Jesus in the World

The passage: ‘Son, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in distress.’ He said to them, ‘Why did you search for me? Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?’ And they did not understand what he said to them. (Luke ii. 48-50.)

Was that his saying? Why did they not understand it? Do we? The Greek is not perfectly clear, and who can tell whether the Syriac words he used were more precise? But had we heard his very words we too, like his parents, would have failed to understand. Must we fail still?

Our first difficulty shows if I give the latter half of the saying as the revised English version has it, departing from the authorized: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s house?’ His parents had his exact words and did not understand; we lack them and are in doubt what the Greek means.

If the authorized translation is true to the Greek, how could his parents, who knew him from all that had been said of him and all they had seen in him, have failed to understand that wherever he was he must be about his father’s business? And supposing they did know it, was that reason enough, given their spiritual development, for him to expect them not to be anxious at losing him? Thousands who trust God for their friends in spiritual things do not trust him for their health or well-being. His parents knew how prophets had always been treated, and a boy like him seemed exposed to many dangers; these could be met only by a faith able to say, ‘Whatever has happened to him, even death, can be no evil to one about his father’s business,’ and I think the Lord could not yet expect that of them. So long as they had not learned what God is, which he came to teach, he would have seen misfortune befalling him on his father’s business as reason for their anxiety. His words rather imply there was no need to worry about his personal safety. Fear of some accident seems to have caused their trouble; he did not mean they should not mind if he died doing his father’s will, but that he was in no danger from accident or misfortune. So much for the authorized version.

Let us now take the Revisers’ translation: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s house?’

Are the Revisers authorized in translating the Greek so? I know no justification, though I am not learned enough to say there is none. That the Syriac has it so weighs little, since it is a retranslation. If he said ‘my father’s house’ and meant the temple, why would he assume his parents knew it? The temple so little suggested itself to them that either it was the last place they looked or they had been there and had not found him. And if they might have known without being told, why did they not understand even when he set it before them? I do not believe he meant the temple.

What makes those who give this translation prefer it to ‘about my Father’s business’?

One or other of two causes, most likely both: an ecclesiastical fancy, and the mere fact that he was found in the temple. An ecclesiastical mind presumes the temple the likeliest place for the Son of God, and does not reflect that it was a place where the Father was worshipped neither in spirit nor in truth, built by one of the vilest rulers of this world, less fit than many another spot for the presence of him who says he dwells in the high and holy place, and with the contrite and humble in spirit. Jesus, in the same breath in which he once called it his father’s house, called it a den of thieves. His expulsion of the buyers and sellers was the first waft of the fan with which he came to purge his father’s dominions; nothing could cleanse that house, and his fanning rose to a tempest that swept it out of his father’s world.

The second cause, the mere fact that he was found in the temple, can hardly be a reason for his expecting his parents to know he was there; and if it witnessed to some habit of his that they knew, it is hard to see why they failed to see what the interpreters find so easily. The parents looked for a larger meaning in such a son’s words, one too large for them to find.

When, in the Greek, the Lord elsewhere says ‘my father’s house,’ he says it plainly, using the word house; here he does not.

Let us see what the Greek offers toward the thought in his mind. Literally it says, ‘Wist ye not that I must be in the——of my father?’ The authorized version supplies business, the revised house. The Greek has no noun, and the article ‘the’ is plural: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in the things of my father?’ The question is what things he means. The word might mean affairs or business, but I do not know why a plural article should be contracted to mean house. In a great wide sense house might be used, as I shall show, but surely not as meaning the temple.

He was arguing for confidence in God on the part of his parents, not for knowledge of his whereabouts. What made them anxious kept them from understanding his words: lack of faith in the Father. The words were meant to teach his parents the one thing he came to teach men. They are spirit and life, holding the one principle by which men shall live, and the same core as his words to his disciples in the storm, ‘Oh ye of little faith!’

