People in love surrender themselves unhesitatingly. Their hearts beat in a wonderful unison, with a single love. What then will the Love of God be like?
To parent the Son of God was a tough task for Joseph and Mary. Parents would know that better. They had to go through stages of anxiety, panic and trauma in that process. One could argue that parenting a child involves all that—complications in pregnancy, life-threatening circumstances or illnesses affecting children, and the rebelliousness and mood fluctuations of adolescents and teenagers are all moments of anxiety, panic and frustration for any parent.
The gospel does not speak much about how Joseph and Mary went through these stages. It only tells us how Joseph followed the instructions he received in dreams. But, how they brought up the boy Jesus in a foreign land, what sort of education did they give him, and so forth, remain open for the readers’ speculations. The Gospel of Luke presents the instance of them going for the Passover festival in Jerusalem when Jesus was 12-years-old. Luke begins his narration of the story with an introduction: “Every year, the parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover” (Luke 2:41). That gives us a clue of the upbringing of Jesus.
To know the boy Jesus, how he reacted like any other adolescent, listen to his response to his mother! In today’s terms, we would call him a rebellious adolescent! Like any boy if his age, he may not have liked his parents always behind him… when he got a chance, slipped away from their attention. It was certainly not an accident, but a conscious act. That’s why he asks, “Why were you looking for me?” In effect he must have been retorting in the typical style of an adolescent who picks an argument with his or her mom!
The boy Jesus knows that mom and dad will return in search of him. Mary describes that they were “very worried while searching” for him. But, even as a boy, with his apparent defiant response, he gives supremacy to the Father’s will—which Jesus would later call not only his work but also his food.
It’s easy for us to look back and see the whole story, to proclaim it as gospel, but it might not have been easy for Mary and Joseph to be a part of it. We have the whole episode neatly compacted in a decade of the Rosary, and we can contemplate the mystery without any anxiety. But Joseph and Mary had to live it, without a prior knowledge of the outcome. They were compelled to find the Lord not by prophetic insight but by process of elimination. One place after another proved fruitless until they decided to go up to the Lord’s house. But most importantly, they went through this together with an awareness that they were part of the great plan of God.
The couple—Joseph and Mary— give us a valuable lesson: our lives unfold like that, without a ready-made timeline of events that we can follow. If we could see the end at the beginning and all the steps in between, although we might be shocked at the events of life, we might still have greater peace in knowing where God is taking us.
But, God does not want that for us. He wants us to follow in trust—and not just any kind of trust, but something on par with Mary and Joseph’s trust.
