Godborn

This month’s Doré woodcut illustrates Luke 2:46-47—

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.

There is a sense in which the Gospels were written backwards.

New Testament scholars refer to “the messianic secret,” the notion, firmly established in the text, that Jesus’ nature and identity are fully revealed only in the Resurrection. Before that He is misunderstood and misapprehended, even by those closest to Him: His Apostles, His Mother, His brothers and His sisters.

Easter unveils Him not only as Christ and King but as the Word made flesh, God Himself incarnate. The paschal mystery illuminates all: all that went before, and all to follow after. The earliest Christian confession was the amazed and breathless cry, “Christ is Lord!”—with full understanding that Lord, κύριος, is the established Hellenistic euphemism for the Hebrew Name of God.

The Resurrection is the bit of which the Gospels are the surest. But just as surely Jesus did not become God only in His rising from the tomb. He must’ve been God all along. And so His disciples looked back upon His teachings, His actions, His life, with new discernment, under the light of the Risen Christ and the guidance of His Holy Spirit. Despite many witnesses, the bones of His ministry were broadly agreed upon: Matthew, Mark, and Luke present the story of Christ synoptically, “with the same eye.”

Peter, James, and John speak of Jesus’ divinity unveiled at the Transfiguration. Others point to the miracles of His ministry. Some tell of His epiphanic Baptism in the Jordan River. But the earlier we go, the fuzzier things get. Paul, Mark, and John give no indication of a Virgin Birth, despite their indisputably high Christologies. Matthew and Luke both speak of Jesus’ birth, yet couch their theology in wildly differing stories.

I’m not saying that the Nativity narratives didn’t happen—Lord knows how I love Christmas—but clearly they weren’t nearly so well-established as Jesus’ public ministry, His Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. We were far more confident about His latter rather than His earlier life. Hence, the Gospels were written, and probably ought to be appreciated, backwards.

Luke’s is the only account of Jesus’ childhood within the biblical canon. And like much of the early chapters of his Gospel, it likely began as an independent tale, seemingly unawares of the Nativity recounted earlier in the same chapter. Mary refers to Joseph as Jesus’ father, for example, and both parents appear amazed at the miraculous nature of His wisdom, not to mention His assertion of God as His true Father. This would only seem strange without the first Noel.

In some ways the story of Jesus as a 12-year-old in the Temple may be seen as boilerplate classical biography. Great heroes from Moses to Alexander supposedly engaged in similar public acts of teaching as children, foreshadowing their destinies to come. Even Josephus—a Romano-Jewish historian from the same time and culture as Christ—struts a bit, insisting that he would put rabbis in their place at the tender age for 14. Hellenistic audiences would understand this as a marker of Jesus’ greatness, a trope of the genre.

Yet in Luke this episode prepares us for Jesus’ ministry as an adult: the way that He answers people with questions, then offers answers to their answers. As in the Christmas story, here the Gospel reasserts the Christian community’s belief that Christ was always God, even as a child, even (according to John) eternally begotten long before He was ever born.

Then as now, the central scandal of Christianity is the Incarnation: the utterly shocking notion that the One God could truly become a Man, while still remaining God. And this Incarnation must embrace the whole of Jesus’ earthly life: His conception, birth, infancy, childhood, the whole shebang. Indeed, if Christ is God; and God by definition is eternal, beyond all passability or change; then the Incarnation must be an eternal reality as well. God didn’t become Jesus; Jesus has always been God.

Take this one step further: if Christ is eternally Incarnate, it would then follow that Mary is in some sense eternally His Mother. So if she was the Mother of God from eternity, beyond all time and space, then she truly would be the Virgin Mother theologically, regardless of one’s historical interpretation. But I digress.

The story of Mary and Joseph finding the child Jesus in the Temple is first and foremost an assertion of Christology: of the Christian conviction that Christ is eternally God, eternally one with the Father, right from the get-go, even before the beginning. That simple confession, “Christ is Lord,” remains as awe-inspiring and mind-bending today as ever it was in the past—more than enough to keep a pious soul in adoration and astonishment, humility and hope.

In Jesus. Amen.