LET’S FACE IT: anxious parents sometimes say stupid things. I still remember something my mother once said to me when I was a teenager. We lived in a split-level house on the side of a hill. To make enough room, the builders had to excavate part of the hill and erect a high cement retaining wall to hold it back. That was the view through the back windows of the house: a cement wall. Not very inspiring.

Every so often, we had to do some yardwork on the part of the property above the wall. I had to climb to get up there, and a misstep would mean falling about ten or twelve feet to the cement pavement below. Mom, naturally, wanted to caution me to be careful. That’s understandable; I would have done the same in her place. But how it came out was, “If you fall off the wall, I’ll kill you.” I don’t think she was trying to be funny, and I knew she meant well. I remember being a bit amused by the irony.

Let’s go back then to a frantic Joseph and Mary, looking for Jesus. It’s now the third day since he went missing. The journey back to Jerusalem to look for him must have felt agonizingly long; I imagine Mary fretting the entire way, various doomsday scenarios playing out in her head.

Again, Luke doesn’t tell us how long or where the parents looked before they finally found the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple courts, having a nice little intellectual exchange with the teachers there. Here’s how Luke describes their reaction:

When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” (Luke 2:48, NIV)

The word “astonished” is used thirteen times in the New Testament; all but one of those are found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It suggests someone who is dumbfounded with amazement, gaping in astonishment. Typically, it refers to the response of people to the teaching of Jesus. Indeed, using a different word, Luke has already told us that the people who heard the boy conversing with the teachers were “amazed” at what he said. Now, it was his parents’ turn to be amazed.

We don’t learn a lot about Joseph and Mary in the gospels, but on the basis of what we do have, I don’t take them for people who would have gone charging into a meeting of esteemed teachers, even if was to retrieve their wayward son. They would probably have hung back, listening and observing, having the opportunity to see what others saw. I imagine them glancing at each other every so often, as if to say, “Did you know he could do this?”

But at some point, the meeting broke up. It’s Mary who speaks first. “Why have you treated us like this?” she asks, as if Jesus had upset them intentionally. “Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” But the word “anxiously” doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the emotion suggested by the Greek. The word is only used four times in the New Testament, and only by Luke. He uses it twice in Luke 16 to refer to a rich man suffering the torment of the fires of hell, and once in Acts 20 to refer to the intense grief the Ephesians experienced when they said goodbye to the apostle Paul, knowing they would never see him again.

Thus, I imagine Mary taking Jesus by the shoulders, looking him in the eye, and saying with a mixture of anger and relief, “Don’t you know we’ve been worried sick looking for you?”

The boy’s response is classic:

“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them. (vss. 49-50)

These are Jesus’ first words in the gospel of Luke; indeed, since Luke is the only gospel to have a story from Jesus’ childhood, they’re his first recorded words, period. In the face of his mother’s emotionality, Jesus cocks his head in curiosity or confusion. “Why?” he asks. “Why were you searching for me?” The question is a bit ambiguous and can be taken in different ways. But I don’t think he’s questioning why parents would look for their child. He’s asking why they needed to mount a search. Didn’t they already know exactly where he would be, in his Father’s house? Why bother to look anywhere else?

It’s an honest question, not a criticism. They’ve raised him in an environment of piety and devotion. His identity has been revealed to them miraculously and multiple times. So, surely, they knew? Surely, they understood that his first and foremost loyalty belonged to his heavenly Father rather than his earthly parents?

But no, Luke says, they did not understand. That doesn’t have to mean they understood nothing, only that they didn’t understand everything. They had acted as any caring parent might, in a culture in which honoring one’s parents was a fundamental commandment. They were still learning what it meant for Jesus to be not only their son, but the Son of God.

And yet, Jesus submitted to their authority as his parents:

Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. (vss. 51-52)

They went home to Nazareth, and all was well. But Mary, as was her habit, privately pondered everything that had happened. She had been the one to confront Jesus in the temple, speaking for both herself and Joseph. Indeed, nowhere in his gospel does Luke record Joseph saying anything, and at this point, he disappears from the narrative.

Because Jesus, from the cross, asks the beloved disciple to care for his mother (John 19:25-27), Joseph at that point must already have been dead. Some believe he may even have died before Jesus began his public ministry, since Joseph doesn’t come into any story of Jesus’ adult life, not even the wedding at Cana, where only Mary is mentioned (John 2:1-12). We know nothing of the father-son relationship between Joseph and Jesus.

But Luke is already setting us up to wonder the same thing Mary did. We can see in the boy something of the man Jesus will become. What will it mean for him to be the Son of God?