In a previous article on Jesus’ student-teacher relationship with John the Baptist, we mentioned that there is so much that can be learned about education from Jesus’ example. The mystery of the incarnation is packed with significance for the process of learning, human maturation and discipleship. As it says in Hebrews,
“Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.” (Heb 5:8-9 ESV)
The idea that Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered” includes the cross as the culminating event, but it also consists in his whole life from cradle to grave. The author of Hebrews argues at length for Jesus’ role as high priest, and this too implies that Christ’s humanity necessarily includes the common human experiences of learning, growth and development.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t have much of a record of Jesus’ childhood, because that would no doubt be a gold mine for reflection on educational ideals. What insights we could mine on the ideal learner by studying Jesus’ boyhood! Of course, to talk of fortune is silly when we know that God providentially preserved for us exactly the information he wanted us to know about Jesus’ early years. And therefore we have all the more reason to mine the one significant passage on his boyhood, and that is the story from Luke of the boy Jesus being left behind in Jerusalem at twelve years old.
Borrowing from Hebrews’ identification of Jesus as our great high priest, we’ll unpack the passage by focusing on Jesus’ priestly learning, his priestly lineage and his priestly humility, before stepping back at what Jesus’s example as the ideal learner can teach us about education generally.
The Ideal Learner Left Behind in the Temple
41 Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. 42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. 43 And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, 44 but supposing him to be in the group they went a day’s journey, but then they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances, 45 and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” 49 And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” 50 And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them. 51 And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart. 52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.
Luke 2:41-52, ESV
Luke, the writer of this Gospel narrative, sets the scene for us well. It’s a classic case of lost child. I’m sure many parents have similar stories of losing or almost losing track of a child in a busy place. My mother tells the story of almost losing my brother in a crowded airport. I have some friends who often tell the story of leaving one child of several behind at a gas station in the midst of a long journey for a few minutes before doubling back to get him. There are few experiences more frightening or dismaying for a parent.
Some indications from the beginning of this Gospel suggest that Luke has had a chance to interview Mary, late in her life, after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Can you imagine what it would have been like to sit down with Mary, Jesus’ mother, and hear her tell story after story about his early life? Of those stories that could have been told, this one made it in the Gospels because of its significance in pointing to Jesus’ identity and self-awareness as God’s son.
Jesus, along with his mother and father, had joined a group of Jewish pilgrims every year travelling from Nazareth up to Jerusalem. And this was such a commonplace yearly occurrence for them, amongst the jostling crowds, with a set of fellow Nazarenes in all likelihood, that when all the rites had been fulfilled for the festival of Passover and it came time to head home, Joseph and Mary thought nothing of it as they all departed with the group. As Luke tells it, they simply assumed that Jesus was with their relatives somewhere in the caravan that was heading toward Nazareth. You can imagine how the slight uneasiness of the parents at not seeing him would grow throughout the day as they are journeying on, how they might begin to actively search for him, asking their neighbors and relatives in the caravan if they’d seen their son. And then at last as uneasiness turned to downright panic, they realized that he was not anywhere in their group and so they had to turn around and head back on their own to the incredibly busy and likely dangerous capital to search for their lost son. Undoubtedly this would become a memory engraved on a mother’s mind beyond all the other trivial occurrences of day to day life.
Well, what is striking about this episode is not his parents’ fear and three-day long search, which are understandable enough given the circumstances. No, what caused this story to be recorded is where Jesus actually was and what he was doing the whole time his parents were frantically searching, which brings us to our first point and that is his priestly learning.
1. Priestly Learning
Jesus had spent those four days in the temple sitting among the teachers and asking them questions. And as it says in verse 47, “all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” In spite of being from the Podunk town of Nazareth, not from a priestly or rabbinic family of any significance whatsoever, not even having had the opportunities of any formal education in the scriptures, aside from what could be picked up at the local synagogue or the yearly trip to Jerusalem, Jesus was apparently remarkable for his learning.
Now I mean that in two senses. First and perhaps most important is that Jesus has sought out the learning; he is, we might say, an active learner. After all, he’s the one that got so caught up in questioning the teachers who would daily come to the temple courts that he failed to go with the departing caravan. He displays a youthful eagerness for learning all that he can about God and the scriptures, listening carefully and thoughtfully to the priests and scribes and rabbis, asking them questions. He is engaged in the type of learning process that would have been reserved primarily for those training to be priests or teachers of the law of Moses. He has sought it out and claimed this priestly learning as his own.
