Well, he wasn’t there.  And no-one on the Mount of Olives or down in the valley could tell us anything about him either.

Most of the visitors had left by the time we arrived, which was no surprise – after all, it’s now two days since the Feast of Unleavened Bread ended.  We searched and searched, but there was nothing to be found.

By the time we were sure he wasn’t there, it was past the time of the evening sacrifice,[1] and we had less than three hours left in the day to search the city for our son.

We decided to go into the city and visit each of the gates, asking if anyone had seen a twelve-year-old lad.  The problem was that we weren’t sure how to describe him in a way that would distinguish him from any other twelve-year-old lad – it’s only once you start talking to Jesus that he stands out from others.  However, we did our best, and visiting each of the gates and travelling between them used up the rest of our daylight hours.

One or two possible leads turned up, but in the end we had nothing to show for our efforts.  The whereabouts of Jesus is still just as much of a puzzle to us now as it was this morning.

Since then, we’ve found a place to stay for the night and decided that we’ll keep looking more in the morning once it gets light.

We’ve been trying to think of more places to look, but there’s nowhere that seems very likely.

 

 

The night is finally over and now it’s light.  We had some sleep, but not much.  More hours were spent in prayer – and it was time well spent.

When you are forced to wait for something – when you can’t do anything but pray – it forces you to think as well.  We were forced to think about Jesus, what we knew about him and what we believed of him.  We knew that we would have to look for him in the morning and that we had to work out where to start.  It compelled me to decide what I thought of him so that I could predict where he might be.  Mary says that it was the same for her.

By the time a young man is twelve years old, much of his character is firmly fixed and can be seen to control his behaviour – and this seems more true with Jesus than with most.  So I thought about what I knew of him and how much I would trust him.

It was an enlightening experience.

I asked myself a series of questions.  I can’t remember them all, but these were some of them.

Is Jesus logical?  Yes.

Is Jesus sensible?  Yes.

Would Jesus try to fool us?  No.

Would Jesus do something wrong, something sinful?  No.

Would Jesus sneak away to do something he knew we wouldn’t like?  No.  I am certain that if he believed that he had to do something we wouldn’t like, he would still tell us.

Would Jesus tell lies?  Never.

After thinking for a few minutes and answering those questions and more, I realised that I trust Jesus as much as anyone I know, and much more than most people I know.  It was a very enlightening experience.  It was also very encouraging.

Yet it raised more questions too.  If Jesus was so good, trustworthy and reliable, how had we ended up in the situation we were in?  

I could only think of two real possibilities: injury (foul play?) and misunderstanding.  Either Jesus was too badly injured to act normally, or there’d been some kind of misunderstanding.

I’ve written this process down in a calm, methodical way, but there were moments when my worry erupted into anger and frustration.  With God’s help through prayer, though, I managed to bring them under control each time.

The injury possibility was easy enough to imagine, whether through an accident or foul play.  In some ways, I felt that this was the most likely explanation, because I couldn’t imagine any sort of misunderstanding that could place us in our current situation.

Was Jesus kind?  Yes.

Did Jesus often get confused or mixed up?  No.  He was always amazingly good at understanding what people meant, however poorly they might express themselves.  Brilliant, really.

So how could someone so kind and understanding have left us in such a worrying situation?

The only possible explanation I could think of was that something had happened or some idea had come up where Jesus’ very character would mean that he would expect us to understand something that we just couldn’t see.

Mary and I discussed this possibility for quite a while, but we couldn’t come up with any ideas except for the possibility that it was somehow to do with God being his father.

Beyond that, neither of us could come up with any idea of what basis there could be for a misunderstanding!

We couldn’t believe that Jesus could be dead – that wouldn’t fit with the prophecies he is meant to fulfil – but what if he was injured, lying somewhere in pain, in a place we couldn’t possibly know?  It was a horrible idea, and we decided that we should try to follow up the “misunderstanding” path first.  To that end, we both agreed that we should go to the temple first thing in the morning and see if we could find any news of him.

Was God guiding us in making this decision?

We couldn’t tell, but we did hurry to the temple as early as we could.  After hours spent in prayer, we were full of hope that at last we would find our missing son.

We climbed the stairs to the outer courts of the temple and looked around eagerly.  No Jesus.

What should we do next?  Guards stood at the entrance to the inner courts, so we went to ask them if they had seen Jesus.  As we described him to them, they grew quite animated.

“Twelve years old, you say?” asked the first, looking thoughtful.

“That would be about right,” said the second.

“You see,” said the first, pointing, “we heard about an amazing young lad who was over there in the colonnades all day yesterday.”

“I haven’t seen him yet today though,” said the second.  “I don’t think that the teachers of the Law have arrived yet to start their classes, but….  No… wait… I think I see them in the corner there.  They aren’t normally here this early in the morning – maybe they’re excited about that lad.  They said he had an amazing knowledge of the scriptures for one so young.”

“Look,” said the first, pointing again, “if you go over there, you’ll see the teachers, and maybe that lad will be with them.  Do you think that could be your son?”

We agreed that it could be – in fact, probably was – him, and hurried over to the colonnades where the guard had pointed.

As we approached, Mary gave a sudden cry – she had recognised Jesus sitting among the teachers.  Jesus heard her cry and turned and looked at us.

 

 

That was the end of a terrible time for us.

We were very pleased that it was all the result of a misunderstanding, but I still don’t really understand Jesus’ thoughts.

In some ways, it was very satisfying to find that our conclusions about Jesus were right: he would not have done any of the things that might have caused him to become a “lost child”.  Our assessment of his character proved right, we just didn’t take it quite far enough – if we had, we would have known where he would be without having to wonder or search.  That’s what Jesus says, and, given where he was and what he was doing, we can’t deny it.

People think differently from each other, there’s no doubt about that.  Two people faced with the same question or problem can come up with two completely different answers or solutions.  Sometimes the differences are between wrong and right, good and bad, or happy and sad, but none of these measures are as simple as either one or the other.  All of our differences as humans are spread along a continuum.  There’s not only good and bad, there’s also very good and very bad – and then there’s all sorts of shades of very good and very bad as well.

Mary is a very righteous woman, and her ideas, thoughts, imagination, feelings and reactions are all based on that character.  She also knows Jesus better than anyone else, yet not even she can think in a way that would have equipped her to find Jesus easily when we lost him.  And, sadly, my ways of thinking didn’t equip me to find him either.

Jesus is different, even though he is only twelve years old.  He already thinks with a godliness that separates him from everyone else, even his mother.

So we have a lot to think about and a lot to learn from this scary episode.  We already understood that Jesus was special, but now we’ve been shown that his special-ness is growing with each passing year.

Where will it all lead?