"When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day's journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers." (Luke 2:43-47)
The thing that makes Jesus worth following is the same thing that makes him dangerous: he doesn't get his insight or wisdom from the official Gatekeepers of Respectable Religion. Rather, he amazes them when they listen to him, and he astounds them when he is the one posing the questions.
While there are certainly a number of things going on within this story of the pre-teen Jesus, which many of us heard read this past Sunday in worship, at least one thing that I think Luke wants us to note is that Jesus holds his own with the official teachers of religion even though he hasn't gone through their training. Jesus hasn't become the student of a rabbi yet at his age, and his schooling would have been pretty minimal beyond what he could have learned in his hometown synagogue and from his family at home. And yet, even though he hasn't gone through the official education process or studied Torah at the feet of these priestly leaders in Jerusalem, Jesus somehow (ahem) knows about God.
Jesus' insight doesn't come from having learned the "official" version of things from the scholars and scribes; it comes, Luke wants us to understand, from Jesus' very being as God's own Son and the Promised One. That is to say, Jesus knows about God, not from studying texts or memorizing verses, but from his own being. And at no point does Jesus have to get his personal theology approved by the appointed guardians of orthodoxy who are in the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus' understanding of God arises from his own identity as God's Beloved.
And as I say, that fact makes Jesus simultaneously worthy of our allegiance and also makes him something of a threat to those Guardians and Gatekeepers of Respectable Religion. On the one hand, Christians claim that Jesus is worth listening to because he actually knows what he is talking about. As the Gospels say elsewhere, Jesus stands out because "he teaches as one with authority, and not as the scribes and teachers of the Law." Jesus, we believe, doesn't simply parrot back the answers he memorized from flash cards or spit back the "correct responses" he found in a textbook. Jesus knows because he really is what the angels all said he was back in the Nativity story--this really is the Son of the Most High and the Lord long awaited. And to be sure, that's a big deal. Jesus is different from all the snake-oil salesmen and televangelists of history hawking their guesses about God and their self-help suggestions, because he actually knows what he is talking about. He is worth following and giving our lives to because he actually knows how the universe is put together and what sort of life brings us fullness of joy. All of that is hinted at here in this scene as the pre-teen Jesus astounds the formally trained and officially credentialed temple teachers with the knowledge he already possesses--without having gotten it from them.
But by the very same token, that is precisely what makes Jesus dangerous--both to the Religious Experts, and in a sense, to us. That's because Jesus has no obligation to give cookie-cutter, committee-approved, mostly harmless answers about God or the ways of God. Jesus doesn't have to prop up an institution (like the temple) or make sure his theology fits with the unquestioned tenets of Officially Respectable Religion. Because he doesn't have to worry about getting his credentials from the Temple Correspondence School or Jerusalem Theological Seminary, Jesus is utterly free to tell audacious truths about God, to question old assumptions, and to surprise us with the audacious mercy, urgent justice, and boundary-crossing love of God. In other words, Jesus is able to show us where have been wrong and could not see it, because we had become so comfortably satisfied with the "official right answers" that we had stopped asking any deeper questions. Jesus reserves the right (and frequently exercises it) to overturn what we thought we knew about God and to stretch us into newer and deeper understandings. A teacher who has not graduated from the Official School of Religion has the ability to lead us beyond our comfort zones--which is precisely what the real Jesus does.
So, just to be clear, when this same Jesus upsets the folks in his hometown synagogue by insisting that God loves foreigners and outsiders (enraging his home congregation to the point that they want to hurl him off a cliff!), or when Jesus announces God's blessing on the poor rather than assuming the rich are receiving God's favor, we don't get to dismiss him as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. He speaks with authority because he is, after all, the Christ of God. And when Jesus insists that God is doing a new thing that includes Gentiles and lifts up the voices of women and makes space for outcasts and sinners, we don't get to just ignore him because his teachings don't fit the expected "correct" answers of the accepted conventional wisdom. The twelve-year old Jesus who already comes to the Temple experts knowing the ways of God without having been taught by them is both a wonder worthy of our worship and also a challenge to our established orthodoxies. We don't get to declare Jesus our Lord without also being prepared to have him turn our world upside down. He just might.
Lord Jesus, we dare to give you our allegiance and to invite you to challenge us, surprise us, and to pull us beyond our assumptions.
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