Christ Among the Doctors

“And it came to pass, that after three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers,” —Luke ii. 46, 47

The passage: After three days Joseph and Mary found Jesus in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. All who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and His answers.

The manifestation to the Magians, which we heard in Thursday’s service, is recorded by St. Matthew. The manifestation to the doctors is told only by St. Luke. We might have expected the reverse: that Matthew, writing for Jews, would tell what concerned Jews directly, and that Luke, the companion of St. Paul, would seize on the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. But Matthew, who cared to set forth a King of the Jews, would naturally record the Wise Men’s search for such a King and their homage when they found Him. And no one was fitter to tell how the Light of the World burst upon the Rabbis in the Temple than Luke, who had talked with the pupil of Gamaliel and had carefully studied how that man came to be enlightened.

By bringing these two events together under the name of Epiphany, the Church seems to impress on us that every act of our Lord from His birth onward is a disclosure of the glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father, from whose Grace and Truth all human grace and truth proceeded. Seen so, these old records, which some distrust and would like to discard, fit the whole tenor of the history. They also free us from confusions about that history and about the meaning of the word Revelation. We think it natural that the Apostles, endowed with miraculous powers, could build up a Church among Jews and Gentiles. Had we such powers, we feel sure we could convert Hindoos and Mussulmans, and the many who are Christians only in name. The Apostles had no idea that they possessed any such charms for moving hearts and consciences. They said the Gospel itself was the “power of God unto salvation, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.” They said their task was to preach Christ crucified, because His weakness and humiliation made known the power and wisdom of God. In other words, it was He who, through their preaching, revealed Himself to the eye meant to receive the discovery and waiting for it. The story of the Star leading the Wise Men to the King they were asking the stars about explains how He made words or signs effective for His purpose. The story of His listening to the doctors and questioning them shows how He made men who were slaves of words, or rather of letters, and who thought all power lay in them, confess a mightier power in Him.

I. This is the subject I think today’s Gospel forces on us. In the Temple were gathered grave men, full of all the learning to be had from the traditions of the past, and, as they thought, from the words and lives of Patriarchs, Lawgivers, and holy men. Theirs was no profane wisdom; some might have a little of that, but all valued it only as it illustrated the Divine wisdom given to their land, or as a foil to set off its purity. They might not agree on the meaning of the words they prized. The Psalms were open to very different readings. They disagreed about where and how a given prophecy would be fulfilled. They might differ on the relative worth of the commandments, and still more when they compared those simple, broad commandments with the exact rules handed down by elders and doctors. Most probably thought that keeping the commandments was comparatively easy and vulgar, and that practising the refined rules showed a more scrupulous holiness, or at least led toward it. Some, however, would deride such practices as idle: ordinary morality, as the Commandments prescribe, was what God demanded, and ascetic maxims had been needlessly grafted on. Yet through all these differences ran a general impression that whatever there was of religion, or of acquaintance with the oracles of God, dwelt among them. Age and the inheritance of former times were theirs. They were the shepherds of the people, and whether the sheep went right or wrong depended mainly on whether they accepted or neglected this guidance.

Into this grave and venerable company comes a Boy just twelve years old. No one can say exactly how He came there. But it is a promising sign, a sign of early devotion, that He likes to be in the Temple. The great festival has just ended, and among the crowds who attended it, it is no wonder if one was seized with awe at those beautiful buildings, or at what they signify. This one is apparently separated from His parents. He may have wandered off by accident, or He may be thinking, if His tribe and the rules of the elders permit, of giving Himself to the service of that place. A friendly Rabbi might think it worth asking what He intended, and why He was lingering there.

