Rev. Daniel Mackey Epiphany 1 January 12, 2014 Luke 2:41-52 Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Muncie, Ind. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And [Jesus] went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. St. Luke tells us that Jesus was under the authority of Joseph and His mother. Here Jesus keeps the 4 th Commandment Honor your father and your mother perfectly. But our Gospel lesson is more than Jesus keeping a particular commandment; rather, it is about Him being human, fully and completely. Yes, kids, even Jesus had to do the dishes, clean His room, and take out the trash just because Joseph and His mother said so. We see here also that Jesus is fully and completely divine. While sitting in the temple, He amazed the teachers with His understanding and His answers, often challenging them with the tough questions He asked. This was more amazing than that game show about the child geniuses who are out-answering ivy-league professors. No, Jesus not only knew facts and details, but He had insight and saw how everything was connected. He not only could answer questions about the Scriptures, but He could also ask them. And He, being without sin, was never arrogant or snotty about His understanding. When Joseph and Mary found Him and questioned Him about what He was doing, Jesus spoke plainly to them of His divine identity and mission. Christ s first recorded words are Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in My Father s house? Jesus true Father is in heaven. Our Savior is begotten of the Father before all worlds, very God of very God, begotten not made. And when the second person of the Trinity became man, it was the Holy Spirit of the Father who miraculously conceived Him in the Virgin Mary s womb. That s why it was necessary for Jesus to be in the temple; it was His Father s house and so also His own house. As Christians you also have parentage that is both earthly and heavenly. Having been baptized into Christ, you are members of His body. Your lineage is just like His. You have a spiritual mother on earth like the Virgin Mary, namely the holy Church. For 1
it was from the Church that you were given new birth into fellowship with God through Christ. The Holy Spirit conceived you in the womb of the Church, that is, the baptismal font. And this blessed mother has fed you with the pure milk of the Word, and she continues to nurture you even this day. You also have a Father in heaven, the same Father of our Lord Jesus. For it was the heavenly Father who caused you to be conceived as Christians in the womb of the Church, gave you life by His Spirit and called you to be His child. He continues to breed faith in you by His preaching and His Sacraments. As you come to His holy house to hear His words of life, you are tenderly invited to address Him as Father Our Father who art in heaven. There is a spiritual Joseph in the congregation, too. He is a foster father in the faith, namely, the pastor. Joseph of himself didn t generate or cause the birth of Jesus. But God used Him to do what was necessary to see the event through and to guard and to protect both mother and child. So also pastors of themselves don t generate or cause the new birth of Christians. But God does use them to deliver that new life, to guard the Church from that which threatens her faith and to protect the spiritual wellbeing of her children. As Martin Luther states in his Large Catechism, ministers are indeed fathers of the faithful. But they must always be seen as foster fathers, like Joseph, and not more than that. It is the Father in heaven who truly gives you life in Christ His Son. Your real, eternal flesh and blood comes through the Church, your spiritual mother. And so we have the holy family: Mary and Joseph and Jesus, who had traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. On the way home, Mary and Joseph assumed that Jesus was with other relatives or friends in the caravan. But at the end of the day s journey, they discovered Jesus wasn t with them. They began looking for Him, getting more and more anxious as He couldn t be found. They lost Jesus! So they went back to the last place they saw Him, Jerusalem. They found Him on the third day, after a great deal of seeking, and found Him with the teachers in the temple. Jesus said to them, Why were you looking for Me? In other words, You were looking all over for Me. Didn t you know I d be here, in the temple? As fallen human beings, we tend to look for God and seek Him out in all the wrong places. Where do 2
