My Father's Business,

And Jesus said to them, “Why did you look for Me? Do you not know that I must be about My Father's business?” Luke 2:49 MKJV

In 2025 I will celebrate my 70th birthday. Of those 70 years 25 of them were raising 4 children from birth to high school graduation. Parenting was good, lots was fun.  Mostly I learned so much about myself. The best part was being witness to moments of my children discovering their adulthood. In the next 12 months I resolved to be a better listener and more supportive of my adult children.

Many cultures celebrate coming-of-age ceremonies, traditions, and rituals. Some native American cultures practice ‘dream-quests’. The Amish allow ‘rumspringa’. I remember watching the drama of homecoming, prom, first car, and all kinds of social functions that brought my generation into the adult world.

In the 21st century western culture, Jews host a Bar Mitzvah for the boys and a Bat Mitzvah for girls as a coming-of-age ritual at 12-13 years of age. When Jesus was 12, he went with his parents to Jerusalem where Jesus appears to be free to wander the Hebrew temple on his own. In 18 BC Herod the Great enlarged and upgraded the temple to one of the wonders of the world. The complex covered 36 acres. The outer Court of the Gentles was 20 aces. It held markets for wheat, wine, and animals to be sacrificed. There was banking for temple tax and currency exchange. But most interesting to the adolescent Jesus were the Socratic schools of discussion by teachers of Hebrew history, law of Moses, prophecy of Messiah, and philosophy.

Today educators, medical brain scientists, psychiatrists and sociologists recognize the mystery of early adolescence human brain development. The non-traumatized human brain experiences normal transformation from formative thinking to abstract thinking on its own. Like a chrysalis that morphs from a ground crawling caterpillar to a flying butterfly. Faith that was based on people, places, and earthly events is questioned.  It is often very hard on parents like Joseph, when loyalty to the earthly father figure transfers to a different ideology.

We can hear the excitement of the words of Jesus. ‘Dad, I want to become a son of the temple!’  What the boy Jesus had seen as a historical traditional ritualistic sacrificial religious system broke with human inconsistency. Rather than the faith fading, it exploded into a spiritual vision of release from childhood naivety, guilt, and shame to mission and peace with a loving heavenly Father-figure.

The conversation between Jesus and his parents' borders on being dishonorable. Especially tense is the comment of Joseph’s fatherhood. We can only speculate on what Jesus knew of Joseph’s stepdad role. The word ‘father’ as a reference for God was only used in the generational context of the God of our fathers. Hebrew theology does not have a trinity concept of God. What we do know is that Jesus is claiming the temple to be his father’s temple. As was normal for enthusiastic boys, Jesus is announcing separation from the carpentry business of Joseph to apprenticeship/discipleship in God the Father’s house, the temple. In fulfillment of the Law, Jesus did humble himself in obedience to honor Joseph in the carpentry role for another 18 years.

The translators struggle with the words for ‘house’ and ‘businesses.’  We can ponder childish to adult perspectives of what Jesus saw happening in the temple. The business of God the Father is more than religious. The Judo-Christian God is Spirit. Those who worship, worship in the Spirit of repentance and faith.

The discovery of Jesus’s Heavenly Father being in the business of forgiveness of sin, overwhelmed his early adolescence being. The earthly temple and religion of Moses was simply the environment for the possibility of spiritual illumination to the Christ idea. The human adolescent Jesus could not hold the divine excitement of Gentiles and Hebrews in the same house of the spiritual father’s business. Sinners and saints, foreigners and locals, immigrants, migrants, and citizens all receive the same redemption from the insecurity of childishness, localism, and sin.

In our New Year’s resolutions, we pray for daily repentance from childhood religion to the faith of a loving Heavenly Father, revealed by God the Son, and delivered by God the Holy Spirit. When it dawned upon Jesus that he would be the sacrificial lamb we do not know. At 12-year-old Jesus began to perceive the business of the temple as spiritual salvation for the entire world. The religion of the temple was about to go away. All may receive the gift of faith to believe in the sacrifice of Christ. The spiritual gift of grace from God to love God and our neighbor as God does.