After they had completed its days, as they were returning,
the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem,
but his parents did not know it.
This absence of Jesus would have been especially troubling because of how perfectly he had honored his father and mother up until this apparent aberration. How could it be that suddenly he would have no consideration for the feelings of his parents after such perfect fidelity to this point? Yet the alternative scenario, that something unintended and possibly tragic had happened, was also hard to accept. After all, this was the child of the angel's promise, the one who would sit on the throne of David forever.
When his parents saw him,
they were astonished,
and his mother said to him,
“Son, why have you done this to us?
Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”
Perhaps in her anxiety Mary remembered the prophecy of Simeon, that the child was destined to be a sign that would be contradicted. Certainly she was already beginning to feel what it would mean for a sword to pierce her own heart. But what she finally found was not an accident or tragedy, but something quite intentional on the part of Jesus.
And he said to them,
“Why were you looking for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Jesus was not acting in disobedience to his earthly parents, but was rather responding to the higher call of obedience to his heavenly Father. Nor would this be the last time the fidelity of Jesus to his Father would cause Mary to suffer. The mystery of God's plan for Jesus was not something that was perfectly clear to her. She did indeed trust in him, because she genuinely needed to trust. She never wavered in supernatural faith, but it was on faith alone that she was forced to depend. But when her human understanding couldn't readily understand she did in fact suffer, and experience the piercing of her own heart.
After three days they found him in the temple
This three day absence of Jesus prepared her for another and still more terrible absence. In that absence she would not simply lose track of him, but would see him breath his last breath on the cross. She would take his lifeless body in her arms and mourn with a sorrow all the more acute because her heart was not encumbered by sin. But perhaps at that time she remembered the words Jesus said to her in today's Gospel, "Why were you looking for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?" This brief absence when he was twelve, then, was a kindness to help her to prepare for what would come to pass later.
He went down with them and came to Nazareth,
and was obedient to them;
and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
She did indeed mourn her son when he suffered and died, but she never lost hope, and her faith did not waver. She had learned, she had been taught, that understanding was not required for her obedience, and that it wouldn't always be offered to her. But she also learned that Jesus only ever deprived her of himself in order to give himself back to her again in a way that was somehow better than before.
and you yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed (see Luke 2:35).
The sorrows of Mary and her response of fidelity expose the thoughts of our own hearts which do not always respond to the crosses we are given to bear with faithfulness. Mary knows deeply that Jesus may allow us to experience difficulty, but only so that we can experience resurrection. She desires intensely that we learn from what those thoughts upon which she reflected in her Immaculate Heart, that we learn to trust in her son, and do whatever he tells us.
Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh;
even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh,
yet now we know him so no longer.
So whoever is in Christ is a new creation:
the old things have passed away;
behold, new things have come.
Only if we learn the lessons the Immaculate Heart would teach us will we be able to experience life as new creations in Christ. Even while our outer self is wasting away we can come to know, having learned the truth of it from Mary, that our inner self is being renewed day by day (see Second Corinthians 4:16). We can look past the surface, past our own understanding, and by faith begin even here and now to possess the fulfillment of the promises of God.
We can be, we are meant to be, the righteousness of God in Christ. This is what the world needs of us so that we can become, in turn, ministers of reconciliation.
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