'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?' And
they understood not the saying which he spake unto them.-Luke ii. 48-50.
WAS that his saying? Why did they not understand it? Do we understand
it? What did his saying mean? The Greek is not absolutely clear. Whether
the Syriac words he used were more precise, who in this world can tell?
But had we heard his very words, we too, with his father and mother, would
have failed to understand them. Must we fail still?
It will show at once where our initial difficulty lies, if I give the
latter half of the saying as presented in the revised English version:
its departure from the authorized reveals the point of obscurity:-'Wist
ye not that I must be in my father's house?' His parents had his exact
words, yet did not understand. We have not his exact words, and are in
doubt as to what the Greek translation of them means.
If the authorized translation be true to the intent of the Greek, and
therefore to that of the Syriac, how could his parents, knowing him as
they did from all that had been spoken before concerning him, from all
they had seen in him, from the ponderings in Mary's own heart, and from
the precious thoughts she and Joseph cherished concerning him, have failed
to understand him when he said that wherever he was, he must be about his
father's business? On the other hand, supposing them to know and feel that
he must be about his father's business, would that have been reason sufficient,
in view of the degree of spiritual development to which they had attained,
for the Lord's expecting them not to be anxious about him when they had
lost him? Thousands on thousands who trust God for their friends in things
spiritual, do not trust him for them in regard of their mere health or
material well-being. His parents knew how prophets had always been treated
in the land; or if they did not think in that direction, there were many
dangers to which a boy like him would seem exposed, to rouse an anxiety
that could be met only by a faith equal to saying, 'Whatever has happened
to him, death itself, it can be no evil to one who is about his father's
business;' and such a faith I think the Lord could not yet have expected
of them. That what the world counts misfortune might befall him on his
father's business, would have been recognized by him, I think, as reason
for their parental anxiety-so long as they had not learned God-that he
is what he is-the thing the Lord had come to teach his father's men and
women. His words seem rather to imply that there was no need to be anxious
about his personal safety. Fear of some accident to him seems to have been
the cause of their trouble; and he did not mean, I think, that they ought
not to mind if he died doing his father's will, but that he was in no danger
as regarded accident or misfortune. This will appear more plainly as we
proceed. So much for the authorized version.
Let us now take the translation given us by the Revisers:-'Wist ye not
that I must be in my father's house?'
Are they authorized in translating the Greek thus? I know no justification
for it, but am not learned enough to say they have none. That the Syriac
has it so, is of little weight; seeing it is no original Syriac, but re-translation.
If he did say 'my father's house,' could he have meant the temple and his
parents not have known what he meant? And why should he have taken it for
granted they would know, or judge that they ought to have known, that he
was there? So little did the temple suggest itself to them, that either
it was the last place in which they sought him, or they had been there
before, and had not found him. If he meant that they might have known this
without being told, why was it that, even when he set the thing before
them, they did not understand him? I do not believe he meant the temple;
I do not think he said or meant 'in my fathers house.'
What then makes those who give us this translation, prefer it to the
phrase in the authorized version, 'about my Father's business'?
One or other of two causes-most likely both together: an ecclesiastical
fancy, and the mere fact that he was found in the temple. A mind ecclesiastical
will presume the temple the fittest, therefore most likely place, for the
Son of God to betake himself to, but such a mind would not be the first
to reflect that the temple was a place where the Father was worshipped
neither in spirit nor in truth-a place built by one of the vilest rulers
of this world, less fit than many another spot for the special presence
of him of whom the prophet bears witness: 'Thus saith the high and lofty
One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and
holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive
the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.'
Jesus himself, with the same breath in which once he called it his father's
house, called it a den of thieves. His expulsion from it of the buyers
and sellers, was the first waft of the fan with which he was come to purge
his father's dominions. Nothing could ever cleanse that house; his fanning
rose to a tempest, and swept it out of his father's world.
For the second possible cause of the change from business to temple-the
mere fact that he was found in the temple, can hardly be a reason for his
expecting his parents to know that he was there; and if it witnessed to
some way of thought or habit of his with which they were acquainted, it
is, I repeat, difficult to see why the parents should fail to perceive
what the interpreters have found so easily. But the parents looked for
a larger meaning in the words of such a son-whose meaning at the same time
was too large for them to find.
