The God Boy

Luke 2:41-52

V. 40 covers age 40 days to 11. Now in verse 41 Jesus is twelve.  It’s the only time He's ever recorded to have said anything.  Obviously He spoke daily, but nothing He said is ever recorded in Scripture except this.

He’s on the brink of adulthood.  It is the moment in which He reveals that He knows who He is and He knows why He came.  He reveals it to His mother and to Joseph, His earthly father, and Luke, recording it, reveals it to the whole world.  There is nothing miraculous that happens in this story.  There is nothing supernatural that happens in this story.  And yet it is as profoundly divine as any miracle could be as Jesus identifies Himself as God the Son, and it comes in verse 49.  “I’m here to take care of my Father’s business.

V. 41                It’s a very normal thing for Jewish people go to the Passover.  If you go back to Exodus and Deuteronomy, you find there is instruction there as to the Jews maintaining certain feasts that God ordained for Israel.  There were three main feasts held every year.  There was the feast called Passover.  There was the feast called Pentecost.  And there was the feast of Tabernacles.  Passover happened on the fifteenth of Nisan at the beginning of the Jewish calendar year.  In our calendar, it's March or April.  We obviously celebrate Easter in March or April because Jesus was crucified on a Passover.  But the Jewish year began with Nisan.  Attached directly to the Passover was a seven-day feast called the feast of unleavened bread. 

Then fifty days later was the feast called Pentecost, the feast of the first fruits when they celebrated harvest.  Then later on in the fall, our fall, would come the feast of Tabernacles, which would celebrate the wanderings in the wilderness when they lived in tents and God provided manna for them.  Those were the three great festival celebrations.

Passover celebrated God as the Redeemer of His people, the deliverer, the Savior, the rescuer.  It memorialized the Passover event that's recorded in Exodus 12.

They sacrificed the animal, a lamb of special choice without blemish, without spot, that was a pet lamb that they had to keep in the house for a week and grow to love and then to kill and then to eat and then the blood was put on the door.  And all of that pictured the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world, who would die for sinners.  And there was the Passover angel coming and as he came he saw the blood and passed by. 

That was the last plague that launched the Egyptians’ decision to let Israel go.  They went across the Red Sea and were on their way to the land of Canaan.  Pharaoh and his army tried to follow and were drowned as the sea closed in on them.

So the Passover was then instituted by God as a memorial to God as the deliverer of His people.  So when they came together they ate the lamb, as they had done in Egypt.  And they remembered that the death angel had passed them by and God had spared them death, God had delivered them from death and also delivered them from bondage.  So it's still even today  the greatest of all the Jewish celebrations.

It was required traditionally for men to go, even at the time of Jesus, but not so much the women.  And so, typically not all the women would go to Passover.  In fact, for a woman to go to Passover, according to Jewish tradition, was to demonstrate on her part a rather unusual spiritual devotion, a rather unusual interest in the things of God, a devotion to God and to His Word and to obedience.  How interesting, verse 41, "His parents used to go to Jerusalem every year."  And here again, Luke reminds us of the devout character of the faith of Joseph and Mary.  They were true worshipers of the living God.  They went every year to Passover.  Joseph and Mary had other children, both sons and daughters and it would be more difficult to go. And every year Joseph and Mary would go.

Now twelve years after Jesus was born, they're in their mid-twenties and they're still going to the Passover.  It's not an easy trip, 80 miles, three to four days, probably four days if children were in the entourage that went because they had to go from Nazareth and go around Samaria because of the attitude between the Jews and the Samaritans. 

Verse 44 indicates that they went in a caravan [not Dodge]. It's the only time that word is used in the New Testament. It means what it says, a large company of people traveling together.  And most of the traditional Jewish scholars would say the children were in front because if the parents got in front they would be going too fast for the kids.  So they put all the children in front, followed by the women, followed by the men, so that the men couldn't, because they tend to stride a little faster, distance themselves.  And they would go in caravans for the sake of friendship and fellowship, family, neighbors, acquaintances.  But also because it put them in a safer position to be able to withstand the traditional onslaught of highway robbers and marauders who would attack people traveling in small groups or alone.

When Joseph and Mary and Jesus [siblings?] arrive for the launch of Passover, Jerusalem would be swelled by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who had come from all over everywhere, both in the land of Palestine and outside where the Jews had been scattered. And they would be looking for families to stay with if they didn't already have families that they stayed with every year, or distant cousins or relatives.  They would be trying to find a place to house themselves for their time there.  They would also be trying to find a place where they could have their family together for the meal, where they could cook the lamb and what went with it and have the meal together.  They would also be purchasing their sacrifices.  So it would be a bustling and busy time as the people were flooding into the cities from all over everywhere and colliding at all points in their efforts.

