In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

 During the season of Christmas we celebrated the great mystery that Jesus is God in human flesh, that He is fully divine and fully human and yet one person.  Our Lord is Son of God and Son of man, with both heavenly and earthly parentage.  We see this illustrated now in today's Epiphany Gospel when Jesus was still a youth.  On the one hand we hear of how He grew in wisdom and stature and became strong in spirit.  St. Luke tells us that Jesus was subject to Joseph and His mother, that He lived under their authority and honored them according to the 4th commandment.  All of this points clearly to Jesus' true humanity.  His humanness is further accentuated in the way Mary is referred to.  You'll notice that unlike Joseph, Mary is never mentioned by name in this passage.  Rather, she is always called simply "His mother," "Jesus' mother."  This emphasizes that Jesus is truly of the same flesh and blood as Mary.  He is her real biological child–though, of course, without sin.  Joseph, however, was not Jesus' father, but something more like His foster father, and so He is referred to differently.  Along with Mary, Joseph saw to it that this real boy was properly raised and cared for.

 But on the other hand, we see here also the true divinity of Jesus.  While sitting in the temple He amazed the teachers with His understanding and His answers.  He had a grasp of the Scriptures unlike any other child His age.  He demonstrated great wisdom.  Furthermore, when Joseph and Mary found Him and questioned Him about what He was doing, Jesus spoke to them plainly of His divine identity and mission.  His first recorded words are "Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?"  Jesus' true Father was in heaven.  Our Savior was begotten of the Father before all worlds.  He is "very God of very God, begotten not made."  And when Christ became man, it was the Holy Spirit of the Father who miraculously conceived Him in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  That is why it was necessary for Jesus to be in the temple; it was His Father's house and therefore also His own house.  There our young Lord discussed the words of God; for He Himself was the Word made flesh, sent by the Father to redeem the world.

 As Christians you also have parentage that is both earthly and heavenly.  For you have been baptized into Christ; you are members of His body.  And so your lineage is just like His.  You have a spiritual mother on earth like the Virgin Mary, namely the holy Church.  For it was from the Church that you were given a new birth into fellowship with God through Christ.  This blessed mother has fed you with the pure milk of the Word and continues to nurture you even to this day.

 You also have a Father in heaven, the same Father of our Lord Jesus.  For it was the heavenly Father who caused you to be conceived as Christians in the womb of the Church and who gave you life by His Holy Spirit.  He continues to breed faith in you by His preaching and His Sacraments.  And as you come to His holy house to hear His words of life, He invites you to address Him as "Father," "Our Father who art in heaven . . ."

 And there is a spiritual Joseph in the congregation, too, a foster father in the faith, namely the pastor.  Joseph of himself didn't generate or cause the birth of Jesus.  But God used Him to do what was necessary to see the event through and to guard and protect both mother and child.  So also, pastors of themselves don't generate or cause the new birth of Christians.  But God does use them to deliver that new life, to guard the church from that which threatens her faith and to protect the spiritual well-being of her children.  Just as Joseph stood in the place of the heavenly Father in the raising of Christ, so also the pastor stands in the place of the heavenly Father in the guiding and shepherding of Christians as they grow and mature in the faith.  He acts with divine authority when He speaks the words of God to the children of God.  Therefore, Martin Luther states in the Large Catechism that ministers are indeed fathers of the faithful.  But they must always be seen as foster fathers, like Joseph, and not more than that.  For it is the Father in heaven who truly gives you life in Christ His Son.  Your real, eternal flesh and blood comes through mother Church.

 So then, let us now return to the important details of this Gospel narrative.  Mary and Joseph were returning home from Jerusalem, and they assumed that Jesus was with other relatives or friends in the caravan that they were traveling with.  But at the end of the day's journey, they discovered that Jesus was not there.  They began to look for Him with increasing anxiousness throughout the company of travelers.  Unable to find Him, they journeyed back to Jerusalem the next day, and on the third day they began to search for Him.  After a great deal of seeking, they finally found Him with the teachers in the temple.

