Search and You will Find
After three days, they found him. Back in the Nazareth of his childhood, just one of a scattering of small towns in remote, far-off Galilee, he will have noticed how his parents looked south to the Holy City, how they spoke of it with awe and longing.
He will have grown up among subsistence-level people who, in the midst of their carefully eked-out existence, still managed to save and "put aside" for their trips to Jerusalem. And not just to Jerusalem as holiday makers but to the Temple as pilgrims.
He will have heard the other villagers sing from the psalms as they made their long journey to the Holy City, "it is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord". And again, " I rejoiced when I heard them say 'Let us go to God's house, and now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem' ".
When those who came in search of him eventually found him, they discovered that he was doing much more than merely "standing within the gates of Jerusalem". He was in the Temple itself, sitting among the very leaders of the law, asking them questions. The growing lad was finding his own voice and in the process revealing the Word within him. Not everyone would come in search of such a word for being "in Control" had shut them out from what was yet to be revealed.
Many years from now there would be another "three days", three dark and violent days when the veil of the Temple that shut out the Holy of Holies from mere Pilgrims, would be "rent in two from top to bottom." The child they had found in the temple had now not only become a man, but in his death made access to The Holy open to all. In revealing the Truth of his Word, he now asks questions of us all.
Some do not find it easy to listen to the questions he asks for they seem to threaten Orthodoxy, THEIR orthodoxy, and therefore also their control of "the temple". But those who come to the crib this Christmas, ready and willing to be changed, must not come in control of anything. Should their search be genuine, they will find Him a revealing answer.
He will have grown up among subsistence-level people who, in the midst of their carefully eked-out existence, still managed to save and "put aside" for their trips to Jerusalem. And not just to Jerusalem as holiday makers but to the Temple as pilgrims.
He will have heard the other villagers sing from the psalms as they made their long journey to the Holy City, "it is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord". And again, " I rejoiced when I heard them say 'Let us go to God's house, and now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem' ".
When those who came in search of him eventually found him, they discovered that he was doing much more than merely "standing within the gates of Jerusalem". He was in the Temple itself, sitting among the very leaders of the law, asking them questions. The growing lad was finding his own voice and in the process revealing the Word within him. Not everyone would come in search of such a word for being "in Control" had shut them out from what was yet to be revealed.
Many years from now there would be another "three days", three dark and violent days when the veil of the Temple that shut out the Holy of Holies from mere Pilgrims, would be "rent in two from top to bottom." The child they had found in the temple had now not only become a man, but in his death made access to The Holy open to all. In revealing the Truth of his Word, he now asks questions of us all.
Some do not find it easy to listen to the questions he asks for they seem to threaten Orthodoxy, THEIR orthodoxy, and therefore also their control of "the temple". But those who come to the crib this Christmas, ready and willing to be changed, must not come in control of anything. Should their search be genuine, they will find Him a revealing answer.
posted by Val Farrell | 10:07
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