Our readings this morning, both about Samuel and about the boy Jesus, invite us to reflect on our role in helping children to grow up into a faith appropriate to their years now, but with roots deep enough to grow and develop with them, to empower and sustain them in whatever life may have in store for them. Both as parents and as a Christian community we know that there is no more precious gift we can offer to them.
Our first encounter was with the child Samuel. Before he was conceived, his distraught mother Hannah had come to the temple to lay before God the misery of her childlessness. When God answered her prayer, her heart was so full of joy and thankfulness that she vowed to give back to God the most precious thing in her world, the very child for whom she had wept. So it was that as soon as the child was weaned, he was brought to the temple, and placed in the care of Eli the High Priest. And then we have that moving picture of Hannah bringing to the temple every year a little robe for her growing son to wear. Samuel was at home in the temple.
Jesus didn’t live in the temple, as Samuel did, but he was used to visiting with his parents who went up every year for the Passover Festival, so he knew his way about the place, and evidently felt sufficiently at home there to be comfortable sitting among the teachers and talking to them. We then have this fascinating and utterly credible snatch of dialogue between Jesus and his parents. Relieved to have found him at last, worried sick that they might so easily have lost him – anything might have happened to him in a big city crowded with visitors – exasperated to find him sitting there so calmly as if nothing had happened, furious that he hadn’t thought to tell them he was staying on in Jerusalem, and how did he think he was going to get home on his own, Mary gives way to an utterly understandable outburst: ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ She must have been close to tears, and not much helped I should think by Jesus’ response, which displays a certain lack of adult sensitivity common enough in a boy of twelve wrapped up in his own affairs. ‘Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ In his own mind the logic of his behaviour was perfectly obvious. Why had his parents been searching for him? They should have known at once where to look for him. I’m not sure I believe that the conversation ended quite so quickly, with Mary and Joseph reduced to puzzled silence, but that’s as much as Luke is going to tell us, and there is no reason to doubt that it conveys the gist of Mary’s recollection. When she had time to recover her composure, she treasured the story, as any parent treasures some of the more surprising things our children come out with.
And this particular remark really is rather astonishing, since it implies that by the age of twelve Jesus had come to regard God as his Father in a uniquely personal sense. In the Old Testament, as the God of all creation, God is our Maker. In this role he is occasionally seen as a father. Isaiah, for example, in a plea to God not to forsake his people, cries out: ‘O Lord, Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter; we are the work of thy hands’ (Isaiah 64.8). In his covenant relationship with the children of Israel, God is also seen as the father of the nation. But neither of these father-like relationships has the intimate character of the relationship which Jesus had with God, whom he addressed in prayer as ‘Abba’, the most intimate Aramaic word for father, equivalent to our affectionate use of Dad or Daddy. As a small child Jesus would almost certainly have called Joseph ‘Abba’, and he will have learned from both his parents what it means to love and to be loved unconditionally. We can also be sure that they will have brought him up to love God and to know that he was loved by God. At some point he must have grasped intuitively that God’s love for him and his love for God was not so very different from the way Joseph and Mary loved him, and he for his part loved them, receiving their love and care and responding with the obedience that is normal and natural within the context of a loving parent-child relationship.
We don’t know what Mary and Joseph may have told Jesus about the circumstances surrounding his birth – not very much I should think if they wanted him to enjoy a reasonably normal childhood. Although they knew how special he was, even Mary and Joseph didn’t understand what he meant when he said: Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house? Even for Jesus himself, this little incident may have marked a significant stage in his growing self-awareness. Perhaps one of the teachers in the temple had been saying something about the nature of God’s love which made sense of his own intuitive understanding, enabling him to perceive that the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, was in fact his Father’s house. If so we are here in touch with the first step towards the radical new theology of the relationship between God and humanity which Jesus would grow up to live and to teach. Noone else has ever been able to call God ‘Father’ in the way that Jesus could call God his Father, for He is God’s one and only Son, but we are privileged to share the same loving relationship with God as his children by adoption, a step which utterly transforms our relationship with God – God who made us, yes, but who loves us not just as the potter loves the pot he has made, but as the parent loves the child, hopes indeed to be loved in return, but loves her anyway.
So, what lessons might this delightful story have for us both as parents and as a church community? As parents, if we want our children to grow up in the knowledge and love of God, we need to follow the example of Mary and Joseph. Not only was their own love for Jesus unconditional, so that he grew up knowing what it means to love and to be loved, but they also took him regularly to synagogue and temple, as we take our children to church and occasionally to a great cathedral, to learn about God’s love for his people and to take part in worship. At home they will have told him about the love of God, answered his questions, and taught him to pray, so that he grew up knowing about God and able to enter into the same relationship of loving obedience that guided his parents in their lives. We cannot create such a relationship for our children, they have to find it for themselves, and embrace it as their own, but the life we lead and the choices we make as well as the way we behave towards one another and towards them can be a help or sadly a hindrance. This morning’s reading from St Paul’s letter to the Colossians offers us a model which you may like to take home and think about.
As a church, we need to show our children that we love and value them as part of the family. In recent years we have seen significant growth in our work with children as we have welcomed them to Holy Hamsters, and special holiday clubs, as well as our children’s choir and Sunday school classes, but we cannot afford to be complacent. The crowded conditions in which we ask them to learn to worship God are seriously inadequate, and we are being challenged to work out what we can do to improve the situation. Perhaps our aim should be to cause them to feel as comfortably at home in this church, as Jesus evidently did in the temple at Jerusalem, when he astonished his parents by calling it ‘my Father’s house’.