December 30, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Wise beyond His Years

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 148
1 Samuel 2:18–20, 26
Luke 2:41–52

“And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”

Luke 2:52 (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”

“Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” This is how Luke sums up the only story in the Bible that gives us a glimpse into what Jesus was like before he would begin his public ministry almost twenty years later. It echoes how the writer of 1 Samuel described Samuel as a child before he would become priest of the great temple in Shiloh. By including this story about Jesus as a twelve-year-old in his Gospel, Luke reminds us that Jesus, the Son of God, was fully human and that, like Samuel, it took time for Jesus to grow up. It took time for Jesus to be brought up to become an observant Jew, understanding Jewish law and custom. It took time for Jesus to mature and gain wisdom.

That Jesus grew in wisdom and in years does not mean, however, that Jesus was not wise beyond his years. He was, and one of the purposes of the story Luke tells is precisely to demonstrate this. Jesus was found in the temple, sitting with the greatest and wisest teachers of his day, and rather than receiving instruction from them, Jesus was teaching by asking questions just as Socrates, the greatest and wisest teacher of all time, was known to do.

You can imagine that this story was widely circulated, popular, and relished by Jesus’ followers. The early Christians who lived around the time Luke was writing his Gospel were just as interested as we are today in the lives of famous people. In fact, prior to and around the time Luke was writing, the genre of biography became quite popular. From world literature, we find stories about great men who 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).

In the story that Luke tells about Jesus, Jesus is no less a child prodigy. He astounds everyone, even his parents, with his knowledge and understanding. Upon finding their son, after having frantically searched for him for three days, Mary and Joseph cannot believe their eyes. They have no explanation for how their son acquired the wisdom he is exhibiting. Though they remember how remarkable Jesus’ conception and birth had been, they are nevertheless astounded and confounded by what their son now says and does. Who is this person who says to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” How can their own son, whom they brought up from birth, be so unfamiliar to them?

In his newest book, Far from the Tree, writer Andrew Solomon brings into focus the universally common phenomenon among families: that “all offspring are startling to their parents.” Because children are actually not reproductions of their parents, parents inevitably wonder who their children are. Solomon poses the question this way: How can the apple have fallen so far from the tree? At some point, to some extent, and for different reasons, all parents and children will throw up their hands and ask this question. To understand this universal phenomenon, Solomon looks at extreme cases of difference in which the traits, conditions, abilities, or identities of children are alien to their parents. He describes cases of deafness, dwarfs, homosexuality, disability, and prodigy, among others. As different as these kinds of cases are from each other and as unique as every family’s experience of such a case may be, all these cases bring to the fore the issue of identity. Children and parents alike struggle to understand what bearing these traits, conditions, or abilities will have on their children’s identities.

Let’s take an example. In the case of child prodigies, parents struggle to know whether and to what extent they should push their children to achieve their full potential. Solomon describes the dilemma and its potential consequences for the children’s sense of identity. He writes:

There is no clear delineation between supporting and pressuring a child, between believing in your child and forcing your child to conform to what you imagine for him. You can damage prodigies by nurturing the talent at the expense of personal growth, or by cultivating general development at the expense of the special skill that might have given them the deepest fulfillment. (p. 406)

Whether he is writing about prodigiousness, disability, or any other case, Solomon’s point is that children in such cases are apples that fall far from the tree, perhaps a couple of orchards away, or even on the other side of the world.

I cannot imagine a more extreme case of this than that of Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph and Son of God. Clearly Jesus inherited some of his identity from Mary and Joseph, from the society, culture, and religious tradition in which he grew up. And yet clearly Jesus’ identity is not simply a composite of these profound influences. The proclamation of the angels, the testimony of the shepherds, and the vision of Simeon and Anna have already revealed Jesus’ divine identity. These were third-party accounts. Now in this story, for the first time, Jesus speaks for himself. Jesus discloses who he understands himself to be. He is not only Mary’s son, the son of a carpenter, a boy from Nazareth, or the brother of James; he has come to know for himself that he is all these things and the Son of God.

To be sure, Jesus’ identity is exceptional. As the Son of God, he is unique. Luke maintained the exceptional, unique status and identity of Jesus. At the same time, Luke reminds us that Jesus did not come fully formed into his ministry. Jesus had to “increase in wisdom and in divine and human favor.” Jesus had to grow into his full and unique identity. Like all the Gospel writers, Luke insisted that Jesus was both the Son of God and a son of man. This insistence is at the heart of Christian theology.

If we fail to appreciate the full humanity of Jesus as well as his divinity, we risk falling into the trap of exceptionalism. In conducting interviews for his book, Andrew Solomon found that the majority of people about whose cases he wrote tended to think of their cases as exceptional. “Almost everyone,” he writes,

was to some degree put off by the chapters in this book other than his or her own. Deaf people didn’t want to be compared to people with schizophrenia; some parents of schizophrenics were creeped out by dwarfs; criminals couldn’t abide the idea that they had anything in common with transgender people. The prodigies and their families objected to being in a book with the severely disabled, and some children of rape felt that their emotional struggle was trivialized when they were compared to gay activists. (p. 44)

While each kind of case is different from every other kind of case, Andrew Solomon wants to make the point that how people deal with one kind of difference can intersect with how they could deal with another kind of difference, even one that they may not have personally or directly experienced. To claim that one’s experience of difference is so exceptional that it should be treated as an exception impairs our ability to stand in solidarity with people whose experiences differ from our own. Rather than dividing us, the experience of difference can unite us.

I believe this is true. I believe that if we excavate deeply enough those experiences in our own lives in which difference has shaped our identities, we will uncover a softness and suppleness of heart, a pool of empathy, compassion, and appreciation.

In Jesus we have the most radical example of difference. He is both human and divine. It was in his teenage years that Jesus had to come to terms with his identity, an identity that would equip him for a ministry to all people—a ministry to you and me, to people from all walks of life. Through him, the poor and the rich, the powerless and the powerful, the sinner, the suffering, and the righteous—all of us are able to put aside our exceptionalism so that we can walk with one another, serve one another, and be for one another.