Has this ever happened to you? You are shopping when an announcement comes over the store's loudspeaker, "May I have your attention please? We are looking for a six-year-old child who is lost. His name is John and he is wearing blue jeans and a red shirt. If you find John, please bring him to the customer service center." How did this child become lost? Perhaps he just wandered off to look at the toys and his parents left him behind. Maybe the child's mother and father each thought he was with the other parent and went on about their shopping. You can imagine how concerned the parents were when they realized that the child was missing. How about John? How do you think he felt? If he was having a good time playing in the toy department, he probably never even knew that he was lost! Have you ever been lost? How did you feel? Were you afraid, or were you confident that your parents would find you and everything would be alright?
Do you think Jesus ever got lost? We don't know a lot about the childhood days of Jesus, but today’s story talks about a 12-year old Jesus getting lost in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Passover – the special festival of the Jews, maybe kind of like our Christmas and Easter? It makes me think a little about what these events were like for me when I was young…
As a child I lived for the big events: Christmases and birthdays, first and last days of school, holidays, opening day of the baseball season. The ‘in-between’ days were unremarkable, and maybe even boring, and therefore simply needed to be endured in order to get to the ‘good stuff’.
I think many of us approach life like that. We enjoy the highlights, the significant occasions, and the in-between times simply must be tolerated. In our liturgical calendar we even set apart ‘high feast’ days like Christmas and Easter, including special prayers or songs, to help us gain a sense of the uniqueness of these occasions. And once we move through that time, we find ourselves in what is properly called ‘Ordinary Time’. In the church calendar ‘Ordinary Time’ follows Epiphany on January 6th, and Pentecost Sunday. It actually makes up the majority of our church season – and thus parallels our lives that are made up of high points to be reflected upon and cherished, but consisting mostly of ordinary day-to-day routines.
We don’t know a lot about Jesus’ life before his ministry began. And that’s kind of remarkable. It’s true that legends in the ‘gnostic gospels’ contain rather interesting stories of a young Messiah able to speak from infancy, who gave life to animal sculptures, and when confronted, could even kill people with a word.
If anything, I think the absence of stories of Jesus’ earlier life tells us something: that it is in the ‘ordinary’ that we live, and our approach to the ordinary is what forms us and equips us to meet the extraordinary.
In the gospel today we hear about a Jewish family doing what a good Jewish family does – travels to Jerusalem for the Passover. Their family (other relatives, friends, servants, etc) would have all made the trip together as an important yearly pilgrimage. A twelve-year-old Jesus disappears from the group and is later found discoursing with the religiously learned in the Temple. All are amazed at his spiritual maturity and understanding – a foreshadowing of Jesus’ remarkable preaching ministry to come.
The text then adds this line, “Then he went down to Nazareth with them, and was obedient to them.” He had been chastised for causing his parents to worry, and even though he felt a strong connection to his ‘Father’s house’ (the Temple), he went along with his parents.
It appears that in this story Jesus is already aware of his special calling, and perhaps he had an awareness of what was to come for him, but he still had close to twenty years to go before beginning his ministry. What would he do in the meantime?
To be sure we don’t know exactly what his days looked like, but implicit in this story is that Jesus lived a quiet but admirable life, ‘growing in wisdom and favour with God and man.’ As a firstborn son he would’ve worked with his father as a mason – the hard, physical labour of the working class. He would be trained to succeed his father in order to carry on the family business when Joseph was no longer able to work. He would’ve had to care for his young siblings, assisting his mother with household chores. As a Jew he would’ve gone to synagogue, studied the scriptures, attended church school, and journeyed to Jerusalem for occasions like the Passover.
His life would’ve been relatively ordinary: (What were the things he had to do as a child and young person do you think?) Washing dishes, cleaning his room, going to bed before curfew, waking up early to get in as much work as possible before it got too hot. In this ordinary time the Messiah is spiritually formed, matured. As he handles his family and work responsibilities, in his dealings with relationships, Jesus grows in ‘favour with God and man.’ He is of a heavenly kingdom, yet doesn’t neglect his fellow human beings. And maybe, just maybe, it was during this ordinary time that Jesus learns to ‘find God in all things.’
It’s easy to get excited about our faith at Christmas and Easter, but what about the in-between times? What about ‘ordinary time’? Brother Lawrence was a 17th century solider-turned-monk that joined the Carmelite order in Paris in 1666. Like many joining religious orders, he expected to be engaged in some kind of noble work at the monastery and to be lifted into ecstatic prayer experiences. Instead, he found himself spending most of his time washing pots in the kitchen. Day after day, hour after hour, he scrubbed and scraped pots and pans. At first he was discouraged and didn’t think he’d be able to keep it up – it was his most hated chore and here he found himself being forced to do it over and over again.
But then something happened. He stopped seeing his dish washing as an obstacle to his prayer life; rather, it was an opportunity to experience God in the ordinary. Here’s what he says in his work, “The Practice of the Presence of God”:
“The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were on my knees.”
“I drove away from my mind everything capable of spoiling the sense of the presence of God…I just make it my business to persevere in His holy presence...My soul has had an habitual, silent, secret conversation with God.”
Practice the presence of God. Find sanctuary in the sanctity of the mundane. The path to the extraordinary goes through the ordinary. For in this season especially recall that we worship a God who manifests Himself in the ‘ordinary’ human form of a child – and he His holy presence persists in the highs, lows, and in-betweens of our lives.
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