So, here we are celebrating the second 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 actual reading is “in His Father's things.”)
Jesus had to be in His Father's things, in His Father’s house, about His Father’s business. We will misunderstand why Jesus was born, if we don't understand that He had to be where the Father sent Him to be, doing what His Father sent Him to do. Mary herself along with Joseph failed to understand 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 was or where He had to be. She even called Joseph His father. Jesus' Father, however, was not Joseph, but the Lord God Almighty, who had sent His Son to be about His business in His things.
Jesus, as God's Son, had to be in His Father’s things, 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 get 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 at one time. 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 though 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 those things included 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. This would culminate in their rejection of Jesus and their demand to have Him crucified. But for now here He was in His Father’s temple, doing what the teachers should have been doing all along, proclaiming God’s Word to them.
And through this proclamation Jesus showed that God’s 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 that He was to be about, according to the Scriptures, 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 good will 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, blessed it, 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 with Him in His heavenly kingdom forever. Amen.