Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Boy Jesus

We don’t know much about Jesus’ childhood. We have the birth narrative, of course, and the story of his parents’ encounter with Simeon and Anna. But we only get one childhood event, from when he was a precocious 12 year-old impressing the scholars in the temple.

The boy Jesus has been fleshed out a bit thanks to recent scholarship on the “Jewishness” of Jesus. A recent twist in this trend has been an interesting discussion about whether it is more appropriate to refer to Jesus as a Jew or a Judean. Rob Bell’s artful teaching-sermons often focus on the Jewish background of the gospels. People eat this stuff up, because for most of their lives they have been served up a Jesus that is context-free, whose pious sayings seem to come out of nowhere. A Jesus without a context, without a childhood in which he learned, is a Jesus without personality. This kind of Jesus, I have argued, is unloveable.

Our culture celebrates and idolizes childhood. Thanks to Sigmund Freud and Charles Dickens, all our biographies of famous people start with their childhood. Who were their parents? What formative events shaped the course of their lives? How did they feel about their mothers? We talk about the inner child, the hierarchy of needs, how people learn to trust, to love, to dream and pursue their ambitions. But childhood in the first century was something else entirely. Children were incomplete persons. They were, some have argued, nobodies. This interpretation makes Jesus’ words about greatness and entering the Kingdom of Heaven more powerful. The disciples ask him who will be greatest in the Kingdom. He says we must become like a child not because children are trusting or innocent (both of which are debatable), but because they are not great. The nobodies are the greatest. When you read it this way, his saying is revolutionary. When you read it the normal way, it’s just sentimental glurge.

And it is at least partially because of this disregard for children, this belief that they should be seen and not heard, that we have almost nothing of Jesus’ childhood.

David Buttrick often said in class that Jesus was not born with a “magic Christian brain.” He did not fall from the sky with an omniscient mind in order to teach Christian doctrine. He was born, educated, and formed by his first-century Jewish context. It was likely while in Nazareth or Capernaum that he learned Hillel’s Golden Rule:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

Compare that to Jesus’ version from the Sermon on the Mount:

Do to others as you would have them do to you. For this is all the Law and the Prophets.

Christians are often surprised that Jesus did not invent the Golden Rule. We attribute more originality to him because of his special status as the God-Man. But no matter how Divine you believe Jesus was, he was fully human - he learned. He was taught. He absorbed the best teachings of his day.

To me, this image of Jesus not only as teacher, but as learner, is part of what makes him lovable. Even if you have a high Christology, even if you believe Jesus was Fully Divine, the Word of God made Flesh - he had to learn how to talk. He had to learn how to think. He would not have walked around as a four-year-old lecturing his parents without getting spanked for sassing back. He had to learn how to share. He had to learn in what contexts it was unacceptable to pick his nose or break wind. These are the things children have to learn. Nobody - not even God - gets to skip childhood.

Once I heard a little girl ask during a children’s sermon: was Jesus ever spanked? I think that question gets to the heart of a tough theological issue. How human was he? Fully human? Did he screw up? Did he get in trouble? Or was he such a sinless goody-two-shoes that he always upheld the status quo, never fought, never lied, and never hurt anyone else. In other words, was he so good that he never actually had to learn anything?

What is being human, if not learning? Growing? Changing? If Jesus did not experience those things, then can it truly be said that he was fully human?

Christians sense this issue underlying the spanking question. I’ve asked other preachers this question, and they hem and haw. “Well,” they say, “the Bible says he was sinless.” Yes, I reply, but that isn’t the question. The question is, did he get spanked?

I suspect that he did - especially after temple incident when he was 12. He ditched his parents to hang out in the temple for three days. When they found him, he said, “why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know I’d be in my father’s house?” Here in Alabama, we call that sassing back. After hunting frantically for three days, do you think his parents stood for that kind of back-talk? Now, I’ve always maintained that corporal punishment is not the best discipline, and I do not advocate spanking. But I’m guessing that, in their frenzied state, after hearing that kind of lip, Joseph and Mary took him out behind the woodshed. And when their arms grew tired, I bet they took turns.