But secondly, there is his learning, in the sense of his own insight or understanding based on what he has learned or known. The ability of his questions to drive at the core issue and his own insightful answers to the questions of these teachers were a source of amazement to everyone watching this unique teacher-student dynamic in the temple. Even without a priestly education, Jesus had a priestly wisdom and a depth of understanding about the relationship of God and humanity that would have fit him for the priesthood.
It might feel strange to discuss Jesus learning about the Bible, God and the priestly duties and sacrifices of the Mosaic law, and that’s because as modern Christians we tend to stress and emphasize Jesus’ divinity—the fact that he is fully God, different and set apart from us. And there’s a good reason for that: those who don’t believe in Jesus, non-Christians, are perfectly fine with talking about Jesus as a man, as a human being, and so we are inclined to emphasize the important truth of his divinity that they wouldn’t agree with, but which we hold so dear. But it’s important for us not to forget Jesus’ full humanity, that he was a baby, that he grew up as a boy, and learned things, experienced life and suffered just like we do. In some mysterious way Jesus is both: fully God and fully man, 100% God, 100% frail human being.
And that is so important, because that mystery is precisely what enables Jesus to be our great high priest. As a human being, Jesus shares in all of our experience, in all that it means to be a human in this world; and that includes learning. He can sympathize with our weakness and struggle, with our questions and heartache, with our everyday challenges of school life and the process of learning, because he himself learned as a child, just like we all did… just like our children and students do.
2. Priestly Lineage
By priestly lineage I don’t mean to say that Jesus was born into a priestly family, of the line of Levi or Aaron. In fact, the Gospel writers are very clear that he was of the tribe of Judah, from which no priest in Israel’s history ever came. No, Jesus wasn’t of priestly lineage in that sense. What I’m referring to here is the startling and prophetic response that Jesus the twelve-year-old boy gives to Mary when she starts her scolding.
After scouring Jerusalem for three days, Mary has as good an excuse as any to go into lecture mode, “Your father and I have been worried sick?! Why have you done this to us? Do you have any idea the anxiety we’ve experienced while looking all over for you?!” she says, more or less. And Jesus answers them enigmatically, as if in a riddle, saying, “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be in my father’s courts?” Most translations say “in my father’s house” and that gets at it well, but the Greek is a very general expression like “at my father’s place,” only it’s plural, which would give some hint that it implied the holy places or sanctuary.
In hindsight we can see how Jesus’ cryptic statement points not only to his self-understanding as God’s Son, but also to his priestly role as the mediator between God and man. After all, God’s house would naturally be home to priests, like Samuel of old, who was dedicated to the Lord after his miraculous birth, when God heard his mother Hannah’s prayer and opened her womb. In a way, Jesus is saying that he has come home, that he should have always been here in his Father’s holy places, and his earthly parents should have known that.
Luke makes clear that Mary and Joseph had no idea what he meant by that at the time. You can imagine that they weren’t in the mood for interpreting riddles, and you get the impression that this wasn’t the only time Jesus said something puzzling or enigmatic. Of course, Mary and Joseph would have known the mystery of Jesus’ divine parentage, the fact that his true Father really was the God of Israel himself—how the angel had proclaimed to Mary that the child to be born to her would be called the Son of the Most High. If anyone had a right to be a priest in God’s house, it was Jesus. Where else would he be found than in his Father’s sanctuary, devoting himself to learning in the rabbinic discussion-based format?
3. Priestly Humility
Well, in spite of Jesus’ divine and priestly lineage, in spite of his astonishing priestly learning, Jesus does not immediately embark on the trajectory of a child prodigy, seeking the best teachers in Jerusalem, taking advantage of his claim to fame in the nation’s capital. Jesus simply and humbly goes back home with his parents to the small out-of-the-way town of Nazareth, where he has no hope of becoming famous for his learning or advancing to the top of the priestly hierarchy of Israel. And he even, says Luke, “was submissive to” his parents, obeying them, from the heart, even if his learning and pedigree was beyond their own.
Try to imagine for a moment what that would have been like, to be Jesus, and to submit humbly to poor, ordinary, sinful parents, without great learning or skills or resources; to learn from Joseph the rudimentary skills of carpentry, when he had the ability to study with the best rabbis of Israel. Jesus exercised an incredible priestly humility. I wonder what would have happened if the boy Jesus had pushed for more advancement and influence. It certainly wouldn’t have followed the God-ordained plan that Jesus would grow up like “a root out of dry ground” and that he would have “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2 ESV). But more than fulfilling prophecy, it would have short-circuited the normal human process and development.
