there that a whole genre of biography grew up prior to and around the time Luke wrote his Gospel. Biographical stories about heroic figures were not uncommon. We find ancient stories from world literature about great men who already from an early age were child prodigies, exhibiting extraordinary knowledge: the Buddha in India, Osiris in Egypt, Cyrus the Great in Persia, Alexander the Great in Greece, and Augustus in Rome (Raymond Brown, An Adult Christ at Christmas, pp. 40–41). Nonbiblical Jewish stories written around the same time as New Testament stories portray Moses as just a boy when God gave him knowledge that astounded others. This morning you heard a passage from 1 Samuel in which Samuel, only twelve years old, is about to be called by God to become the great temple priest. Like the author of 1 Samuel, who wrote that the child Samuel “waxed mighty before the Lord” (1 Samuel 2:21) and “advanced and was good in the company of God and men” (1 Samuel 2:26), Luke ended the story about twelve-year-old Jesus with similar words. “Jesus,” he wrote, “increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). Ending with such a statement and showing similarities to other stories about the precocious childhoods of famous figures, it is not surprising that this particular story in the Gospel of Luke has come to be known for revealing how outstandingly wise Jesus had been even as a young boy.

Biblical scholars point out, however, that it may be wrong to assume that this was the story’s main point. By incorporating this popular story about Jesus as a boy into his Gospel, Luke reinterpreted the story’s meaning. No longer circulating by itself, the story stands in the context of what Luke told before and after. So far, in Luke’s Gospel, the identity of Jesus has been revealed by a string of others: first the angel Gabriel, then the shepherds, then Simeon, and then Anna. Now finally, in verse 49, Jesus himself speaks. In response to his mother and father, who have been frantically searching for him, Jesus says, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

These are the first words that Luke’s Gospel attributes to Jesus, and they form a statement implying who Jesus is. While he doesn’t come right out and say it, he implies that he is the Son of God. As the Son of God, he must be in his Father’s house. In time Luke will make it clearer to everyone what Jesus meant by these words.

For now, imagine the shock, the utter disorientation, that Mary and Joseph must have experienced when, after searching three days, they finally found their son not among their relatives or friends, which would have been understandable; not lost in a city crowd, which too could have happened; but rather in the world-famous Jerusalem temple, teaching religious teachers. Their shock would only have been exacerbated by Jesus’ statement. Before they could even experience the relief of finding their son, a cloud of disorientation about who their son was settled over them.

Throughout the Gospels are stories in which the people closest to Jesus are confused about who Jesus is. To be sure, his disciples experience their fair share of confusion. People from Jesus’ hometown too are puzzled: in the Gospel of John, when Jesus talks about himself as having come down from heaven, they ask, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” The disorientation over Jesus’ identity is most striking when it comes to his family. In Mark, when Jesus’ mother and brothers are waiting for him and call to see him, Jesus responds by saying, “Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33–34). In a later chapter of Luke, when Mary and Jesus’ brothers come asking for Jesus, he responds in a similar way, saying, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:19–21). It’s not that Jesus’ family members were especially hardheaded. That even Mary and Joseph, in the Gospel lesson I read this morning, did not understand what Jesus was saying to them was Luke’s way of getting across to us how truly difficult it is to comprehend who Jesus was.

From Jesus’ response to his parents, what can we know about (1) who Jesus understood himself to be and (2) what he understood himself as needing to do? These are typical questions about vocation. In fact, a recent volume of essays on the subject matter of vocation focuses on these two questions. Its title is Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be. Excerpts of writings by well-known public figures—some of them public heroes, like Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Dorothy Day —address in one way or another these questions of vocation. The insights into vocation offered by these and other prominent individuals, however, seem also to address another question, one that, while not overtly raised, is nevertheless assumed in their reflections. It is a question about relationships, and it comes prior to the other questions of vocation. In order to know “what they should do” and “who they should be,” those writing seem to recognize the need to ask themselves “whom should they serve,” “to whom are they committed,” and “for whom are they responsible.”

