06 About His Father's Business

VI ABOUT HIS FATHER’S BUSINESS

Luke 2:49 The forty-ninth verse of the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel should be printed in letters of gold a finger deep. For that absolutely priceless verse has preserved to us the very first words that ever fell from the youthful lips of our Lord. He speaks only once till He is thirty years old, and this rich text tells us what He said. And our Lord’s first recorded words are words of an immense significance and an immense importance. Among many other things these first recorded words of our Lord tell us that it was on the occasion of His first Passover that the Holy Child first began to realize Who He was and on what errand He had been sent into this world. I may be quite wrong in my interpretation of these weighty first words of our youthful Lord; but to my mind it is the next thing to a certainty that God first began to reveal His Son in the Holy Child during the preparation, and the self-examination, and the attainments, and the enjoyments, connected with His first Passover. The Holy Child came up to Jerusalem the son of Joseph and Mary; He went down to Nazareth the Son of God. Not that His whole Messiahship was wholly and down to the bottom revealed to Him during those seven Passover days. And much less His whole Divine Sonship. For it took every hour of another eighteen years to make perfect to Him the tremendous revelation of His whole Divine Sonship. His Divine and Eternal Sonship was such a tremendous revelation that it was not completely and for ever apprehended by our incarnate Lord till the Holy Ghost was poured out without measure upon Him eighteen years after this on the occasion of His baptism at the Jordan. At the same time, as I believe, His Father began that tremendous revelation in the Holy Child when He was deep among the ordinances and the experiences of His first Passover-week in Jerusalem.

"Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. And He said unto them, How is it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?" There was both sorrow and anger in His mother’s reproof, and there was both pain and shame in her Son’s reply. He was both pained and ashamed that His mother should say such things to Him in such a place and at such a season, and He did not seek to hide the shame and the pain that He felt. It was something not unlike this among yourselves. Suppose your eldest son come to years of discretion and become a young communicant. And suppose him wholly taken up with the occupations and the experiences of his first communion. And suppose on your missing him from home you went to seek for him in a football field, or at a bicycle tournament, or at some military display, or in some non-churchgoing friend’s house, during the hours of the preparatory or thanksgiving services. And not finding him in any of those places you came and broke out on him at the Church door--what shame and what pain he could not fail to feel. That you, his mother, and a communicant yourself, should so misunderstand and should so reprehend your young communicant son. It had not been the first time that His mother had so wounded the Holy Child with her want of understanding and sympathy, and it would not be the last time. But there was something specially painful to her son in this present outbreak of His mother at such a time and in such a place. As soon as Moses’ law would let them, Joseph and Mary cut the communion season short, and set out for home as fast as they could. But their Son, happy as He was at home, had during that Passover-week discovered another home in which He was happier still, and which He could not bring Himself easily to leave. He felt as if He could dwell in His Father’s House in Jerusalem all the days of His life. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God. For a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand.

"About My Father’s business," He said, dwelling on the word. And no wonder. For there had never been, and there never would be, another business of His Father’s at all to compare with this business on which He now begins to be engaged. First and last, the Son of God will have His hand in many great businesses of His Father’s, but there will never be another business like this. As the divine and eternal Son of His Father He had carried through many great undertakings already; and both on earth and in heaven He will carry through many more. But this present undertaking on which He is just entering is by far the greatest and grandest business of them all. Almighty, and full of all manner of resources, as the Son of God always was, He could not attempt this present business till He was first made flesh. No nor till He was first made sin. All the other businesses He had performed for His Father had cost Him nothing, but this new business burdened Him, and humbled Him, and straitened Him, and gave Him no rest, till it was accomplished. One here, and one there, up and down this house, will have some idea of what that business was, and what it would cost the Son of God to carry it through. Yes; you are right; it was your sin that was His Father’s terrible business with His Son. It is my sinfulness that gives me the right key into this text to-night, and it is your sinfulness that enables you to understand what I am trying to say. He might have been found holidaying it up and down among His kinsfolk and acquaintance all that week, like the rest, had it not been for your sinfulness and mine. You are to be congratulated indeed on your great sinfulness. The simple truth is, Joseph and Mary had not sinfulness enough, nor enough of the sense of sin to understand God’s present business with His Son. But you, by His grace, know better. You know what that business was that had brought Him into this world, and what had now brought Him up to that prophetical Passover. Beata Culpa! You may well make that exclamation over your great sinfulness, since it has brought you into step with the Son of God in His execution of His Father’s favorite business, and since it has given you such a share in that favorite and fruitful business of theirs. And then when that business of the Father’s and the Son’s and yours is finished, both in Him and in you, you will then be able to visit all your kinsfolk and all your acquaintance in the New Jerusalem at your holy leisure, and will have time to tell them what both the Father and the Son have done for your soul.