1. So He stands among the Rabbis, not frightened by their dignity, showing no bashfulness but also no forwardness. He is not eager to speak; He wishes to listen. The doctors are talking about matters they presume are far above a boy’s understanding, and His face shows no assumption or precocity, only quietness and docility. Such a boy may be allowed to hear their talk, and it may impress Him later, if not at once, with reverence for their persons and office. And what was that listening of His? In the highest sense, as in every lower one, the maxim holds: “Everything is received according to the measure of the receiver.” We can imagine how glibly the familiar texts were repeated, how often “sins” and “repentance” were on their lips, how they debated the hope of Israel and the promise of dominion over the Gentiles, how they spoke of all God’s dealings with them, short of pronouncing the Name that signified His hidden essence. What awful, unutterable meanings lay under these sounds! And the meaning, not the sound, was what this Boy was listening to. What the learned men had only the faintest consciousness of entered into His inmost being. It was reverent and awful listening, the listening of a child, not the judgment of a man. We find that distinction hard, but if we believe the Incarnation we shall try to make it. We shall believe that the Child was a child and the Boy a boy; that the Child was perfect as a child and so did not anticipate its later growth, which would imply imperfection; that the Boy was a perfect boy and so had none of that forestalling of manhood which our consciences and reason tell us is irregular and untrue. This is not merely to do justice to Christ’s Humanity. It is the only way we can see how the Divinity manifested itself through the Humanity and addressed all the conditions and needs of Humanity. We may form a notion of Divinity as unlimited wisdom and power, but such notions are worth very little. What we want is to know what wisdom and power are in their fullest sense, not to shape and shrink them by our understandings and then fancy we have made amends by calling them “unlimited.”

Do you suppose those Rabbis, after forty or fifty years of reading and copying the Law and comparing and registering the commentaries, had ever felt such a presence of Divinity as when they looked into the face of that listening Boy? They could copy the letters and survey the commentaries. If something deep and mysterious lay beneath, they could reduce it to Cabbala and talk of it as their possession, their distinction from the multitude. But which of them could penetrate the awe and mystery of that countenance, clear and bright as it was? What spoke through it could not be reduced to Cabbala. They could never say, “That raises us above our countrymen.” They must have felt: “That face speaks of our connection with Galilean peasants; it reminds us we are of the same flesh and blood. As we look at it, does it not seem more glorious to share flesh and blood with anyone called a man than to have all this learning of ours?” A strange message, a strange witness, to come to men who must uphold their reputation for sanctity and wisdom before the multitude! Yet surely a divine message. Surely those listening eyes were reading their very hearts. Surely they knew better than ever before that God was reading them.

2. Then came the questions: “He was sitting among them, both hearing them and asking them questions.” Still all is suited to a boy. He pronounces on nothing and lays down no law. The time may come when He will go up into a mountain and speak as One having authority, but not yet. He is not above the Scribes; He sits at their feet. He wants to know what they think about this commandment, about this sentence of David or Isaiah. At first the answers are ready: what one elder or another had written or taught his disciples. They begin to give out the oracles, perhaps with an air of patronage to the earnest youth. Why does the patronage disappear? Why does the well-trained memory fail? Why that look of puzzlement, almost terror, on faces used to resolving every riddle and silencing every dispute? The question has gone beneath commentary and text alike, and the second-hand answer does not serve. What would it profit to give the best exposition of the Commandments if the Child, with those deep, searching eyes, said: “He who spoke these commandments calls Himself The Lord thy God. What is this Thy? Is He indeed the God of each of you? He speaks as a Deliverer out of bondage. Is that so? Was He only the Deliverer of our Fathers long ago, or is He that still, now? The prophets always call Him the Living God, the God from generation to generation. Is He then actually with us as He was with them, speaking to us as He spoke to them? He is described as a Father pitying His children and putting away their sins, yet hating all iniquity. Is that so still? Does He actually seek to make men right?”

I have supposed questions with no novelty in them, arising directly from the language of the Holy Book. If there had been none deeper (and there were deeper than we can imagine), what must their effect have been? No Rabbi could have charged the speaker with captious doubt or premature disbelief. But might not many have been led to suspect themselves of doubt and disbelief? Might not one have thought: “The words cannot be taken in their simple, strict sense; if so, the Book is not the one I thought I knew from beginning to end”? Might not another have said: “Yes, thanks be to God, that must be what is written. I did not perceive it, but so it is. The King of kings cannot be far from us. He must be in this place, and though it is the holy place where He put His name, I knew it not”?

3. We are told that “all who heard this child were astonished at His understanding and answers.” So they must have questioned Him as He questioned them. No doubt He submitted to their catechism as willingly as He had been eager to receive what they had to give: a child, in either task, taught by elder men and doing what they required. And His answers, like His questions, would not be new or far-fetched. They would be startling because they presented the words of holy men in their direct, full, original force. They did not make veils for those words but drew away the veil that had hidden them. The words came forth as if the men in whose hearts they had burned like fire were present, and they were shown to be not theirs but His who had spoken to those men and declared His purpose through them. The answers, I repeat, were not veils; they were a Revelation, an Unveiling. And that Unveiling was not of a System or a Religion but of Him who said, “Let not the rich man glory in his riches, nor the wise man in his wisdom, but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he knoweth Me, that I execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.”