 Jesus' response to Mary and Joseph indicates that they should've known all along that He would've been in His Father's house.  "Why did you seek Me?" He said.  This clearly illustrates how we fallen human beings tend to search for God and seek His presence in the wrong places.  Where is it that people look for God today, if they're looking at all?  What do they do to try to find Him?  Very often they'll look for God within themselves; they'll search for some spark of the divine presence within their own hearts.  Or, they'll seek God in nature; they'll try to get close to Him by being out in His creation.  Or, they'll look for Him in false religious practices and man-made forms of holiness.

 But God is not truly to be found in any of those places.  He is to be found only in His temple.  And Jesus begins to reveal to us here that the temple, the dwelling place of God, is not ultimately a temporary building.  The true and abiding dwelling place of God is none other than the eternal flesh of Christ.  Jesus is Himself the new and everlasting temple of God.  For does not the Christmas Gospel say, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us"?  And it is also written that in Christ all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form.  Therefore, if someone wishes to seek God, they must seek Christ and nothing else.  And if they are seeking Christ, they must look for Him according to His human nature; that is, they must search for Him in those physical, audible, concrete places where He is present for us:  in His words, the water, the bread and wine.  That is why places like this are sometimes referred to as the house or the temple of God.  For Christ is present here.  And He is present here in order to make us His dwelling, His very body, that He may fill us with His grace and wisdom.
 In order that our human natures might be filled with this grace and wisdom of our Lord, it was necessary for Him to cleanse us from our sin by being crucified and rising from the dead.  Jesus Himself said, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days."  By this temple He was referring to His own body.  And St. Luke records this of Good Friday, "The sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two.  And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, ‘Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.'  Having said this, He breathed His last."  You see, the transition from the old temple to the new took place through the holy cross of Christ.  By His bodily resurrection He has now become a living temple through which all who believe may enter into the very presence of God.

 And all of this was foreshadowed already here when Jesus was 12 years old.  For when did all of this take place but during the Passover, the feast that commemorated God's deliverance of His people from death through the sacrificing of a lamb.  So it would be that one day Jesus would return to Jerusalem to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  As St. Paul said, "Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed."

 And was it not for three days that Jesus was missing and hidden from his parents' sight?  Indeed, Christ our Brother was dead but came alive again on the third day, just as He was "lost" and then found here in the same span of time.  Truly, therefore, this event in the temple foretells Jesus' resurrection.  For our Lord also uses words very similar to those later spoken by the angels at His tomb.  Jesus said to Joseph and His mother, "Why did you seek Me?"  And the angels said to the women who had come to the grave, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?"  Mary and Joseph didn't understand the statement Jesus spoke to them in the temple, just as the disciples often didn't comprehend Jesus' sayings during His ministry.  But after He was raised, Jesus would open the eyes and minds and hearts of His followers, so that they might comprehend His words and see Him for who He truly is.  In the same way the risen Jesus still opens the eyes and the understanding of His people, so that you also might perceive the meaning of His holy words and look to Him rightly as your Redeemer and King.

 It is all of this and more that Jesus meant when He said, "I must be about My Father's business."  It was His Father's business that He take on our humanity and grow in wisdom and stature and grace–not that He didn't already fully possess those things as God, but so that He might fully transfer those divine gifts to our human nature.  The all-knowing, all-wise Son of God increased in wisdom as the Son of man in order to deliver that wisdom to us children of men and make us "wise unto salvation."  So it is written, "Christ has become for us wisdom from God."  In the same way Jesus increased in stature and in grace according to His humanity in order to give us humans stature before God and so that the Father would look upon us with His gracious favor.  Then, having restored our natures, it was His Father's business that Jesus would purge us of our sins by the blood of His Passover and purify us to be the children of God by His resurrection.  And finally, it is now His Father's business to be in the midst of His people, the temple of His Spirit, to speak to us the words of God, words that impart to us His grace and wisdom, His forgiveness and life.

 So then, brothers and sisters of Christ, let us now be about our Father's temple business in this new year.  Let us, by the mercies of God, offer up our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God in Christ.  Let us eagerly seek the Lord in His holy house, hearing  and receiving His words, treasuring them up in our hearts.  And let us grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord, until we finally come to the stature of the fullness of Christ on the Last Day.

  In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit