“About His Father’s Business”
Luke 2:41-52
12/31/06 (Morning)
So, here we are celebrating the first Sunday after
Christmas, and the Gospel lesson for today has Jesus already at age 12
sitting among the teachers in the temple, listening to them and asking
them questions. We haven’t even gotten to Epiphany yet,
where one of the first lessons of that season is about the Magi
bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to a then
two-year-old Jesus who was living with Mary and Joseph in a house in
Bethlehem. So why this jump in time from Christ’s birth
last week to His teaching in the temple 12 years later? It is (I
believe) for the simple reason of showing us why Jesus was born, and
that was to be about His Father’s business. (Our version
has Jesus saying that He had to be in His Father’s house; the
actually reading is His Father’s things.)
Jesus had to be about His Father’s
things. We will misunderstand why Jesus was born, if we
don’t understand that He had to do what His Father sent Him to
do. Mary herself along with Joseph failed to understanding why
Jesus was born, even though they had both been told who He was and what
He would do. Mary was told that she would miraculously conceive
Him by the Holy Spirit and that she would name Him Jesus. She was
told that He would be great, that He would be called the Son of the
Most High, and that the Lord God would give Him the throne of His
father David. Joseph also was told to name this Child Jesus,
because He would save His people from their sins. And when the
shepherds told her what the angels had spoken to them about this Child,
Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her
heart. And yet, here she was, betraying with her words of
frustration and rebuke that she did not fully understand either who
Jesus is or what He was sent to do. She even called Joseph His
father. Jesus’ Father, however, was not Joseph, but the
Lord God Almighty, who had sent Him to be about His business.
Jesus, as God’s Son, had to be about His
Father’s business, in order to accomplish the work His Father
sent Him to do. When we understand this, then we will not only
understand why He was born, but also His words and His work.
It’s when we have our own plans for Jesus, other expectations of
Him, other business and things for Jesus to do, that we are confused
about why He was born and fail to understand His words and His work,
just as Mary and Joseph did. We often want Jesus to be about our
business, doing what we want Him to do, not what His Father sent Him to
do. Mary and Joseph expected Jesus to act like any other child,
any normal child, a child which they could keep under their
control. But Jesus doesn’t act the way we expect Him to,
He’s not under our control, and He often does things that we
don’t think He should be doing. The Apostle Peter thought
this way. When Jesus said that He had to suffer many things, be
rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, be killed,
and then be raised up on the third day, Peter rebuked Him and said,
“God forbid it, Lord! This will never happen to
you!” But Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind
Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me, for you are not
setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of
man.” According to Jesus, God’s things involved
Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, but these things
didn’t fit into the things that Peter had planned for Jesus.
The things of man are contrary to the things of God,
so that unless we are enlightened by the Holy Spirit to accept them, we
will reject them, and we will fail to understand Jesus, His words, and
His works. The result is that many people (including ourselves at
times) have different Jesuses for themselves, Jesuses whom they can
control, Jesuses who will do what they want, instead of what the Father
wants. This is why the Scriptures state that the cross is a
stumbling block, because it’s not what we expect of Jesus.
We want a glorious Jesus, not a Jesus who hangs dead on a cross.
And while He lives and reigns in glory now since His resurrection, He
will always be our crucified Savior. And yet, sad to say, many
Christians today avoid the preaching of the cross like the
plague. A crucified Jesus is an offense, so much so that Jews
refuse to receive Him as their Messiah, Baptists will have nothing to
do with crucifixes, and Muslims deny that He even was crucified.
But the true Jesus, the Jesus that the Father gave
to the world on Christmas, came to do the Father’s things, and
part of those things entailed going to the cross. Already in
today’s Gospel reading we see that Jesus would eventually head
there, because His preaching and teaching would clash with the teachers
of the Word of God, and as a result they would demand His
execution. The teachers should have been proclaiming the Word of
God in such a way that they would have accepted Jesus as their Messiah
when He came. In the past the teachers were to proclaim
God’s Word to God’s people from God’s temple, so that
they might be comforted by the promise of the coming Savior and receive
Him when He came. But many had neglected both the teaching and
the hearing of that Word. Part of His Father’s things,
then, included Jesus teaching both the people and the teachers
God’s Word. Now here He was, the Son of God in the flesh,
in His Father’s temple, proclaiming His Father’s words to
those who would listen.
