Looking in the Wrong Places--January 1, 2025

Looking in the Wrong Places--January 1, 2025

"When (Jesus') parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, 'Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.' He said to them, 'Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?' But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart." (Luke 2:48-51)

There's a great line from early on in the film version of The Lord of the Rings where Ian McKellen's wizard character Gandalf the Grey says, "A wizard is never late. Nor is he early.  He arrives precisely when he means to." He doesn't say it angrily, nor to make an excuse for himself. He just states it matter-of-factly, as if to say, "If you were expecting me at a different time, that's an incorrect assumption on your part, not a miscalculation on mine."

I hear something similar in the way I read Jesus' reply to his mother after they have spent several days frantically searching for their lost son (and the Messiah announced by angels!).  When Jesus says, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" it doesn't come off to my ears as being rude or petulant, and neither is it really an apology, either.  It seems more like he is saying, with a straightforward matter-of-fact-ness, "If it has taken you three days to find me, then it seems that you have been obviously been looking in the wrong kinds of places."  The temple, after all, is the place that ordinary first-century Jewish families associated with the presence of God.  Where else would Jesus ben if not seeking after the presence of God, right? In a way, it seems like Jesus' response is meant to tell Mary (and perhaps us, overhearing) that Jesus is never lost. Rather, if we cannot spot him, it is because we have been looking in the wrong places or with the wrong sort of vision.

And again, I don't hear this statement of the pre-teen Jesus as a matter of disrespect to Mary or Joseph.  Luke the narrator even caps off the story by noting that Jesus goes back home to Nazareth and "was obedient to them" as a good and dutiful son.  But neither does Jesus treat this situation as moment for him to apologize or accept fault--he doesn't see himself as having done anything wrong, but rather that he has been in the most obvious place to be found all along.  From Jesus' perspective, the question is not, "Why weren't you where we expected to find you?" but rather, "Why was anybody looking for me anywhere else but here?"  Apparently, even for Mary the Mother of Our Lord, if we are looking for Jesus and don't spot him, the issue is that we were looking in the wrong place, not that Jesus was in the wrong place and had somehow gotten lost.

That's important to hold onto, because throughout his adult ministry, Jesus will go to some pretty unexpected and unlikely places.  And when he does--say, when he invites himself over to the tax collector Zacchaeus' house, or crosses the border into Gentile territory, or makes his way through the region of Samaria--we might be tempted to correct Jesus and send him back to the places we think he is "supposed" to be. You know, we want a Messiah who associates with "our kind of people," and who doesn't mix with the wrong crowd. When Jesus gets a reputation for being "a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners," some impulse in us wants to scold him, "Jesus, don't you know people will get the wrong impression about you--and US--by the people you associate with?  Shouldn't you get back to more respectable places?"  We don't want a Messiah who goes to the Temple and then associates with doers of abominations; we want a Christ on a short leash who will only go to the places we approve of.  But to hear Jesus tell it, wherever he chooses to go is the right place for him to be.  Mary began to learn that when her son was only twelve years old.  We've had two thousand years to come to grips with it--and to be honest, a lot of Respectable Religious Folks still don't like it.

All of this is to say that when it comes to Jesus, none of us--even with the best of intentions--gets to chart out an itinerary or schedule of approved locations for Jesus to show up. Jesus himself reserves the right to go to the places where he will, as he determines is right, both in order to connect with the God who has sent him, and in order to love the people to whom he has been sent. If we can't spot Jesus, it's not because he's gotten himself lost and gone somewhere he's not supposed to be--it's that we have been looking in the wrong places.

What would it do to our perspective, for both the day ahead and the year ahead, to take the lesson that Jesus teaches even to his mother here in this story?  How would it affect our way of seeing the world if we remembered that Jesus reserves the right to be in whatever place he chooses to be, even if it's not where we expected (or approved of)?  And when we expect or assume Jesus to be in a certain situation or act a certain way but don't spot him there, could we be humble enough to consider that we might have been looking in the wrong place--and instead start looking for Jesus in the kinds of places he chooses to be? Are we willing to follow a Lord who does not run his schedule past us first, but who is loose in the world and who shows up precisely where he intends to be, at precisely the time he arrives?

We might end up recognizing him in all the places we didn't think God was allowed to be.

Lord Jesus, go where you will, and help us to find you where you are.