Jesus as a child

Second Sunday after Christmas, January 5, 2025: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23 or Luke 2:41-52; or Matthew 2:1-12; Psalm 84 or 84:1-8

This Sunday, the lectionary offers three choices for the Gospel: two phases of the story of the Wise Men, and the story of Jesus in the temple. These are among the few glimpses we have of Jesus’ life between his birth and his ministry: from birth to age 30, it’s pretty much a blank. As I’ve been thinking about this week’s readings, I’ve been wondering why it matters what Jesus did between birth and his ministry. The accounts we have in the two stories about the wise men are used to show how Jesus fulfills prophecies from the Hebrew scriptures. The passage from Luke on Jesus in the Temple is designed to show the child Jesus growing in wisdom, and claiming his role as the son of God. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” This painting, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current Siena exhibit, tells this story in a very human way:

Martini, Simone; Christ Discovered in the Temple; Walker Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/christ-discovered-in-the-temple-97710

It is a family: worried mother (“Where were you”), anxious father (“Look what you did to your mother”) and sullen kid, standing with arms crossed (“I don’t care what you think”). Everyone I know who has seen the exhibit comments on this painting, whose dynamics we all recognize. Jesus is shown as a human child, even though he and his parents all have golden halos.

The gospels on the one hand want us to know that Jesus was always special. But they also want us to know that he was a normal child. Simone Martini’s painting leans into Jesus as a normal kid. The stories we read at Christmas are particularly focused on the dynamic between Jesus as fully human, but with strong indications that he is also fully divine. As Luke says, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”

What is important about the incarnation is that Jesus was one of us: this is why I love the image of the kid with his arms crossed. He shared our feelings, and many of our experiences. He suffered fear, and pain; he had friends, he did work he thought mattered. That God made himself human is remarkable. And it means that we all have God within us.

At Christmas we are particularly attuned to the gift at the center of our faith, the presence of Jesus, born of a woman, living among us. God participates in the human not from the outside, but from the inside. While the gospel stories all indicate ways Jesus was always different, they also make him very human. As our reading of the gospels moves forward, we will be drawn increasingly into engagement with the divine Jesus.

“His mother treasured all these things in her heart.” Thus Luke remarks on Mary’s response to Jesus’s absence in the Temple. Mary is holding in her heart the way Jesus knows his position as the Son of God. But we need to also hold in our hearts that Jesus is one of us. Both are true, and both are important. May we hold on to both.

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