1 Samuel 2.18-20, 26; Colossians 3.12-17; Luke 2.41-52 

Those of you who read my letter last month in The Diary will know that I talked about one of my favourite verses in the Bible from Luke chapter two, words uttered by Mary after the visit of the shepherds to the baby Jesus: Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 

Mary must have had a lot of pondering to do. What an amazing nine months she had had.  

First, she meets an angel - not an everyday experience, even for people in the Bible. The angel has that amazing message for her that she is to have a baby. And that this baby will be great and be called the Son of the Most High, and be a king, reigning over Jacob’s house for ever. 

And, then, she’s told that she’s not the only one to be giving birth in the near future. Her relative Elizabeth, an elderly woman, is also to have a baby; Elizabeth whom everyone believed to be barren - a source of great shame for people in biblical times. Much to ponder.  And the story continues, as we all know. Mary’s baby is born, away from home, and placed in a manger because there was room nowhere else. And this humble girl and her husband and baby were visited by shepherds, who had also been spoken to by angels. It’s not surprising that Mary started pondering and reflecting when so much happened to her in such a short space of time. We don’t know much about what happened over the next decade or so. Matthew tells us that wise men visited the holy family and Luke tells us the stories of Jesus’s naming and circumcision and the meetings with Simeon and Anna, but that is pretty much it, until the story we heard in today’s Gospel reading. Presumably Mary kept pondering and reflecting. Luke tells us that the child Jesus grew and became strong, that he was filled with wisdom and that God’s favour was with him. I’m speculating a little now but I assume that as Jesus was growing Mary and Joseph saw him very much as their child. He lived with them and they cared for him, and, because we are not told anything dramatic about Jesus’s childhood, I think we can assume fairly safely that it was a pretty normal childhood for the child of a Jewish artisan of the period.  Mary probably did ponder the events of Jesus’s birth from time to time as he grew, but I imagine that most of her life was focused on keeping home for Joseph and her small son.  But today we get another snapshot of Mary pondering and reflecting. “His mother treasured all these things in her heart.”  She may well have been reminded of the unusual circumstances of his birth as she reflected on this episode in the temple. Jesus was 12, not far off the age of adulthood for Jewish boys. To our modern ears, it seems shocking that parents of a 12-year-old did not know where he was for four whole days. It was only after a day’s travelling that they realised he wasn’t there, and then it took them another three days to find him.  And then, in typical teenage fashion, some things, it seems, never change, Jesus can’t be bothered with welcoming his anxious parents, but greets them with a gentle rebuke - did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house? 

It seems that, at this point, Jesus has a far better understanding of who he really is than his parents. And Mary continues to store up her experiences and thoughts about who Jesus was. What did she have to ponder after this event? There were Jesus’s strange words about being in his Father’s house - did she recall those words from long ago about his being the Son of the Most High? There was the fact that he was with the religious teachers, clearly holding his own, and doing more than that since all who heard him were amazed at his understanding. He had been asking questions of the rabbis, but also giving answers of his own. At this point, Mary had to begin to rethink who he was. And, to a certain extent, that’s something that all parents have to do. As a child grows and matures and becomes more at ease with his or her own identity, parents have to let go of their ideas about who the child is and allow them to be the people they have been created to be by God. Mary’s pondering must have led her to wonder who this child really was. She realised that he wasn’t exactly the person she had thought he was.  And we too are asked to ponder and reflect on our relationship with the Christ-child. If Mary, who knew Jesus as intimately as any human has ever done, needed time and space to reflect and ponder on who he really was, how much more will we need to do so. 

When we lose something, finding it again may well involve some kind of surprise. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, suggests in his Luke for Everyone that part of what Luke was doing in his Gospel was writing for people who had some idea of who Jesus was, but then find he is more elusive than they had first thought. 

When Mary and Joseph finally found Jesus, he didn’t give them the response they were expecting. He hadn’t been worried by his separation from his parents and he didn’t even seem that pleased to see them when they found him. They thought they knew him and they had to reappraise what they knew.

And our relationship with Jesus is also like that. If we never reappraise who we think Jesus is, our faith will not grow and develop. Jesus will surprise us.  If we ever get to the point when we think we really know him, we may then discover that he’s not where we thought. We may look around and see that we have left him behind or that he has raced on ahead of us. Discipleship is, after all, not about following a strict set of rules and regulations but about following a person, and we cannot control the thoughts and actions of others. 

Mary and Joseph assumed, when they left Jerusalem, that Jesus was with them. They took his presence for granted. Do we do that with Jesus? Do we assume that when we go off and do our own thing, he is there beside us?  When Mary and Joseph realised they had lost Jesus, they turned back from what they were doing and went to look for him.   At those times in our lives, do we care enough about Jesus to do just that? When it seems as if he is far from us, do we search him out or do we just allow ourselves to drift away from his presence?  How do we search him out? Mary and Joseph took a long time to discover that he was in the temple. And yet, to those of us who know the story’s ending, it seems an obvious place for him to be.  Where do we go when we want to renew our acquaintance with Jesus? We have many ways and helps. We have prayer and Scripture. We have worship and fellowship with other Christians. We have the sacraments and music. We have so many things to point us to God and to Christ if we do but look.  And it may well take some time and pondering when we find him again. We may discover that perhaps one of the reasons we took so long to find him is that we were looking in the wrong place or for the wrong sort of Jesus.  

If Mary and Joseph who lived with him day in and day out took four days to find him, it’s not surprising that we too may discover he’s not always where we think he should be or doing what we think he should be doing. 

But the one thing we do know is that, wherever we find him, Jesus will be doing his Father’s work. Our challenge is to join him in that.