So it was, as the Evangelist says, the understanding (σύνεσις) of this child that astonished the doctors. No word could better express the impression on their minds. This boy went along with the words they had read, copied, and memorized. They had never gone along with them. They had drawn conclusions and generalized notions from the words, but their hearts had never touched them. The words were idols worshipped at a distance, and not worshipped until all the dangerous life had been extracted from them, until they were as powerless to act, teach, or govern as the stocks and stones of the heathen which those very words denounced. What a wonder to see them living and breathing again in this Child’s answers! What a wonder to find that He went along not only with the words but with the very mind of Him from whom they came, and spoke like one brought up with Him, a sharer of His counsels!

4. Although nothing in this Boy’s listening, questioning, and answering interferes with the growth in wisdom and stature St. Luke speaks of, the gradual unfolding of human life necessary to manifest the Divine life, there is a foreshadowing of later years. We generally see such a thing in an individual when we know his story, and we should confidently expect it in the Man, the Representative of the Race. After He entered His ministry, when He was exercising the fullness of His power and denouncing those Scribes and Pharisees He had listened to in the Temple, He was still unveiling deep mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven by asking questions of His disciples and the multitude. The last of these awakened great awe: “What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?” He was still answering those who asked “what was the chief commandment,” “Shall we give tribute to Cæsar?” and “Whose wife will the woman be hereafter, who had the seven husbands on earth?” He was again a silent hearer of the charges against Him in the Sanhedrim, until the High Priest’s adjuration to say whether He was the Son of God drew the final answer: “Thou hast said; nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of Heaven.” Thus His earliest acts on earth and His latest showed a divine harmony. His understanding of God’s ways was more and more discovering His name to be what the prophet proclaimed: “He shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor.” And His question to Mary and Joseph when they sought Him sorrowing, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”, prepared the way for His baptism and for His final prayer, “Father, glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee.”

II. But the subject is for us no less than for the Rabbis. I will mention some lessons I think lie in it, which we especially need at this time.

1. First: many divines, and many Christians who are not divines, have a great fear of questions. “Certain things,” they say, “were settled long ago, and to disturb the settlement is perilous. If we are humble and modest, we shall be content without knowledge of divine things. Probabilities and distant approximations to knowledge are all that creatures like us can aspire to.” Brethren, as long as I believe in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, and seek my standard of modesty and humility in Him, I must protest against the modesty and humility these disciples of His affect. I find Him beginning His pilgrimage on earth as a questioner. I find Him astonishing the upholders of a long, safe tradition by that method. I find Him sanctioning it as His own sound way of detecting falsehood and laziness and urging men to seek Truth so that they may find it. I believe Christ has been asking questions from that day to this, and is asking them of us all, divines and laymen, now. They come in many shapes and through many lips. They come through children who torment parents and teachers about the wonderful meaning of words that have become to them mere familiar sounds, and of things they have gazed at until they forget there is any life or mystery in them. They come through men exercised by the puzzles of Philosophy who want ground to stand on, a ground of reality, not of convention. They come through the cravings of men who know nothing of Philosophy but have found enough in their own thoughts and in the world to amaze and confound them. They come even through the frivolous, who seem to be engaged in no search, who only want to throw down a system or build one for their own fame, yet who, being men, cannot be merely busy at that poor work and will start some inquiry that we may pursue to its issue if they will not. I am greatly afraid that when we try to silence any of these questions we are trying to silence the voice of Christ, in others and in ourselves. We do not like Him to sift us and make us understand what in us is of Him and will bear the fires of His judgment-day, and what is our own wood, hay, and stubble, which must be burnt up in them.