people look for God today, if they re looking at all? What do they do to try to find Him? Very often people look for God within themselves; they ll search for some spark of the divine presence within their own hearts. Or, they might seek God in nature; they ll try to get close to Him by being out in His creation. Or, they ll look for Him in false religious practices and man-made forms of holiness. In all of these cases, they re looking for God in the creation rather than listening to where the Creator says He can be found. God cannot be found in a sunset. God cannot be found within the deep recesses of your heart. God cannot be found in religious practices. He is to be found only in His temple. And Jesus begins to reveal to us here that the temple, the dwelling place of God, the Father s house, is not ultimately a temporary building. The true and abiding dwelling place of God is none other than the eternal flesh of Christ. Jesus Himself is the new and everlasting temple of God. Our Gospel lesson for Christmas declared, The Word became flesh and dwelt [that is, tabernacled, pitched His tent, made His temple] among us. It is also written that in Christ all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form. So, if some is looking for God, they need to look no farther than Jesus and only Jesus. And if they are looking for Christ, they must look for Him according to His human nature; that is, they must look for Him in those physical, audible, concrete places where He is present for us: in His Word, in the water, in the bread and the wine. That is why places like this building are sometimes referred to as the house or the temple of God. For Jesus is present here. And He s present here in order to make us His dwelling, His body, His abode of grace and wisdom. To accomplish this, Jesus took on our human nature and its sin and was made man and crucified it on Good Friday and raised it on Easter morning. Jesus said, Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days. By this temple He was referring to His own body. About Good Friday, St. Luke also records for us, The sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two. And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit. Having said this, He breathed His last. The transition from the old temple to the new took place through the holy cross of Christ. By His bodily 3
resurrection, He has now become a living temple through which all who believe may enter into the very presence of God and live. This was all foreshadowed when Jesus was 12 years old. How so? This all took place during the Passover. The Passover, recorded for us in Exodus, was the feast that recalled God s deliverance of His people from death through the sacrificing of a lamb. So it would be that one day Jesus would return to Jerusalem to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. As Apostle Paul writes, Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Remember how many days Jesus was missing? Three days. Indeed, Christ our Brother was dead but came alive again on the third day, just as He was lost and then found here in the same time span. You can see that this event in the temple foretells Jesus resurrection. Not convinced? Jesus also uses words very similar to those later spoken by the angels at His tomb. Jesus said to Joseph and His mother, Why were you looking for me? The angels said to the women who had come to the grave, Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Jesus parents didn t understand what He meant, just as the disciples often didn t comprehend Jesus sayings during His earthly ministry. But after He was raised, Jesus opened the eyes and minds and hearts of His followers so that they might comprehend His words and see Him as He truly is. In the same way, the risen Jesus still opens the eyes and understanding of His people so that you might also perceive the meaning of His holy Word and look to Him rightly as your Redeemer and King. It is all of this and more that Jesus meant when He said, Did you not know that I must be in my Father s house? It was His Father s business that He take on our humanity and grow in wisdom and stature and grace not that He didn t already fully possess those things as God, but so that our human nature might receive those divine gifts. The all-wise Son of God increased in wisdom as the Son of Man in order to deliver that wisdom to us children of men and make us wise unto salvation. So it is written, Christ has become for us wisdom from God. In the same way, Jesus increased in stature according to His humanity in order to give us humans stature before God that means we can stand before God. 4
We can stand before God because it was the Father s business that Jesus covers our sins with His blood, much like the blood of the lamb in the Passover covered the lintels of the Hebrew homes. And this Jesus did with His blood shed on the cross and made us to be the children of God by His resurrection. And finally, it is now His Father s business for Him to be in the midst of His people, the temple of His Spirit, to speak to us this day God s Word, a Word that imparts to us His grace and wisdom, His forgiveness and life before God. Therefore, brothers and sisters of Christ, children of the Father in heaven, let us be about our Father s business in this new year. Let us, by the mercies of God, offer up our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God in Christ. Let us eagerly seek the Lord in His holy house. And He will give to us His Word, a treasure for our hearts. He will cause us to grow in wisdom and stature before God and man, until we finally come to the stature of the fullness of Christ. He who has begun this good work in you will bring it completion in Christ Jesus on the Last Day. In His name. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus + to life everlasting. 5