Perhaps that’s why Luke closes out this section by stating that “Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” Perhaps it’s actually in the humble submission of obeying your parents and teachers, of apprenticeship into a trade, of humble service and labor, day in and day, that human beings grow. Wisdom, that priestly wisdom of maintaining a right relationship with God, comes through humility. Indeed Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered.”
Applications to Teaching and Learning
Well, we’ve already mentioned some ways that this passage can speak to our educational renaissance by offering a picture of the ideal learner. But let’s draw out some implications just a touch further in terms of the content, method and purpose of Jesus brief stint of priestly learning.
Content: Text-centered Instruction
Our first implication for education relies on a historical inference. What were Jesus and the teachers of the law discussing for all those days as Jesus lingered in the temple courts? I’ve already made allusion to the Mosaic law and the scriptures, reflecting my view that the instruction was focused on the text of scripture and its interpretation. While this isn’t stated explicitly in Luke, from a historical perspective it is almost certainly the case. Rabbinic focus on the exact meaning and application of the Hebrew scriptures did not pop out of nowhere after AD 70. The teachers of the law and the priests in the temple had the books of the Pentateuch as a fundamental starting point.
Education focused on passing on this cultural and religious heritage, alongside the oral torah, or spoken instruction about the text as passed on from generation to generation of religious leaders and teachers. We don’t need to embrace an authoritative view of this tradition to appreciate its relevance for education. For both the highly skilled and the normal Jew, the centerpiece of education focused on a text. There was content to be known and understood and that content was found in the rich literature recording Israel’s cultural history.
Of course, in this case the texts also revealed God and were inspired by Him in ways that no other body of literature could. But that doesn’t change the fundamental point that the content of education was traditional, in the sense that it focused on passing down a cultural heritage of wisdom through instruction in particular texts. This is an important point because in our culture active experiences get so much hype that we tend to downplay the centrality of learning a body of literature through the hard work of sitting down and reading it with focused attention.
Method: Discussion-based Learning
There are many different terms for discussion-based learning today, from the socratic dialogue (which means any number of different things to different teachers, not many of which have a close relationship to Socrates’ actual method) to partner talk, harkness tables, or the dialectic of the liberal arts tradition. The description of Jesus both listening to the teachers and asking them questions, and amazing them with his insight and answers seems to point to some sort of multifaceted learning process that had discussion as its base. This is not a one-sided set of interactions; teachers and students both ask questions and also give answers to each other. It is therefore a fundamentally different mode of education than one that is primarily one-way at its base. Jesus does not sit and take notes while the teachers of the law lecture, only to be tested later on his ability to spew up the identical factual content he received. Instead, they discuss the content of scripture together.
We want to be careful here not to claim that there isn’t a place for direct instruction. Jesus himself will go on to teach to the crowds in sermons and parables at length, with no dialogue mentioned. However, the Gospels do record that he would then often discuss the details at length with his inner circle of disciples, showing that the ideal method of learning was discussion-based, not simply hearing-based, and that in fact the public telling of the parables was meant to conceal the full reality from the crowds, not showcase an optimal teaching method as some today claim (see e.g. Mark 4:10ff.). At the very least Jesus’ own practice as a boy points to how the ideal learner interacts, asks questions and responds with full engagement in the learning process.
Purpose: Wisdom, Stature and Favor
Luke’s final comment about Jesus’ submission to Joseph and Mary signal a broader purpose for both his education and his sonship. The first thing to notice is that there is a focus on “increase” or growth in particular qualities or attainments. The purpose of childhood and education is therefore subjective in the sense that it aims to develop this particular child. Second are the qualities themselves. Wisdom is intellectual, no doubt, but also spiritual, moral and relational, if the book of Proverbs is any clue to what Luke has in mind here. Stature is clearly physical, referring in the Greek to age or time of life development, but also to the maturity and bearing of an adult. Favor with God and man focuses on his reputation and relationships. Here in a nutshell we have a holistic educational goal of personal development in physical, moral, intellectual, spiritual and relational components of what it means to be a mature human being.
Jesus, the ideal learner, learned obedience through suffering and submission as a child, grew in wisdom, stature and favor, and thus illustrates for us the trajectory of a holistic education in content, method and purpose.
Please let me know your responses in the comments! Is there something I missed? How else do you see Jesus in the role of learner?