‘Why did you look for me? Did you not know that I must be among my father’s things?’ What do we understand by ‘my father’s things’? The authorized ‘about my father’s business’ or ‘affairs’ is, as to the words themselves, thoroughly justifiable; I refuse it only because it does not fit the logic of the narrative as things does. Of course he was about his father’s business, and they might know it and still be anxious, lacking perfect faith in that father. But their fear was not of what might befall him for doing the Father’s will; he seemed too young for that. It was the vague perils of life that appalled them, the uneasiness of every parent whose child is missing; had they trusted in their father as he did, they would have known what he meant by being in the midst of his father’s things: that the very things from which they dreaded accident were his home-surroundings, and that he was doing the Father’s business not in a foreign country but in the Father’s own house. Understood as the world or the universe, ‘my father’s house’ would be a better translation than the authorized; understood as the poor, God-forsaken temple, no more the house of God than a dead body is the house of a man, it is immeasurably inferior.

The Lord meant, I say, to remind them, or rather make them feel, for they had not yet learned it, that he was never away from home and could not be lost; he was in his father’s house all the time, where no hurt could come to him. ‘The things’ about him were the furniture and utensils of his home, and he knew them all and how to use them. The world was his home because it was his father’s house. He was no stranger there, no lost child, but with his father all the time.

Here is one main thing wherein the Lord differs from us: we are not at home in this great universe, our father’s house. We ought to be, and one day shall be, but are not yet. This reveals Jesus as more than man by revealing him more man than we. We are not complete men, and so are more or less out of harmony with everything in the house of our birth. We struggle to make our home in the world without success, because we are not at home with the lord of the house, not one with our elder brother, his right hand. Only the son, the daughter, abides ever in the house. When we are true children, if not the world then the universe will be our home, felt and known as such, and we would not change it. Until then comes the hard strife with Nature, as we call the things of our father: invaluable for our development, yet showing we are not men enough to be lords of the house built for us. We cannot command in it as the Lord did, because we are not at one with his father, and so neither in harmony with his things nor rulers over them. Our best power is to find out wonderful facts about them and turn these to our uses on systems of our own. For we discover what we seem to discover by working inward from without, while he works outward from within, and we shall never understand the world until we see it in the direction in which he makes it, which we cannot do until we are one with him. Meanwhile both we and his things are so much his that we can err about them only as he has made possible: we can wander only in the direction of the truth, if but to find that we can find nothing.

Think how Jesus was at home among the things of his father. It seems to me a spiritless explanation of his words that the temple was where he was naturally at home. Does he make the least lamentation over the temple? He weeps over Jerusalem, the men of Jerusalem, the killers and stoners. He prayed on the mountain-top, not in the temple. His symbols for what passes in the mind and before the face of his father in heaven he finds not in the temple, its rites, altars or holy of holies, but in the world and its lovely-lowly facts: roadside, field, vineyard, garden, house, family, and the commonest of its affairs, the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, the neighbour’s borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying of the sheep; and even in its unlovely facts, such as the unjust judge and the false steward. See how he drives devils from men’s souls and bodies as we drive wolves from our sheepfolds, and diseases hurry and flee before him! The world has for him no chamber of terror. He walks to the door of the sepulchre, the sealed cellar of his father’s house, and calls out its four days dead; he rebukes the mourners, stays the funeral, and gives the departed children back to their parents. The roughest of its servants do not make him wince, and none is so arrogant as to disobey his word; he falls asleep in the storm that threatens his boat, and rebukes his disciples for trembling: God’s little ones afraid of a storm in their own house! Hear him tell the watery floor to be still and no longer toss his brothers, and see it obey; see the creatures under it come at his call; see him walk over its heaving surface to help his men of little faith; see its water turn to wine and its bread grow more bread at his word; see him go from the house for a while, and returning with fresh power take what shape he pleases, walk through its closed doors, and go up and down its invisible stairs!