2. I know how liable such statements are to be misunderstood, as if I wished to discourage reverence for the past, or thought there were no oracles of God stronger and deeper than all human reasonings and speculations. I have tried to show you today how unfair those charges are. Just because I would uphold reverence for the past, and think our speculations far feebler than the oracles of God, I dare not stifle one anxious question men raise about the faith of other days and those oracles. The Rabbis did not reverence the past. They accepted its decrees. They had no fellowship with the life and sufferings of its men. They did not honour the oracles of God. They were buried under their own reasonings and speculations, and could not receive any word as coming directly to human hearts from the Ruler of those hearts. No men needed so much to become little children and recover the wisdom of children. That they might attain it, the Child came among them, listened to them, and asked and answered questions.

I think that same Child, who has the government on His shoulders, hears us, questions us, and answers us for the same end. There are doubtless those who want to cut us off from all communion with the past, telling us it is a chain on our freedom. There are those who say the Bible is an obsolete book, useful in the world’s infancy and unworthy of such advanced sages as we are. You do not refute these objectors by arguing against them, by setting the weight of opinion against them, or by matching their hard, scoffing temper. Their fault is not that they question too much but too little. They have never asked themselves what they want, or what mankind wants. If they once grappled fairly with those questions, they would begin to reverence those who wept and bled so that mankind might have what it wants, and would be filled with shame as they contrasted those tears and blood with their own boasting. They would hear an old text telling them secrets of their own being that the wisdom which mocks at texts has never penetrated. For they would see that they, and mankind, want the actual knowledge of God; that for this men have sighed and cried in every country and age; and that if this knowledge cannot be had, what is called Self-knowledge is either a miserable delusion or a curse and a horror. So you may lead even proud deniers to come as little children, not only to the Bible but to that Child whom the Bible declares to be the firstborn of Men, the perfect manifestation of God.

3. This is the subject I began with and shall end with. Do our Rabbis confess Jesus Christ to be that perfect manifestation of God? Do they admit that He came into the world in very deed to show men the Father? Do they confess that this was His Father’s business, which He was about from His cradle to His Cross; that He has been occupied in this ever since the world was made and will be for ever and ever? Alas, in the very highest quarters of English Rabbinism we are taught the reverse. The only way to confute Rationalism and establish Christianity, we are told, is to affirm that God cannot be known and that man’s constitution forbids him to seek such knowledge. We are to add nothing to the Bible, except that our main business is to seek a system or scheme of Religion that may benefit our character. We are to take nothing from the Bible, except that man is made in the image of God and that to be ignorant of his Archetype is to be miserable. To some of us this seems to add to the Bible all the human inventions it protests against, and to take from it whatever gives it a claim to be a Divine Revelation. This combination of the profoundest Scepticism with unlimited acquiescence is nothing new. Half the submission to an infallible dictator, and at least half the willingness of philosophers to endure the grossest superstitions, may be traced to it. Its justification lies in the simple proposition, “We cannot conceive the inconceivable.” That maxim is so self-evident that it would have swept away all thought of an invisible world or a divine Being, had there not been in human beings a deeply grounded conviction, however variously expressed or however unable to express itself, that unless we can rise above our conceptions, above ourselves, there is for us no science of things and no knowledge of persons, whether fathers, brothers, or friends; and that all affection must perish, as all understanding must, in the true sense of the word. That inward belief, whose loss is the loss of every aspiration after goodness or nobleness and the destruction of any morality but the conventional, has given rise to the cry for some Being above all our thoughts and conceptions, yet the ground and standard of them all, to tell us what He is and therefore what we are. The faith of our fathers was that God answered this cry which He Himself had awakened; that He did come forth in His only-begotten Son to show men what He is; and that He did send His Spirit into human hearts, that all might know Him, from the least to the greatest. Confessing this Revelation was their orthodoxy. They had no notion of a system or scheme of Religion apart from a Manifestation of God to men. I believe, brethren, that God will sweep from His earth all schemes and systems of religion that lack this real Revelation for their basis or hide it from men. I believe that a building with the doctrine of Bolingbroke, or the “Essay on Man,” for its foundation and the teaching of Christ and His Apostles for its superstructure must fall by its own weight, or, if not, that the rage of disappointed human hearts will tear it down. But I also believe that the Child who stood among the Rabbis, hearing them and asking them questions, and astonishing them by His understanding and answers, has saved and will save the World, which by wisdom knew not God, from that miserable and fatal ignorance. He has revealed, and will reveal Himself more and more, as One who is made unto us Wisdom and Righteousness and Sanctification and Redemption.