The first temple of Israel, where sacrifice was offered according to the Law of Moses, was not in Jerusalem but at Shiloh, and the Ark of the Covenant rested there in a Meeting Tent like the one built by Moses and Aaron. And to that temple in Shiloh, Samuel was taken as a young boy by his mother Hannah and presented to the Lord as we read in today’s first lesson. Samuel was entrusted to the priest Eli to be raised and educated in the temple for the service of the Lord.
When Samuel was twelve, he was called by the Lord to be a prophet and was directed by God to anoint David as king, and then David’s son Solomon built the first Temple at Jerusalem. That Temple was despoiled by the Babylonians, but then it was restored after the return of the people from exile and became again the focus of religious life for all Jews.
The Temple at Jerusalem, however, was not merely the privileged place of sacrificial worship for the children of Israel; it was also the preeminent place to study and teach the Torah or the first five Books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
The word Torah means teaching, and providing well-educated teachers to transmit the Torah is why the Temple was home to a community of scholars whose task was to know the inspired texts intimately and to form the hearts and minds of their students to live in keeping with the dignity of the Covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Among the greatest scholars of the Torah ever to teach in the Temple was a rabbi named Hillel the Elder who was born in Babylon about a century before the birth of Christ, apparently in the line of King David through his mother, thus making Hillel a distant cousin of Joseph. Hillel spent the first 40 years of his life in Babylon, but then he moved to Jerusalem and spent the next 40 years studying the Torah.
That was also the time of Herod the Great’s massive construction project which transformed the Temple Mount into one of the architectural wonders of the ancient world, and Hillel moved from being a student to a teacher of the Torah just at the time the Temple and its surrounding buildings reached the zenith of their splendor.
Already an old man when he began to teach, Rabbi Hillel is said to have lived another 40 years and died at the age of 120. Hillel’s longevity, together with his wisdom and mastery of the Torah, made him a revered spiritual leader of the Jewish people at the time the Lord Jesus was born. Even to this day the Jewish campus ministry at many universities is named for Hillel, just as Catholic campus ministries are often named for Cardinal Newman.
In due course, Hillel’s son and grandson also became teachers on the Temple Mount, and Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel was the rabbi who taught the young Saul of Tarsus when he arrived in Jerusalem as a school boy, sent to the Temple by his parents to immerse himself in the study of the Torah, not unlike Samuel in the day of Eli.
I begin with this background today because it is entirely possible that both Rabbi Hillel and his grandson Rabbi Gamaliel were in the Temple during the Passover feast when the boy Jesus lingered in Jerusalem after his parents left the Holy City to return to Nazareth.
We can imagine the scene: a large caravan of families and friends traveled each year from Nazareth to Jerusalem for Passover, and the children were often separated from their immediate families but remained safe within the secure traveling band of trusted kith and kin. And so during that annual pilgrimage the year Jesus was twelve, Joseph and Mary were a full day on the road home before they discovered that their son was not in the group.
They rushed back to Jerusalem, frantic with fear and searching through the city, and it took them three anxious days to find the boy, who had remained at the Temple among the Torah scholars. One more boy in that setting would not have been unusual because of the great community of teachers and students who were always there, but this boy was singular.
Saint Luke tells us that after three days of searching, Joseph and Mary found Jesus “in the Temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.”
Just imagine what those three days were like, both for the Word made flesh and for the respected teachers of the Torah. We will not know until we stand at the Throne of Grace whether Hillel and Gamaliel were in fact there in the Temple during those three days of grace when the Author of the Law sat with the teachers of the Law, but I certainly hope they were there when the Messiah came as a precocious boy of twelve to the House of God.
In any case, when Joseph and Mary finally found Jesus in the Temple, his mother scolded him “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.”
And so might any parent speak to a child who, apparently without thinking, has caused them needless fear. But Jesus was not any child, and his decision to remain in Jerusalem on that occasion seems to have been a teaching moment of his own. He said to Joseph and Mary “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
To the best of our knowledge, at this point in the life of Jesus, the only people on earth who knew his true identity were his mother, his adoptive father, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, her husband Zechariah, and their son John.
But even Joseph and Mary were not yet ready to comprehend everything entailed by Jesus being God the Son, and so Luke tells us that they did not understand what Jesus meant by saying that he must be in his Father’s house. His hour had not yet come. And so we read that Jesus “went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.”
Friends, the Son of God became the Son of Mary so that he could make it possible for every human person to become by the grace of adoption a child of God rather than simply a creature of God. He who is divine took our human nature so that all who are human could have a share in his divine nature. And that gift is ordinarily offered to us in the preaching of the Gospel and the celebration of the sacraments which unite us to the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ by grace through faith, hope, and love.
But that transformation which begins in the Church with justification and sanctification will not be complete until those gifts are crowned with glorification in the eternal Kingdom of God where the son of Mary and adopted son of Joseph reigns forever as the king of all creation, revealed in splendor as God the Son.
That is what Saint John the Beloved Disciple means in our second lesson today when he writes: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
That is the beatific vision of all the saints in glory, but what is our path from here to there? Saint John describes the Father’s eternal plan of salvation: “This is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.”
In Holy Baptism we are changed from children of wrath into children of God by the grace of adoption, when the Holy Spirit is poured into us with the gifts of faith, hope, and love, gifts which then open our hearts and minds to listen to the words of the Eternal Word made flesh, who even as a boy taught the teachers in the Temple and who as a man revealed the whole counsel of God by the passover mystery of his suffering, death, and Resurrection.
But just for now, just during these few precious days of Christmastide, we linger with the joy of his birth and the wonder of his hidden years at Nazareth. The blessed life of the Holy Family prepared the Son of Mary and the adopted Son of Joseph to be revealed to all the world when his hour finally arrived as both the Son of David and God the Son, the Light of the nations and the Savior of the world: the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 29 December 2024, the Feast of the Holy Family.
Fr Jay Scott Newman