All his life he was among his father’s things, in heaven or in the world, not only when they found him in the temple. He is still among them everywhere in the universe. Whatever he laid aside to come to us, he dealt with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear they were not strange to him but his father’s. He claimed none as his own, and would have had none his except through his father; only as coming from the Father and full of his thought had they any existence to him. That they were his father’s made them precious. He had no care for having, as men count having; all his having was in the Father. I doubt he had a pocket. Did he ever say ‘This is mine, not yours’? Did he not say, ‘All things are mine, therefore they are yours’? Only by knowing them as our Father’s can we escape enslaving ourselves to them; through the false, infernal idea of possessing them we make them our tyrants and the relation between us evil. The world was a blessed place to Jesus because everything in it was his father’s. What pain it must be to him to see his brothers defile the Father’s lovely house, each grasping at the family things in greed and haste to be rich! If one polluted spot disturbs our pleasure in a whole landscape, how much more him.

Whoever can understand Wordsworth or Henry Vaughan when either speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood can imagine a little how Jesus, in his eternal childhood, regards the world.

Hear what Wordsworth says:

Hear what Henry Vaughan says:

Whoever has gazed thus on flower or cloud, or can recall the poorest memory of the trail of glory about his childhood, has some faint idea how his father’s house and its things always looked, and must still look, to the Lord. With him there is no fading into the light of common day. He has never lost his childhood, the essence of childhood being nearness to the Father and the outgoing of his creative love; so, with the insight of his eternal childhood, of which the insight of little ones here is a fainter repetition, he sees everything as the Father means it, as he thought of it when he uttered it. For God is father not only of the child but of the childhood that makes him a child, so childness is of the divine nature. The child cannot look into the father’s method, but he can in a measure understand his work, has free entrance to his study and workshop, and may ask questions. If Jesus could always see his father’s things even as some men and more children see them at times, he might well feel almost at home among them; he could not cease to admire and love them, since the life in them, the presence of the creative one, would always be plain to him. In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially divine? To cease to wonder is to fall from the childlike to the commonplace, the most undivine of intellectual moods. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them, and as we must one day always see them, only far better, should we ever know dullness? Should we fly to art, or to other men’s eyes and thoughts, for deliverance from ennui or any haunting discomfort, and not just open our own child-eyes, look on the things themselves, and be consoled?

Jesus, then, would have his parents understand that he was in his father’s world among his father’s things, where nothing could hurt him; he knew them all, was in the secret of them all, and could use and order them as his father did. To this I think all we humans are destined to rise. Though many of us do not know what home we are capable of, we too shall inherit the earth with the Son eternal, doing with it as we would, willing with the Father’s will. We are travelling to such a home as we now inhabit, only perfected and perfectly beheld, never to reach it save by the obedience that makes us children and so heirs of God. And, thank God, there the father does not die that the children may inherit; we inherit with the Father.

All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests and the learned in the traditional law, whom his parents had not begun to fear for him. They feared the thieves and robbers of the hill-road; the scribes, pharisees, priests and rulers would surely be the first to acknowledge their Messiah and king! Little they imagined, finding him where he ought to have been safest had it been indeed his father’s house, that he sat there amid lions, the great doctors of the temple. He could rule all the things in his father’s house, but not the men of religion who called his father their Father. He might have compelled them with a word or a glance, but the Lord of life despised such supremacy over his brothers. He would have them know themselves of his own family, at home among the things of God, loving and hating as he and his father did, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being. Because they would not, he let them do to him as they would, that he might reach their hearts by some unguarded door in their diviner part: ‘I will be God among you; I will be myself to you. You will not have me? Then do to me as you will. The created shall have power over him through whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know him and his father. They shall look on him whom they have pierced.’

His parents found him in the temple, but never really found him until he entered the true temple, their own adoring hearts. A temple that knows not its builder is no temple; no divinity dwells in it. But at length he comes to his own, and his own receive him, in the might of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, and preach deliverance, sight, liberty and the Lord’s own good time.