This is the only story we have of Jesus as a child, and I can see how it would be a memorable for his parents. On the way home from the big city, it took them a full day to realize that Jesus wasn’t among the gaggle of cousins and neighbor-children that were traveling in their caravan–that had to have been a pretty painful ‘I thought he was with you’ moment. They spent another day traveling back to Jerusalem, and apparently another full day searching for him. What exactly did the twelve year old Jesus do for those three days? Where did he sleep? How did he eat? Was he frantically looking for them? Was he cold? Had he been abducted?
I wonder if it was more of a relief or an exasperation for Mary and Joseph to find Jesus well, safe, and completely oblivious to any sort of crisis. Is it okay to call the Son of God precocious? It certainly sounds precocious when this twelve-year-old boy says to his worried parents, ‘Oh, I thought you knew I had some business to do here.’ But then again, what this whole passage shows us is that Jesus is no ordinary twelve-year-old. Everyone who interacts with him is amazed and astonished. To all appearances, he’s a lost, little boy. But he’s actually fully in charge. This reminds me of a couple of our earlier passages:
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9: 6).
And
The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them (Isaiah 11: 6).