In fact, there were so many sacrifices, some historians tell us a quarter of a million animals would be slaughtered during Passover week. So you can imagine the whole city bleating with sheep.  And all twenty-four courses of the priests were there for Passover because of the massive amount of butchering that had to be done.  And you can be sure that all the beggars were out, all finding their way into the most obvious place, assuming to play on the sensitivities of people who maybe were thinking more about God and their duty than at other times. And the Roman soldiers would be there jostling with the crowds, trying to maintain some level of control.  And the sacrifices would begin and Jesus would go with His family and his father Joseph would take in the animal.  The animal would be killed by the priest. The blood of the animal would be sloshed against the altar. And Jesus would see that and Jesus knew at this time that He was the Lamb of God that would take away the sins of the world.  We can only imagine the vividness of His own mind as He ascertained the reality of all of this sacrifice and the fact that He alone would be the sacrifice to take away sin, and that some twenty years plus hence from that very time, He would be hanging on a cross outside Jerusalem, shedding blood as that true and saving Lamb of God.  The reality of that in His mind would have been overwhelming to Him if He were a normal boy, and who’s to say it didn’t weigh heavily upon Him.

The lamb having been killed, the blood splattered on the altar, the priests would be singing the Hallel, Psalm 113 to 118.  So the chaos of the crowd, the massacre of the animals, the indelible memory of the blood pouring off of the altar, running in a river out the backside of the temple ground down the back hill into the Kidron brook which turned that whole brook red with blood as it fell down into the Valley of Hinnom to the south.  All of that would make it a vivid experience for the twelve-year-old Jesus who is now filled with the wisdom of God and sees it all from the divine perspective.

Then the family would take the lamb home after it had been slaughtered and the blood had been drained, and take it home and cook it.  They would find some home, somebody would give them a place, some relative perhaps, some friend, they would roast the lamb and it would be eaten by candlelight because it was at dark.  They would sing psalms and they would pray to God and they would worship and celebrate God as their Redeemer as they ate that lamb.

Now when the meal was over a son asks a question of his father, typically the oldest son.  In this case, most likely, Jesus would have looked at Joseph and after the meal was complete He would say this. And still to this very day, Jewish sons ask this question at Passover. The question is: Why is this night different from all others?  That question then gave the father, Joseph, the opportunity to repeat the amazing story of the Passover in Egypt.

Then after the story, the whole night was filled with worship and praise as was the whole week.

Well, verse 42, that's what happened when the twelve-year-old Jesus went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. 

At thirteen Jewish boys were considered to be obligated to the law of God themselves.  They passed out from under parental authority at thirteen.  That is why after Jesus’ time, an official ceremony developed and that is known as bar mitzvah.  [meaning son of the law, or son of the commandment]

Verse 43          Very rarely did people stay the whole week.  The majority of the people stayed some portion of that time.  In fact, the common time to stay was two days.  You went in perhaps the day before Passover to do whatever you needed to do.  You were there for the Passover day.  You did the sacrifice.  You did the meal and you left without staying for the seven-day week of feast of unleavened bread.  You sort of did your duty.

Luke tells us what a remarkably godly young couple Joseph and Mary were.  So that from the human side Jesus could not have had more devout and godly young parents to influence Him.

They go day’s journey before they have their ‘Home Alone’ moment. His lingering was not disobedience.  His lingering was not irresponsibility.  There's no hint of that.  His lingering wasn't even the fault of His parents.  I mean, they had never known Him to do anything but exactly what He should have done.  They had never known Him to be anywhere other than exactly where He should have been.  And they've never known Him to do anything other than what was exactly what He expected that they wanted Him to do and to do it precisely and nothing else.  He was responsible.  He was obedient.  He was sensitive.  He was thoughtful.  He was perfect.

But there was something going on here.  There was a break.  There was a breach.  Jesus was moving from responsibility to an earthly parent to a responsibility to God.  And that's why He says in verse 49, look, “I have to be about my Father’s business," and He is sending a major message to His parents that a transition is taking place, that they're not going to have parental oversight over this child, but that God His Father is going to determine His life and what He does.  You can imagine that He was swept up in all the drama of the Passover and knowing who He was, moving through that crowd as a twelve-year-old, realizing nobody knows who I am.  Here is this massive crowd and they look sort of a glancing look at this little boy as He moves, this young boy moving through the crowd, having no clue that this is God in human flesh, that this child is looking at them with the mind of God, that this child is watching the priests and the sacrifice and seeing it as God the eternal God of the universe sees and understands it. 

v. 45        There was only one option left and that was to go back to Jerusalem.  They would stay the night.  They wouldn't go in the dark.  An anxious night it must have been. And it says in verse 46, "after three days."  One day out of town, the next day they came back, and the third day they looked.  And that sets the stage for the most dramatic, profound and penetrating statement from the mouth of Jesus, the child who was God, which indicates He knew exactly who He was, He knew exactly why He came and His mind was filled with the things of God.