Clergy Notes — Holy Family, December 29, 2024
Unless it’s how to set-up that latest Apple™ gadget you received as a Christmas present, the notion of being instructed by a child on any serious topic can strike one as eccentric. Children are famously inexperienced with life; and so what adults might learn from them is conditioned by that fact.
I often tell younger folk that much of what we call “wisdom” is simply learning from your mistakes. Education may make you knowledgeable, and sharpen your native intelligence, but it can’t make you wise. There are no shortcuts: wisdom is distilled from the experience of living and learning; the lifelong training of one’s own personhood. As we shall see, that’s not always true, though.
Children are born into systems not of their own making, and they’re given our present social and technological state as their starting point. There’s nothing to relearn, and no assumptions to accept. To that extent, children teach adults by providing fresh eyes and interpretations to a world we have moulded to fit our projections, as it has changed beneath our feet.
With that in mind, I’m fascinated by Luke’s account of a 12-year-old Jesus teaching in the temple. It is one of Jesus’ great unsung miracles: getting grown-ups to listen to a child hold forth on the finer points of Biblical interpretation. Unlike stringing a daisy chain or programming a tablet, we understand that abstract thinking is one of those cognitive skills which develops and is conditioned with time and applied learning – something we expect a child to struggle with.
Did the child Jesus have access to an exceptional education, drawing out his rabbinical aptitude, as with any child prodigy? I don’t think so. The evangelist Luke is at pains to describe the ordinariness of Jesus’ upbringing in rural Roman Judea. Instead, we’re meant to see that the indwelling divinity of the boy was manifest in such an obvious way, that he could instruct adults in fresh interpretations of the law, with authority. It’s in those fresh interpretations we perceive the peculiar wisdom of a child.
A child’s wisdom is, paradoxically, the wisdom of inexperience. It’s the clear-eyed child who points out that the emperor has no clothes; that what mummy or daddy says isn’t the way they act; that grown-ups fool themselves, lie to one another, and play pretend – and the wise child asks “why?”
In that sense, the child Jesus was the father of the man; as we read his radical reinterpretations of scripture throughout the Gospels. Jesus never stopped asking, “why?” And so, for the gift of Jesus’ childlike wisdom, we give thanks, and ask that it ever be renewed in us, so we might see our world and systems with fresh eyes.
Revd. Neil Fernyhough