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After they had completed its days, as they were returning,
the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem,
but his parents did not know it.
We can take comfort, perhaps, in the fact that we are not the only ones who occasionally lose track of Jesus in our lives. Even the ever sinless Mary and Joseph the righteous man had made an oversight, and left the child Jesus in Jerusalem. At a very basic level we can learn from this that even being without sin is different from being without accidental errors or oversights. Maybe those parents to caught up in perfectionism can pause here and take a breath.
Thinking that he was in the caravan,
they journeyed for a day
and looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances,
but not finding him,
they returned to Jerusalem to look for him.
Yet it would be one thing to notice that Jesus was missing, it would be something else to not immediately begin to look for him. Yes, our lives are a hectic journey, a balance of many different relationships, and competing demands on our time. But Jesus is still the one who is meant to be of central importance to us. If we find ourselves without him we cannot be content to assume that he is somewhere close. We must seek him, for he desires to be sought. If we have let him wander because we have preferred to distract ourselves with sin and worldly delights we should realize how his absence is a privation of greater cost than any benefit we accrue from such pursuits. But perhaps he is absent not due to any culpable fault on our part but because, in his wisdom, he has chosen to momentarily hide himself in order that we can seek and find him in a new and deeper way.
After three days they found him in the temple,
sitting in the midst of the teachers,
listening to them and asking them questions,
and all who heard him were astounded
at his understanding and his answers.
Whatever the reason for the absence of Jesus, it can be for us a Paschal mystery in miniature, where the three days become a kind of dying and rising wherein we learn to more completely trust him, even when we can't sense him, that he is always about his Father's business and in his Father's house.
He went down with them and came to Nazareth,
and was obedient to them;
and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
Even Mary was able to come to ever deeper understanding of her son, grew in her ability to love and to treasure him, and grew in her ability to respond to the challenges that life with him entailed. She did this, not by avoiding or attempting to forget the great anxiety that life with Jesus sometimes brought, but by allowing Jesus himself to provide a greater context for that anxiety. She treasured in her heart every experience through which her son led her, not getting stuck in the painful past, but coming allowing Jesus to lead her to an ever deeper understanding that the third day would in fact always and inexorably come.
The love of Christ impels us,
once we have come to the conviction that one died for all;
therefore, all have died.
We too are called to let this great love of Christ to convict and motivate us. It is this very love which leads us into the Paschal mystery of his absence and death, but precisely so we can let go of our limited fleshly ways of regarding him and others. We are meant to realize that all who are in Christ are new creations. They are not, as it were, among the caravan any longer, but now dwell in the house of the Father. Even the absence of the experience of the presence of Christ is only an invitation to seek him more and to enter ever more deeply into this unshakable truth.
We implore you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God.
For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin,
so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
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