"Wist ye not?"—He said in His deep distress at the unreasonable behavior of Joseph and Mary that Passover-week. It was the utter and inexcusable unreasonableness of His mother’s behavior to Him that so hurt and so humbled Him. A little consideration would surely have directed her steps straight to the temple to seek for her son there, and there alone. And having found Him in the temple a very little consideration would surely have restrained her from the precipitate words with which she assailed Him. If she had taken a little time to think of it the utter unreasonableness of her conduct could not but have struck her and made her ashamed of herself. To take the very lowest ground, it was not reasonable to think that the youthful Christ should hurry away from the Passover ordinances at the earliest possible moment, and should spend His time gadding about up and down the city. It was but common sense, and sound reason, as well as ordinary piety, in Him to do as He had done. "The different magnitude of things is their reason to me," says William Law. And it was because His Father’s business was already beginning to be a matter of such immense magnitude to our Lord that He felt so acutely the unreasonableness and the injustice of His mother’s treatment of that business and of Him that day. And in all that He teaches us also that if our mere reason were only but sound; if we but gave our wholly sane minds to the different magnitudes of things, that of itself would secure the salvation of our souls. Reason itself, He as good as says here, would never let us wander from the way of our salvation, nor would let us stop short of our Father’s house, nor ever leave it. Only be reasonable men, He as good as says to us, and you will end in being saved men.

Both Joseph and Mary were speechless as soon as the Holy Child let them see how full of folly their conduct had been and how much they had misunderstood Him and hurt Him. They had treated Him as if He had taken the Passover much too seriously. They found fault with Him for His devotion to His Father’s business, and they uttered aloud their complaint and grievance with Him before the whole temple. They said it till the astonished doctors heard them, that He should have been home in Nazareth by this time, and back at His proper work. The lamb had been slain, they said, and its blood had been sprinkled on them and on Him for another year,--let Him come away home then, like all His kinsfolk and acquaintances. And if we will only look well we will see ourselves in all that as in a glass. For we are Joseph and Mary over again in all that. We also treat our Redeemer as if He had been religious overmuch in the dreadful business of our redemption. We treat Him and His redemption of our souls as if He had taken us and our sins far too much to heart. Almost as if He had been a martyr by mistake. They did Him the first wrong that week to suppose that He was in that home-hurrying company; and then they still more wronged and wounded Him by the places in which they sought Him; but above all, by their not seeking Him first in His Father’s house and about His Father’s business. And many of you are wounding your Redeemer and your Judge in the very same way every day. Yes: every day; for every day He is about His Father’s business with you. And if He is,--how do you think does your way of spending your days look to Him? Either He is beside Himself or you are. Either He has thrown Himself away or you are doing so. Either His bloodshedding for your sin is all a misunderstanding and a mistake on His part, or you are making the most tremendous mistake that ever a .madman made. I tell you to your face that you are wounding your Redeemer in His tenderest, part, for you are treating His sin-atoning blood as if it were a much overdone thing, and a thing that nowadays you as good as repudiate; it is a thing to explain away, and to advertise yourself out of all doctrinal and confessional and pulpit connection with it. Yes, I tell you, and with the most certain truth before it comes to pass, that one wounded and offended · and angry look of your Judge; one glance of the wrath of the Lamb at your present conduct, will freeze your very marrow on that day, and will make you curse the day that saw you born. "In that dread and awful day," prayed Andrewes day and night, "rescue and save me, and let me never see my Judge’s face overcast as He looks at me in His anger!"