When, according to the Greek, the Lord, on the occasion already alluded
to, says 'my father's house,' he says it plainly; he uses the word house:
here he does not.
Let us see what lies in the Greek to guide us to the thought in the
mind of the Lord when he thus reasoned with the apprehensions of his father
and mother. The Greek, taken literally, says, 'Wist ye not that I must
be in the ____ of my father?' The authorized version supplies business;
the revised, house. There is no noun in the Greek, and the article 'the'
is in the plural. To translate it as literally as it can be translated,
making of it an English sentence, the saying stands, 'Wist ye not that
I must be in the things of my father?' The plural article implies the English
things; and the question is then, What things does he mean? The word might
mean affairs or business; but why the plural article should be contracted
to mean house, I do not know. In a great wide sense, no doubt, the word
house might be used, as I am about to show, but surely not as meaning the
temple.
He was arguing for confidence in God on the part of his parents, not
for a knowledge of his whereabout. The same thing that made them anxious
concerning him, prevented them from understanding his words-lack, namely,
of faith in the Father. This, the one thing he came into the world to teach
men, those words were meant to teach his parents. They are spirit and life,
involving the one principle by which men shall live. They hold the same
core as his words to his disciples in the storm, 'Oh ye of little faith!'
Let us look more closely at them.
'Why did you look for me? Did you not know that I must be among my father's
things?' What are we to understand by 'my father's things'? The translation
given in the authorized version is, I think, as to the words themselves,
a thoroughly justifiable one: 'I must be about my father's business,' or
'my father's affairs'; I refuse it for no other reason than that it does
not fit the logic of the narrative, as does the word things, which besides
opens to us a door of large and joyous prospect. Of course he was about
his father's business, and they might know it and yet be anxious about
him, not having a perfect faith in that father. But, as I have said already,
it was not anxiety as to what might befall him because of doing the will
of the Father; he might well seem to them as yet too young for danger from
that source; it was but the vague perils of life beyond their sight that
appalled them; theirs was just the uneasiness that possesses every parent
whose child is missing; and if they, like him, had trusted in their father,
they would have known what their son now meant when he said that he was
in the midst of his father's things-namely, that the very things from which
they dreaded evil accident, were his own home-surroundings; that he was
not doing the Father's business in a foreign country, but in the Father's
own house. Understood as meaning the world, or the universe, the phrase,
'my father's house,' would be a better translation than the authorized;
understood as meaning the poor, miserable, God-forsaken temple-no more
the house of God than a dead body is the house of a man-it is immeasurably
inferior.
It seems to me, I say, that the Lord meant to remind them, or rather
to make them feel, for they had not yet learned the fact, that he was never
away from home, could not be lost, as they had thought him; that he was
in his father's house all the time, where no hurt could come to him. 'The
things' about him were the furniture and utensils of his home; he knew
them all and how to use them. 'I must be among my father's belongings.'
The world was his home because his father's house. He was not a stranger
who did not know his way about in it. He was no lost child, but with his
father all the time.
Here we find one main thing wherein the Lord differs from us: we are
not at home in this great universe, our father's house. We ought to be,
and one day we shall be, but we are not yet. This reveals Jesus more than
man, by revealing him more man than we. We are not complete men, we are
not anything near it, and are therefore out of harmony, more or less, with
everything in the house of our birth and habitation. Always struggling
to make our home in the world, we have not yet succeeded. We are not at
home in it, because we are not at home with the lord of the house, the
father of the family, not one with our elder brother who is his right hand.
It is only the son, the daughter, that abideth ever in the house. When
we are true children, if not the world, then the universe will be our home,
felt and known as such, the house we are satisfied with, and would not
change. Hence, until then, the hard struggle, the constant strife we hold
with Nature-as we call the things of our father; a strife invaluable for
our development, at the same time manifesting us not yet men enough to
be lords of the house built for us to live in. We cannot govern or command
in it as did the Lord, because we are not at one with his father, therefore
neither in harmony with his things, nor rulers over them. Our best power
in regard to them is but to find out wonderful facts concerning them and
their relations, and turn these facts to our uses on systems of our own.
