Have you ever considered what we don’t know about Jesus? Or, to phrase the question differently, have you ever considered what isn’t in the Gospels? What we don’t know about Jesus is quite surprising when you think about it. We aren’t told what he looks like. We aren’t told how his “father” died. We aren’t told where he went to school, if he was well-liked as a boy, if he had friends, or what his favorite food was. We’re told almost nothing about the first 30 years of Jesus’ life except for two different stories about his birth and this one story about Jesus as a twelve-year-old boy in the Jerusalem Temple. 

It probably should not surprise us then that legends grew up about the child Jesus. One of the more famous collections of these legends is known at the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. To be clear from the outset, there is no historical basis for these non-canonical legends, but in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the infant Jesus breathe life into birds fashioned from clay, curses two boys and kills them, strikes the parents of one of the boys blind, reverses the deaths and the blindness, resurrects a friend who fell from a roof, heals a man who chopped off his own foot with an ax, carries water on a cloth, produces a feast from a single grain, stretches a wood beam to help his father finish making a bed, heals his brother James from snake poison, resurrects another child, and finally resurrects an older man who had died while working construction. Between all these miracles are failed attempts to teach the child Jesus, and the story culminates in our reading this morning with Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple teaching the elders and teachers of the people as he expounds the law and the prophets. 

It is works like this that tell us that from very early on people were interested in stories about the early life of Jesus, which makes it all surprising that for all four of the canonical Gospels the story of Jesus’ life really begins when Jesus is about thirty years old and is baptized by John the Baptist. John start’s with Jesus’ preexistence and then moves right to John the Baptist. Luke and Matthew tell stories about his birth, and Luke tells the story in this morning’s reading, and then both move directly to John the Baptist, and Mark skips over Jesus’ birth entirely and begins his Gospel with John. And all of this information leads me to ask the question, considering that no canonical Gospel tells a single story about Jesus between his birth and the events with John the Baptism other than this story, why does Luke include this incident with Jesus, his parents, and the Jerusalem Temple?

One answer could be that Luke got this story directly from Mary. Scholars have noted for a long time that Luke has a unique expression about Mary treasuring things in her heart, and it’s been argued that this is because Luke is getting some information directly from Mary or a source directly connected to Mary. But that still doesn’t explain why Luke only includes this story. What is it about this story, amongst all the others that Luke could have included, and surely there were many, that made it worthy of inclusion in his Gospel?

First, you may have noticed that I described this story as the “incident with Jesus, his parents, and the Jerusalem Temple” a moment ago. In Luke’s Gospel, the Temple is not just a place but is rather more like a character in the story. We’ve already been to the Temple in Luke’s Gospel, and the Temple will repeatedly appear throughout the narrative. Given Luke’s emphasis on the Temple, it’s not surprising that he might want to include a story of a young Jesus in the Temple, especially considering what Jesus says about the Temple. When Mary and Joseph find Jesus, he says, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49).

In this story, from a very early age, we see not only that Jesus understands his ministry is going to involve the Jerusalem Temple, as Luke repeated