Luke 2:39-52 And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth.… The Man in germ, the personality in the making, we see but once, yet the once is almost enough. The Child has come with His parents to Jerusalem. The city, the solemnities, the Temple, the priests, the sacrifices, the people, have stirred multitudinous new thoughts in the Boy. tie becomes for a moment forgetful of His kin, conscious of higher and Diviner relations, and seeks light and sympathy where they were most likely to he found — in the Temple and with the doctors. It is an eminently natural and truthful incident. The Ideal Child, wise in His innocent simplicity, seeks the society of simple but learned age, feels at home in it, wonders only, when sought and found, that it could be in His mother's mind other than it was in His own. The light that streams from the question, "Wist ye not that I must be among My Father's matters," in His house, in search of His truth, mindful of His purposes? illumines the Youth and makes Him foreshadow the Man. For He, who as Boy, was anxious to be absorbed in His Father and His Father's affairs, became as Man the conscious abode of God. Here, indeed, emerges the sublimest and most distinctive feature of His personality. In Him, as in no other, God lived; He lived as no other ever did in God. Their communion was a union which authorized the sayings, "I and the Father are one"; "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." His consciousness was full of God, was consciousness of God. (Principal Fairbairn, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. |
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