Fulfilling Our Ministry Call

Saturday of the 9th week in Course 2024

There are only a few precious stories in Scripture about the childhood of Christ, mostly like this one in Luke’s Gospel. We know that Joseph and his family were devout Jews, even going up annually to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. It’s important to know how much this celebration of liberation of the Jewish people impressed Jesus, along with all the other parts of their tradition, because it surely helped form the mind and heart of Jesus. Remember that He liberated us from our sins at Passover time two decades later by His suffering, death and Resurrection. Here we see Jesus sitting in His Father’s house, the Temple rebuilt by Herod, the tyrant who had tried to have Jesus killed a decade earlier, but martyred a bunch of innocent babies and toddlers of Bethlehem instead. Jesus was learning from the scholars of the Law, but He was teaching them, too. We would see that come out in His ministry, asking and answering the scholars’ questions, but as a teacher, not a pupil.

Now Jesus, Mary and Joseph had clearly not communicated perfectly during the festival, so the son stayed behind, probably thinking that His parents knew where He was. Mary and Joseph were in the caravan instead, and were probably halfway to the Jordan when they realized Jesus was not with the group. They hastened back to the Holy City and after a heartbreaking three days, finally thought to look in the Temple.

Mary fussed at Jesus, but didn’t show any lack of trust in Him. He explained that the natural place to find Jesus would be in His Father’s house, doing what any pubescent Jewish male should have longed to do—trying to discern the Word of God for Him—He who actually was the Word of God. But as He left the Temple, He knew that God’s plan for Him and His human parents was to grow in wisdom and grace, and to be obedient to them as He was to His heavenly Father.

Whenever Jesus and Mary and Joseph visited the Temple, they would hear the Levitical choir singing psalms. Today’s is particularly important: “I will hope continually, and will praise thee yet more and more. My mouth will tell of thy righteous acts, of thy deeds of salvation all the day, for their number is past my knowledge. With the mighty deeds of the Lord GOD I will come, I will praise thy righteousness, thine alone. O God, from my youth thou hast taught me, and I still proclaim thy wondrous deeds.”

But the psalm fits even more appropriately with Paul’s words to his disciples, since it refers to the singer’s having gotten “old and gray” and lifts up a prayer that God will remember him and act in his behalf. Here we see Timothy in a Roman prison, still allowed to write but no longer to preach. He tells his old friend and disciple, bishop Timothy of Ephesus, to continue Paul’s ministry fearlessly, despite resistance inside and outside the Church. “be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry.”

These are words all of us disciples and leaders in the 21st century need to bear in mind at all times. We are all evangelists, aren’t we? And we are all threatened by resistance. But our call is lifelong, and our promised grace is guaranteed to be enough for us, to the eternal praise of the Father.