"We Have Sought You with Great Sorrow"

+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This week, in the midst of Lent, as Christians prepare themselves for the celebration of the death and resurrection of their Lord, the church calendar ironically gives us two feasts that focus attention instead on Jesus’s birth and childhood. The nineteenth of March is the feast of Saint Joseph, who was the husband of the Virgin Mary and adoptive father of Jesus, and the twenty-fifth is the feast of the Annunciation, when God begins to live a human life, nine months before Christmas. We will celebrate Saint Joseph today and the Annunciation next Monday.

Saint Joseph shows up only in a few gospel stories about the beginnings of Jesus’s life—we don’t hear anything about him once Jesus begins his public career. That fact, the fact that Joseph is only in the childhood stories, means that we don’t know very much for sure about him, for we don’t know how these childhood stories came to the gospel authors who put them down in writing eighty years or so after Jesus was born. In fact, most biblical scholars would say that these childhood stories get retold to illustrate one thing or another that the Christian community had come to understand about Jesus: the gospel writers probably did not care whether things happened exactly this way or not. So we don’t know anything in a historical sense about Joseph: we just have a few symbolic stories about his reputed son, with Joseph somewhere on the fringes.

Today’s lesson, then, is a little story about Jesus, at age twelve, wandering away from his parents during a visit to Jerusalem. Mary and Joseph come back and find him in the Temple, teaching and asking questions of the rabbis. And Jesus says to his parents, "Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?" This question is the punchline of the whole tale. The author’s understanding of Jesus implies that Jesus knew who and what he was before he began his public career, and so the author tells us this story in which Jesus calls God his "father," just as he later teaches his disciples to pray, "Our father."

The intended message of this story, then, is that Jesus, even as a little boy, knew what he was called to do. But the fact that we hear this story about the twelve-year-old Jesus today, on the Feast of Saint Joseph, points to a second message, a message about ordinary human life. For the story tells us not only about Jesus’s relationship with God the Father but also about his relationship with Mary and Joseph, and even though Jesus is who he is, the Holy Family is still a family. Things that happen naturally in any human family happen to these three people, as well. And one of the things that happens naturally in a human family is that children’s lives increasingly have their meaning and purpose outside that family. From the moment of its birth, each child is a strange outsider, a creature of the future. It is the order of nature that children outlive their parents, moving into a world the parents can never know; and we regard it as an unnatural tragedy when parents outlive their children, as the Virgin lived to take her Son down from the Cross.

So, then, it is natural that children grow apart from their parents, ultimately to live entirely separate lives. That is a fact of nature which will be familiar to those few people here this morning who are parents, and to the great majority of this congregation who are still growing children. But it is a fact of nature especially familiar, particularly at this time of year, to those of you sitting closest to me this morning: and I want to say something in particular to you about this fact. As high school seniors, much of your time this year has been directed to the series of forms and essays and letters our American culture uses to manage the single greatest step in this separation, your departure for college. You have new business to be about, and most of you are increasingly eager to get out of here and be about it.

Your new business as you leave here will, I trust, not bring you before the judgment seat of some modern Pontius Pilate. But all of you will in the course of nature see your parents and guardians feeling like the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph in today’s gospel. "Your father and I have been searching for you with great sorrow," Mary says to her son: and this is basic human truth. However well you seniors act over the next several months, however much the adults in your life take pride and delight in you, what you are going through is a change which will, in the course of nature, mingle sorrow with their joy and lack of understanding with their pride. In the order of nature, that is simply the way things are.

Yet we do not live solely in the order of nature, and in the order of grace the dynamics of nature are sometimes reversed: a baby lies in the animal’s manger, the true king wears a crown of thorns, a tomb lies empty on the third day. And so in today’s gospel the lost boy is nonetheless the shepherd of all Israel, and the recovered son is his parents’ savior. And at this point in your lives, you seniors have, in the order of grace, one of your first opportunities to minister to the adults who have nurtured you. You can, graciously, be the departing child without being the defiant child—notice that Jesus does quietly return home with his parents in today’s story—and you can, as a young adult, sympathize with, and perhaps even comfort, these other adults whom you must henceforth know in new ways. College acceptances, and graduation, and college itself, inevitably center, for each of you, on you. But you can, graciously, remember that it is not, in the end, all about you, and you can deal sympathetically with these people who are losing something they have long loved even as you gain the new freedom you have long desired. May God give you the will to undertake these things and the grace to perform them. Amen.

--John Wm. Houghton