The Epiphany of Christ's Childhood
Frederick Brooks. Luke 2:49 And he said to them, How is it that you sought me? knew you not that I must be about my Father's business? Christ is thoroughly a child, thoroughly a youth, thoroughly a man. In every stage of His life He is a representative of human life at that stage. He is not an unnatural child or boy; but He shows His Divine nature in the natural ways and forms of childhood. His humanity is perfect; not marvellously or strangely precocious. We may draw all the usual features of human child-life out of this story. I. Take first the ACTIVE DELIGHT IN A NEW EXPERIENCE, which so belongs to all children. Manhood loses it. Disappointment takes off the edge. It is Christ's first visit to Jerusalem, and He is sensitively and zestfully full of it. He is alive to all the surroundings of His country's capital and centre. Thus He is the champion of childhood, insisting that its natural features (such as inquisitiveness), must be met and gratified; showing that through them God was manifested in His life, that they are not wrong in themselves, that they may be channels of the Holy Spirit's action. Delight and liberty are the simple creed of childhood. It would save many a young life from future excess; it would keep in the family many a prodigal and wanderer, and early emigrant, if this feature of a true, full child were at once recognized; if parents would not only look for a child's trust and obedience, but also for his activity. II. IMPULSIVE TRUTHFULNESS TO SELF. Childhood never argues sophistically, contrary to the impulses of its nature, as a man delights to do often. "How is it...?" "How could I help going into My Father's temple and talking of Him and speaking for Him? It is the great impulse, and duty, and mission of My life. And I but obeyed it. Did you not know I would be here? How could you expect anything else?" Here was a perfect, holy nature, saying in its childhood "I must," and there was nothing more to be said in answer. III. FILIALNESS: sense of Fatherhood, and of a family. Remember every child has a heavenly as well as an earthly father and home. Besides the second commandment in our Lord's code there is the first. Religion is but a higher application of the principles of morality, the doing for God what you do for man; being filled with the sense of God's Fatherhood as with that of earthly parentage; carrying dutifulness from the home of one to the higher home of the other. I remember going through a cave of stalactite, hung with glistening pendants, and capable of wonderful reflections, but shut away from all sunlight and gleam of heaven's power. A simple torch won marvellous effects from those waiting walls. But it was a great longing all the while in one's mind. Oh for one stream of daylight through all this sleeping glory?! If earth, made light, will so lighten it, what would the light of heaven do? So one looks with regret on much of the sweetness of life: upon a filial son; upon a life whose earthly affection lights it up with gleams of bright beauty, but with none of heaven's light streaming through its filial devotion, to give it the supreme glory of a life of a son of God, delighting in being about the Father's business; flinging over it the life which you see in Christ, in this Epiphany of His childhood. (Frederick Brooks.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business? WEB: He said to them, "Why were you looking for me? Didn't you know that I must be in my Father's house?"