Lost in the Big City

When Jesus was very small, Mary and Joseph had carried him down the road to Egypt in the dark, running from a cruel king. Now he was twelve and walking on his own two feet, uphill from Nazareth to Jerusalem, for the feast of Passover.

They went every year, with aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and donkeys loaded with bread and blankets. (Picture a school trip with no bus, no name tags, and no one counting heads, walking for days.)

Jerusalem at Passover was packed and loud. Families squeezed through the streets, lambs bleated in the temple courts, and smoke from the altar rose over the rooftops. For the whole feast they ate together and remembered the night God brought his people out of Egypt.

Then the feast was over, and the Nazareth crowd started home. But Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, and his parents did not know it.

Mary and Joseph walked all day without a worry. Surely Jesus was up ahead with his cousins.

That evening the travelers stopped to camp, and Mary went from fire to fire.

"Is Jesus with you?"

"Not with us. We thought he was with you!"

Joseph's face went pale. At first light they were hurrying back up the road to Jerusalem.

They searched the market where the bakers shouted and the narrow streets where they had stayed. "Have you seen a boy, about this tall?" One day went by, then another, then another.

After three days, they climbed the steps into the temple courts, and there he was.

Jesus was sitting among the teachers of God's law, gray-bearded men who had studied the Scriptures all their lives. He was listening to them and asking them questions. His answers made them look at each other with their eyebrows up. Everyone who heard him was amazed at how much he understood.

(It was the one place in Jerusalem his parents had not thought to look first.)

Mary had three nights of worry inside her. "Son, why have you treated us like this?" she said. "Your father and I have been searching for you everywhere, and we were frightened!"

Jesus looked up. "Why were you searching for me?" he asked. "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?"

Mary said "your father," and she meant Joseph. Jesus said "my Father," and he meant God.

Mary and Joseph did not understand what he meant. But Jesus got up and went home with them to Nazareth, and he obeyed them there. The Son of God carried water, swept up sawdust in Joseph's workshop, and came when his mother called. Mary kept all these things in her heart.

And Jesus grew taller and wiser, and God and people loved him more and more.

Twelve years old, and he already knew whose Son he was. His mother would need a long time to understand it.

When Jesus was grown, he climbed that road to Passover again. At his last Passover he went up knowing he would not walk home. Outside the city wall he was nailed to a cross. "Father," he prayed, "into your hands I put my spirit." He died, and his friends laid him in a tomb.

Then came another search. On the third day, women who loved him went looking for his body. The stone was rolled away, and two men in shining clothes asked them a question that sounded like the one in the temple: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

Jesus was alive. Before he died, he had promised his friends that he was going on ahead to make a place for each of them in his Father's house.