Readings:
Sermon:
Happy Betwixtmas – We are firmly in the Christmas Season, but in that mysterious time between times waiting on the New Year starting in earnest.
The world can want us to move on quickly. Any thoughts of the infant Jesus is put away along with the the decorations are until next year.
Now I know that you will not do that, as we seek to be faithful disciples of Jesus. But do we still have our problems in the remembering area?
I don’t mean the normal failures of memory…how many of you, like me, find yourself groping through the alphabet trying to summon up a name or spending ages trying to locate the safe place in which you have put that essential item?
No, how do we respond to who Jesus IS how we remember that that day to day and live lives in the truth of who HE is?
In our Gospel passage today we have this rare Gospel description of an event in Jesus’ youth. It is a story which most families can relate to – a lost child – in my family we managed to lose my brother at the Redditch Carnival in the early 1970s…we did find him and it didn’t take three 3 days.
The Biblical story in a corker…3 days before Mary, Joseph and Jesus are reunited! Clearly, there are extenuating circumstances. This annual trip would be a big extended family affair, and in Jewish terms Jesus was on the brink of adulthood. Nonetheless, can you image Mary’s and Joseph’s concern when they realised. They spotted he was missing at the end of the first day of travelling, spent a day searching and a day returning to Jerusalem.
During this time can we imagine the rising sense of panic? Can we recall this feeling as parent or as the child? In this narrative we find out something surprising, the “child,”/ Jesus, is not at all distressed.
The why of this is revealed in the interaction between Jesus and Mary when she and Joseph find Jesus is the Temple courts sitting among the teachers, listening and questioning them.
A window at St Stephen’s Redditch shows a look on Mary’s face captures a mixture of relief and anger! As does the biblical phrase “why have you treated us like this?”
Jesus’ response brings us to the key of my opening question…do we have trouble remembering who is Jesus is?
Mary and Joseph had encountered, first hand, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth…but 12 years later, with Jesus on the edge of moving into Adult responsibilities, they are surprised, or even shocked, when Jesus aligns himself with his Heavenly Father.
So much so they struggled with processing His response, “didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” The confusion of Joseph, his earthly father and Jesus’ heavenly Father (uppercase paramount there. Surely, Mary and Joseph, of all people, would be able to grapple with this.
Jesus is not being petulant - his actions reveal his heart – “he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them.” And, what of Mary, she here, as elsewhere, “Treasured up these things and pondered them in her heart,”
Even for Mary this process of realisation of who Jesus truly is takes time. Jesus fully human AND fully divine, truly, the Son of God, not just A child of God, as we could all claim to be but THE SON of GOD.
If holding to these facts is difficult for Mary and Joseph, then it is not unreasonable that it is difficult for us.
BUT that does not let us off the hook! As disciples of Jesus we are called to live out what the Jesus Event means to us NOW. What does the birth, the death, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus mean in the Betwixtmas-tide we live in? In this time between His first coming and His return.
As a new year beckons can we hold on to who Jesus was, is and forever will be?
Can we seek walk in this together as His Church, if only because the question of how we live out our response to who Jesus is, is too big for us as individuals.
To live out the Kingdom of God needs all of us in unity to worship, learn and work together.
Let’s commit to this for the New Year and as Mary did let us ponder these things.
Questions:
- What challenges to you take into 2025?
- How does our knowledge of who Jesus is impact upon those challenges?
- What will you treasure up in your heart?