For we discover what we seem to discover, by working inward from without,
while he works outward from within; and we shall never understand the world,
until we see it in the direction in which he works making it-namely from
within outward. This of course we cannot do until we are one with him.
In the meantime, so much are both we and his things his, that we can err
concerning them only as he has made it possible for us to err; we can wander
only in the direction of the truth-if but to find that we can find nothing.
Think for a moment how Jesus was at home among the things of his father.
It seems to me, I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his words-that the
temple was the place where naturally he was at home. Does he make the least
lamentation over the temple? It is Jerusalem he weeps over-the men of Jerusalem,
the killers, the stoners. What was his place of prayer? Not the temple,
but the mountain-top. Where does he find symbols whereby to speak of what
goes on in the mind and before the face of his father in heaven? Not in
the temple; not in its rites; not on its altars; not in its holy of holies;
he finds them in the world and its lovely-lowly facts; on the roadside,
in the field, in the vineyard, in the garden, in the house; in the family,
and the commonest of its affairs-the lighting of the lamp, the leavening
of the meal, the neighbour's borrowing, the losing of the coin, the straying
of the sheep. Even in the unlovely facts also of the world which he turns
to holy use, such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the faithless
labourers, he ignores the temple. See how he drives the devils from the
souls and bodies of men, as we the wolves from our sheepfolds! how before
him the diseases, scaly and spotted, hurry and flee! The world has for
him no chamber of terror. He walks to the door of the sepulchre, the sealed
cellar of his father's house, and calls forth its four days dead. He rebukes
the mourners, he stays the funeral, and gives back the departed children
to their parents' arms. The roughest of its servants do not make him wince;
none of them are so arrogant as to disobey his word; he falls asleep in
the midst of the storm that threatens to swallow his boat. Hear how, on
that same occasion, he rebukes his disciples! The children to tremble at
a gust of wind in the house! God's little ones afraid of a storm! Hear
him tell the watery floor to be still, and no longer toss his brothers!
see the watery floor obey him and grow still! See how the wandering creatures
under it come at his call! See him leave his mountain-closet, and go walking
over its heaving surface to the help of his men of little faith! See how
the world's water turns to wine! how its bread grows more bread at his
word! See how he goes from the house for a while, and returning with fresh
power, takes what shape he pleases, walks through its closed doors, and
goes up and down its invisible stairs!
All his life he was among his father's things, either in heaven or in
the world-not then only when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem.
He is still among his father's things, everywhere about in the world, everywhere
throughout the wide universe. Whatever he laid aside to come to us, to
whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped his regal head, he dealt
with the things about him in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear
they were not strange to him, but the things of his father. He claimed
none of them as his own, would not have had one of them his except through
his father. Only as his father's could he enjoy them;-only as coming forth
from the Father, and full of the Father's thought and nature, had they
to him any existence. That the things were his fathers, made them precious
things to him. He had no care for having, as men count having. All his
having was in the Father. I wonder if he ever put anything in his pocket:
I doubt if he had one. Did he ever say, 'This is mine, not yours'? Did
he not say, 'All things are mine, therefore they are yours'? Oh for his
liberty among the things of the Father! Only by knowing them the things
of our Father, can we escape enslaving ourselves to them. Through the false,
the infernal idea of having, of possessing them, we make them our tyrants,
make the relation between them and us an evil thing. The world was a blessed
place to Jesus, because everything in it was his father's. What pain must
it not have been to him, to see his brothers so vilely misuse the Father's
house by grasping, each for himself, at the family things! If the knowledge
that a spot in the landscape retains in it some pollution, suffices to
disturb our pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been with him,
how must it not be with him now, in regard to the disfigurements and defilements
caused by the greed of men, by their haste to be rich, in his father's
lovely house!
Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or Henry Vaughan, when either
speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood, will be able to imagine
a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, regard the world.
