Friday, September 26, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Jesus and the Temple
Once when Jesus was praying in solitude,
and the disciples were with him,
he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?”
Jesus is bursting with questions. Anne Rice wrote Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in the first person, and Jesus tells the story. He’s seven, and his extended family arrived in Nazareth last night fresh from a journey north from Alexandria. In the Egypt megapolis he had studied, as a six year old and younger, with Philo the philosopher, who was sorry to see him go. Philo had few answers but many questions. Jesus took to this way of learning like a comb to tangled hair. Brush and brush, day after day, and then let the ways of the world do their worst.
Walking with Joseph through the burned out town – first by rebels and then by thieves and finally by Roman soldiers – they turned away from the dead figures on crucifixes beside the road and toward the olive grove. “My father’s grandfather planted that olive tree,” Joseph told him. Joseph regretted taking Jesus from Alexandria, from thate cradle of questions and understanding, and apologized to his seven-year old son.
Jesus did not speak. He had something to say, but he couldn’t find the words quickly enough. He loved the grass he had been lying on, and he loved the blue sky, and more than anything he loved the old olive tree that smelled of Joseph’s father’s father’s father.
“We’re here because no one will look for you here,” he said to Jesus. “You’ll be hidden, and that’s how you will remain.” Jesus thought, “Why would anyone look for me? What do I need to be protected from?” He began to ask, but Joseph hushed him.
“You keep your questions in your heart. And when you’re old enough, I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Of course Nazareth is just the right place for Jesus to grow up, and his family surrounds him  as he embraces his family. The family carpenters and gardeners made a quiet place to pray on their rooftop. Jesus walked in the orchards, played with the birds and gazed up at the mountains. Each year they made their pilgrimage and retreat with family to Jerusalem for Passover.
Rice’s tale concludes a few years before, at age 12, Jesus loses track of time while talking to the scribes in the temple and his family searches frantically for him. But even now Mary speaks forthrightly to her son:
You are the son of the Lord God! That’s why you can kill and bring back to life … that’s why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he’s made you a child, then he’s made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything else.”
Well-taught, the young Jesus knew the prophets and their words. He knew how the temple’s construction took years of frustration and sweat amid discouragement and cynicism among the people, and he also knew how God responded:
Take courage, all you people of the land, and work!
For I am with you, says the LORD of hosts.
One moment yet, a little while,
and I will shake the heavens and the earth,
the sea and the dry land.
I will shake all the nations,
and the treasures of all the nations will come in,
And I will fill this house with glory,
Mine is the silver and mine the gold,
says the LORD of hosts.
Greater will be the future glory of this house
than the former, and in this place I will give you peace,
says the LORD of hosts!
Jesus loved God’s temple in Jerusalem, and he spent time there all his life. Joseph and his family were carpenters. They repaired broken dwellings and they built anew. They labored and their labor made all things beautiful. Jesus was a rabbi, he never became a scribe or pharisee, but he knew the temple was his home. Just as the whole world was also his home, and out of the temple, out of the world he learned, as we all do, to look into his own heart to find the place where God lives.
Anne concludes her first book about Jesus as a boy:
Everything that happened to me, everything both great and small, was something I had to learn! There was room for it in the infinite mind of the Lord and I had to seek the lesson in it, no matter how hard it was to find. I almost laughed. It was so simple, so beautiful. If only I could keep it in my mind, this understanding, this moment—never forget it as one day followed another, never forget it no matter what happened, never forget it no matter what came to pass. Oh, yes, I would grow up, and there would come a time when I would leave Nazareth, surely. I would go out into the world and do what it was I was meant to do. Yes.
But for now? All was clear. My fear was gone. It seemed the whole world was holding me. Why had I ever thought I was alone? I was in the embrace of the earth, of those who loved me no matter what they thought or understood, of the very stars. “Father,” I said. “I am your child.”
(Haggai 2, Psalm 43, Mark 10, Luke 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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