Understanding > Blame
A sermon on Luke 2:41-52.
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by okeykat on Unsplash.]
When I was, maybe, seven or eight years old, my parents accidentally left me at church after worship one Sunday.
Unusually, they had taken two cars that morning and my mom and dad each thought the other one was bringing me home. Instead, I was playing outside with a friend and didn’t realize they had left.
It’s the kind of mistake that is easy to make when you are a pair of tired parents juggling three young children, one of whom is oblivious because she was having a great time exploring the woods.
It wasn’t until both parents arrived at home, without me, that they realized their mistake and my dad came rushing back, frantic, to find me peacefully playing where my friend had left me when it was time for him to leave.
I can remember looking up at one point before Dad returned and noticing the parking lot was empty, vaguely registering that I didn’t know where my family was, but I don’t remember feeling afraid.
I was at church, and church was my happy place. It was where we sang songs, and everybody loved me, and I learned about Jesus.
How could I ever be afraid there?
That is… until my dad’s truck came screeching into the lot, and he jumped out almost before it stopped yelling about how scared he had been. Then I got a proper jolt of anxiety.
Fast-forward almost 30 years, and I was the frantic parent.
It happened while Tyler and the kids and I were living in Italy. Quinn was six and Maddox was three and we were on our summer holiday in the South of France, exploring the old Amphitheater at Arles.
I had Maddox on my hip, and I thought Quinn was right next to me, while Tyler had moved off to explore another area.
Then I looked, and Quinn was nowhere to be seen.
I lived a lifetime of terror in the five minutes it took me to discover that Quinn had run off to follow Tyler.
He had been safe the whole time, but you couldn’t tell my heart rate that, which was running at adrenaline speed for a whole lot longer than 5 minutes.
Which is my way of saying that I “get” the questions that Jesus and his parents asked each other in today’s gospel.
I 100% get why Mary would ask Jesus, after Three Days (!) of wondering whether he was alive or dead…
(and, yes, that’s probably literary foreshadowing, but no terrified mother could possibly care about that)
…So… I get why she would ask, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you?”
That kind of intense fear NEEDS expression. And while a mother’s heartrate is still galloping in her chest, it’s natural to want the child to explain why they put you through that terror.
Sometimes… love gets expressed like anger and blame.
I also completely get how Jesus responds: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
He hadn’t been scared.
He hadn’t been spending his three days imagining horrifying scenarios and thinking back about what he should have done differently to keep his family safe.
He had been in a place that he felt safe and welcomed, doing something that brought him joy.
So, I get why his response to his mother’s accusatory question might be to push the blame back on her for being so frantic without cause.
Sometimes… love gets expressed like defensiveness.
Since I have personally experienced both sides of this dynamic, I can genuinely see both perspectives, and deeply empathize with the instinct to ask the question: “why?”
Why did you scare me like that?
Why did you react that way?
They are questions, but they are also, subtly, assertions about who is to blame: because the person who did something wrong is the one responsible for explaining their reasons.
But the thing about seeing things from both sides is that it’s also easy to see the problem with the instinct of wanting to lay blame.
For one thing, whichever way the blame falls, it’s my fault half the time, because I’ve been on both sides.
But more importantly, blame isn’t what matters in this scene. Blame is what grabs our emotions, but it’s not what matters.
What matters is understanding.
It’s not the drama of the story, so it might not have struck you on hearing the gospel read, but Luke concludes each scene of the narrative with a statement that relates to what has, or has not, been understood.
In verse 43, as Luke narrates the accidental separation, we hear that Jesus’s parents were “unaware” that he had been left behind… a rather clear failure to understand what is happening.
In verse 47, after we learn that the boy Jesus is discovered having spent the three days in the temple, learning from and questioning the teachers there, Luke tells us that all who heard him were amazed at his understanding.
Then, in verse 50, after the back-and-forth questions of “why” between mother and son, we are told that his parents did not understand what Jesus said to them.
The story concludes in verse 51, with the return to Nazareth where Mary, in echo of her response to the report of the shepherds on the night of Jesus’s birth “treasured all these things in her heart”… a move toward understanding, even if she hasn’t gotten there yet.
At each step of the story, Luke is cluing us in about who does and does not understand. This is the only story we get from Jesus’s childhood and young adulthood in the gospel of Luke, and running throughout this story is the key message about what is happening in the life of Jesus:
As he moves from the vulnerability of infancy toward the wisdom to take up the mantle of ministry, Jesus has to grow in understanding… and so do those around him.
At this point, I think it helps to dig into the Greek words that are translated here as understanding and understand: two variations on the word συνίημι [soon-ee'-ay-mee][1].
They draw from the root word σύν [soon], which means “union,”[2] and that is reflected in their biblical usage: an understanding that involves synthesis, seeing connections and bringing ideas together.
When Jesus sat in the temple, listening and asking questions, he could pull all of the various teachings together with his study of God’s word and understand how it fit together. He could see the big picture (and, perhaps, begin to see his part in it).
When his parents didn’t understand, it was because they couldn’t connect what Jesus was saying about being in this Father’s house to their experiences of sharing a house with him for the last 12 years, and house that was not where he had spent those three days that they were frantically searching for him.
From this perspective, I will admit that my sympathy moves toward the frantic mother’s side… it’s a lot to ask of her to go from anxiety to reframing her understanding of core relationships at the drop of a hat.
At least let her heartrate calm down before dropping the theological truth bombs, Jesus!
But, of course, he’s still growing too… and asking who is to blame is not the point…
The point, I think, is to help us to understand.
To help us to make connections, and to see the wholeness and the unity of Jesus’s story that does move, rather rapidly, from fragile infant to world-changing Savior.
To help us to see how that shift happens, and how we are called to engage in the same work that Jesus AND his parents were called into practicing: the work of seeking understanding.
The work of listening…
And of asking questions…
And of treasuring the things we don’t yet understand in our hearts so that we can come back to them again and see where they connect once we have more of the story.
The good news of this calling is that we don’t have to jump straight to mastery.
It’s actually OK to be in the process of gaining understanding, as long as we don’t fall into the anxiety-trap that that can provoke.
When the world around us tells us that not knowing something is cause for panic… Luke shows us how that panic can backfire.
He also shows us a better way: the way that Jesus himself, as well as his parents, had to practice over the years the preceded his ultimate ministry:
the slow, re-orienting task of letting go of the pull of anxiety, and the instinct to blame others when we get scared, and doing the joyful work of slowly making the connections that will let us see what God is doing.
That is the promise of understanding. Thanks be to God.