And through His proclamation of God’s Word
Jesus showed that that Word spoke of Him and the salvation of the whole
world that He would accomplish according to the will of His
Father. The chief thing of His Father was the business of giving
His life on the cross as the sacrifice for our sins. God had
planned this from the beginning, when He made the promise to Adam and
Eve, saying to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and
the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall strike you on
the head, and you shall strike Him on the heel.” And then
Isaiah says concerning Christ that He was stricken, smitten, and
afflicted by God, and that God was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to
grief. The suffering and death that He was to experience on the
cross was the business that God the Father sent His Son to do, and no
one was going to keep Him from doing it. Even when He prayed in
the garden that this cup of suffering might be taken from Him, He
prayed, “Not My will, but Yours be done.” The Father
sent His Son to the cross, in order that He might atone for our sins
with His blood and work peace between ourselves and God. Because
Jesus accomplished these things His Father sent Him to do, there is now
peace on earth and goodwill from God towards all mankind.
But the things of the Father didn’t end with
the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus had to rise again from the dead,
and no one was going to keep Him from that either. The Jewish
leaders tried to keep Jesus in the grave. They had a seal placed
over the tomb and had a group of soldiers keep watch over it until the
third day. But Jesus rose again from the dead just as He
promised, just as the Father willed, and He appeared to over 500
witnesses at one time. Two of His disciples in particular were on
their way to a town called Emmaus on the day of His resurrection.
Jesus appeared to them and began walking with them on the way, but they
were prevented from recognizing Him. They did not understand that
Jesus had to suffer the things He did and then be raised from the dead
on the third day. And so they neither recognized Jesus nor
understood the Scriptures. But then Jesus opened the Scriptures
to them by explaining that they all speak of Him and the things His
Father sent Him to do. What a sermon this must have been from
Jesus! Afterwards, when they arrived at Emmaus, the disciples
asked Him to stay with them. When they sat down for supper, He
took bread, broke it, and gave it to them, and suddenly they recognized
Him. Then He disappeared from their sight. Like Mary and
Joseph, who had misunderstood what Jesus was supposed to be doing, so
these disciples also had misunderstood His work. But after
hearing Him proclaimed as crucified and risen from the dead from the
Scriptures, and after having a meal with Him, they recognized
Him. They finally saw Him for the Jesus He was, the Jesus the
Father sent Him to be for them.
And these are now the things of the Father that
Jesus is about today for you. Since His ascension into heaven,
where He sits at the right hand of the Father, He is now present in His
Father’s things here in this place as we are gathered together in
His Name. Those things are His Word and His Sacraments.
Here He proclaims to you His Word, teaching you of Himself from that
Word, opening the Scriptures to you by pointing you to Himself and the
things of the Father which He did for you. He leads you to His
cross and His resurrection by way of your Baptism, where you are
crucified and raised with Him. He proclaims your sins forgiven
for the sake of His sacrifice on the cross. And He feeds you at
His Table with His body and blood, the food of immortality that assures
you of your bodily resurrection on the Last Day.
Jesus is still about His Father’s business of
delivering to you the salvation He won for you on His cross, teaching
you about the mercy of your heavenly Father. Jesus is present in
His Father’s temple today, too, only that temple is not made of
wood or stone, but it is His body, the Church. It’s you, in
whom the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have take up residence by
way of your Baptism. Here, as we are gathered together in that
Name, Jesus is in our midst doing His Father’s business.
And He will continue to do His Father’s business for you until He
comes again for you and takes you to His Father and yours to live
forever with Him in His heavenly kingdom. Amen.