Hear what Wordsworth says:-
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Hear what Henry Vaughan says:-
Happy those early dayes, when I
Shin'd in my angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestiall thought;
When yet I had not walkt above
A mile or two, from my first love,
And looking back-at that short space-
Could see a glimpse of His bright-face;
When on some gilded cloud, or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinfull sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence,
But felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
O how I long to travell back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine,
Where first I left my glorious traine;
From whence th' inlightned spirit sees
That shady City of palme trees.
Whoever has thus gazed on flower or cloud; whoever can recall poorest memory
of the trail of glory that hung about his childhood, must have some faint
idea how his father's house and the things in it always looked, and must
still look to the Lord. With him there is no fading into the light of common
day. He has never lost his childhood, the very essence of childhood being
nearness to the Father and the outgoing of his creative love; whence, with
that insight of his eternal childhood of which the insight of the little
ones here is a fainter repetition, he must see everything as the Father
means it. The child sees things as the Father means him to see them, as
he thought of them when he uttered them. For God is not only the father
of the child, but of the childhood that constitutes him a child, therefore
the childness is of the divine nature. The child may not indeed be capable
of looking into the father's method, but he can in a measure understand
his work, has therefore free entrance to his study and workshop both, and
is welcome to find out what he can, with fullest liberty to ask him questions.
There are men too, who, at their best, see, in their lower measure, things
as they are-as God sees them always. Jesus saw things just as his father
saw them in his creative imagination, when willing them out to the eyes
of his children. But if he could always see the things of his father even
as some men and more children see them at times, he might well feel almost
at home among them. He could not cease to admire, cease to love them. I
say love, because the life in them, the presence of the creative one, would
ever be plain to him. In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder
at things essentially wonderful because essentially divine? To cease to
wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace-the
most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home
among things that are not wonderful to us.
Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them-and as one
day we must always see them, only far better-should we ever know dullness?
Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might learn through
the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for deliverance
from ennui, from any haunting discomfort? Should we not just open our own
child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be consoled?
Jesus, then, would have his parents understand that he was in his father's
world among his father's things, where was nothing to hurt him; he knew
them all, was in the secret of them all, could use and order them as did
his father. To this same I think all we humans are destined to rise. Though
so many of us now are ignorant what kind of home we need, what a home we
are capable of having, we too shall inherit the earth with the Son eternal,
doing with it as we would-willing with the will of the Father. To such
a home as we now inhabit, only perfected, and perfectly beheld, we are
travelling-never to reach it save by the obedience that makes us the children,
therefore the heirs of God. And, thank God! there the father does not die
that the children may inherit; for, bliss of heaven! we inherit with the
Father.
All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests, and the learned in the
traditional law, whom his parents had not yet begun to fear on his behalf.
They feared the dangers of the rugged way, the thieves and robbers of the
hill-road. For the scribes and the pharisees, the priests and the rulers-they
would be the first to acknowledge their Messiah, their king! Little they
imagined, when they found him where he ought to have been safest had it
been indeed his father's house, that there he sat amid lions-the great
doctors of the temple! He could rule all the things in his father's house,
but not the men of religion, the men of the temple, who called his father
their Father. True, he might have compelled them with a word, withered
them by a glance, with a finger-touch made them grovel at his feet; but
such supremacy over his brothers the Lord of life despised. He must rule
them as his father ruled himself; he would have them know themselves of
the same family with himself; have them at home among the things of God,
caring for the things he cared for, loving and hating as he and his father
loved and hated, ruling themselves by the essential laws of being. Because
they would not be such, he let them do to him as they would, that he might
get at their hearts by some unknown unguarded door in their diviner part.
'I will be God among you; I will be myself to you.-You will not have me?
Then do to me as you will. The created shall have power over him through
whom they were created, that they may be compelled to know him and his
father. They shall look on him whom they have pierced.'
His parents found him in the temple; they never really found him until
he entered the true temple-their own adoring hearts. The temple that knows
not its builder, is no temple; in it dwells no divinity. But at length
he comes to his own, and his own receive him;-comes to them in the might
of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted,
to preach deliverance, and sight, and liberty, and the Lord's own good
time.
