Losing Jesus
If Mary and Joseph were alive today, they’d likely get a visit from a social worker.
I imagine her, that intimidating ambassador from Social Services, standing hand-on-hips on their humble threshold. Her blouse is severely buttoned right up to the neck, the downturned edges of her mouth a dour picture of disapproval.
‘Sadly, we’ve received a disturbing report which I am required to investigate’, she drones. Proffering an identity card, her voice is a flat monotone. ‘Apparently your twelve year old son went missing while in your care’.
Now she slows her speech and punctuates her words for effect. ‘For Three. Whole. Days’.
But there’s more. ‘Incredibly, we hear that you two didn’t even notice he was gone for a whole day. He was left alone in the city. May I come in?’.
It’s one of those odd gospel stories that has always troubled me. I’ve been niggled, anxious that Jesus’ comment to his much-relieved parents, “didn’t you you know I was about my Father’s business?” was just a tad precocious. Don’t write in; I’m not questioning His sinlessness, just confessing a worry. But then what of His Mum and step-Dad?
When it’s my watch as a grandparent, I’m frantic if one of the lovely boys is out of sight for more than a minute or two. Gone missing for three days? I’d be out of my mind. How on earth could they lose their son like that? Okay, so as a twelve year old, he would have had his bar mitzvah - so he was technically an adult. And it was common for communities to travel together, so perhaps Mary and Joseph just thought he was with Uncle Moshe. But still….
Imagine their relief when at last they spotted Him, chatting with the religious barons in the temple courts. There He is!
But if I may switch the story around a little, perhaps losing Jesus is easy to do. Commenting on this episode in her beautiful, disturbing, book, Still: notes on a mid-life crisis, Lauren Winner makes a stark confession: I lose Jesus all the time.
Me too. It’s not that I lose Jesus in a once and for all declaration of denial and unbelief, a solid act of rejection. If I may put it like this, I just mislay Him. I emerge from a heady temple experience. Religiously enthused, I quickstep down the road, assuming that because I met Him back there, that He’s alongside here. He’ll catch up. Or I’m busy with the incidental, practicing the laziness of frenetic activity, which means I neglect what’s really important.
Sometimes I stubbornly head away from Him; surely, I muse, He’ll get in step with me, at least eventually. Or instead of following Him, which is what everything is supposed to be about, I follow the ruts of routine, of it’s what I’ve done and so it’s surely what I must keep doing, and assume that He’s along for the ride. Question marks come knocking at my door, insistent, demanding answers, and I reach the horizon of my understanding of Him, and because I can’t figure life out, my fingertips slip off of certainty, and in the unknowing, I wonder if He’s there. Or His elusiveness frustrates me; I hear no voice, feel no presence, and my requests seemingly go ignored. Is anyone there?
Yes, I know that there’s a sense in which I can’t lose Him, for the book says so repeatedly. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. He’s pledged to always be with us, to never forsake us. But that doesn’t exclude us from a sense of distance, and, at times, even abandonment. If in doubt, ask the Psalmist.
It’s a phrase we Christians say and sing: I’ve found Jesus, and indeed we have. But in finding Him, I’m still looking for Him, hunting for Him as those anxious parents of His did in the surging crowds of Jerusalem. The book of Revelation declares that one day, in a new Jerusalem, He’ll always be located in plain sight, face to face. You won’t find Him in the temple courts; John tells us that there will be no temple in that busy city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. There He is. We shall see Him, and we shall be like Him. But in the meantime, the search continues.