In his book No Man Is an Island, poet, essayist, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote about vocation in general and his vocation in particular. About vocation in general, Merton wrote that “each one of us has some kind of vocation” (Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation, p. 422). Each person, he thought, has a God-given destiny to fulfill, and that destiny, he described, “is the work of two wills,” two loves. Merton imagined vocation—our sense of who we should be and what we should do—first and foremost in terms of our relationship with God, a God who is not an impersonal “divinity without heart,” but rather a person with whom we can be in intimate relationship. “It is hopeless,” he wrote, “to try to settle the problem of vocation outside the context of friendship and love. We speak of Providence: that is a philosophical term. The Bible speaks of our Father in heaven. Providence is. . . a person. . . . He is our Father” (p. 422).

Merton must have taken seriously passages from the Bible like the one we read today—passages in which Jesus reveals who he is and what he must do, his vocation, in interpersonal, relational terms. As the Gospel of Luke portrays him, even as a boy, Jesus understood himself to be first and foremost the Son of God. The filial piety of a son faithful to his Father in heaven will last, we know, beyond this scene. It is a piety that will color and qualify every other relationship in Jesus’ life, all his other commitments and responsibilities, even the commitments he has to his earthly parents.

Biblical scholar Francois Bovon observes that Luke was a master of avoiding either-ors in his thinking. By appreciating the value of one thing, Luke didn’t feel compelled to depreciate the value of its opposite. Instead, Luke presented choices as though they were between a good thing and something else of still higher value (Hermeneia: Luke 1, p. 113). It was a skill that Luke applied here. Ending this scene with Jesus’ obedience to his earthly parents, Luke ultimately upheld both the relationship Jesus had to Mary and Joseph and the relationship he had to his Father in heaven. In both relationships, Jesus was a faithful son.

Throughout its history, the church has defined faith in different ways, emphasizing different aspects of what it means to be faithful. At times, the church has defined faith primarily as assent to certain propositions or doctrinal teachings. At other times, the church has so closely associated genuine faith with good works that the two seemed almost the same. And throughout history, again and again, the church has returned to an understanding of faith in the fundamentally emotional and interpersonal terms of loyalty and trust.

Many of us Presbyterians have been socially conditioned, I think, to be emotionally reserved, to refrain from and even be somewhat suspicious of emotional and highly personal language when we speak of God and Jesus Christ. That is not, however, how we have always understood ourselves. With John Calvin as our forefather, we have the spirit of reformation running through our veins. Calvin, like the prophet Jeremiah, Jesus, St. Paul, and Martin Luther, who came before him, and like Jonathan Edwards, who came after him, recognized the need to reform, reinvigorate, revive faithfulness in his day by putting the heart back into faith. All of these great religious reformers drew upon and put to use language, symbols, and metaphors rich in imagery and evocative of emotions. When you read what they said and wrote, it is nearly impossible to be unmoved by their words.

Whenever I meet with a couple to plan their wedding service, in asking them to select a passage or two from scripture to be read in their service, I always recommend that they choose texts that not only resonate with them, but that they also find to be rich in imagery. The reason for this is not so as to move everyone to tears, which often can’t be helped, but rather to evoke the deep emotions that are necessary and appropriate for an occasion in which vows of faith—vows to be loyal to and trust in each other—will be exchanged.

Marriage, in the Christian tradition, has often been regarded as a vocation. It’s easy to see the relational aspect of the vocation of marriage between two people. Marriage, however, involves a more complex integration than the simple joining of two people. Taking on all the causes and relationships to which each person is committed, a couple becomes what the church calls a new creation.

Only when we conceive of vocation in interrelational and interpersonal terms is such complex integration possible. The vocation of Jesus as Son of God is the most comprehensive and complex of all relationships. As the Son of God, Jesus takes upon himself the duty to be loyal to all to whom God is loyal. He takes on every cause to which God is committed. He loves every person whom God loves. No one is excluded from the scope of his care and concern.

When we fail to relate personally and intimately with God and Christ, we risk losing the universal scope of God’s concern. Ironically, a deeply personal relationship with Christ and God does not imply a concern for one’s personal salvation alone. Instead it is what makes possible our commitment to the salvation and well-being of all. This is the good news implied in Jesus’ response to his parents, for when he asked, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus included all of us in the household of God.

Amen.