Jesus Goes Electric
Bob Dylan and finding the enigmatic Christ
Jesus said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?”
Luke 2:49
This is the most I’ve ever wanted Christmas to linger. Apparently, I’m the odd one out here. I only ever listen to the car radio when it’s Christmas season, and only because Star 92.9 (you must not say this, but sing it) has the perfect playlist for wintry Vermont backroads. But as soon as the calendar flipped past the 25th, it was like a completely different radio station, and in a day, we went from “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” to David Bowie. It’s like the world has said, “Twelve days of Christmas? You’ve had it since Halloween!” Okay, fine.
While I’ve had a great Christmas, and I hope you did too, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you are or maybe you aren’t having a Christmas hangover. Maybe Christmas was the last time you felt something spiritual in a while, or maybe Christmas really didn’t do it for you this year. Maybe you lost track of Jesus a long time ago, and like Mary in our reading today (Luke 2:41-52), you’re just starting to realize it. Maybe you felt something divine for a second, but maybe your Christmas spirit is moving on too quickly. Even Luke’s gospel moves just as fast past the Christmas story as any radio station of this world.
In feeling Christmas slowly melt along with our snow, it surprised me how much the new Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, spoke to me. There’s something about the iconic folk musician that always tracks with the wandering American soul, but there’s even something like Dylan in our story of young Jesus in the temple.
I’m not making Dylan out as some Christ-like figure; he’s not, and he’d be the first to admit it. But one of the reasons Dylan was absolutely magnetic was how hard he was to pin down. His poetry defied definition, phrase by phrase, line by line, full of subtle shifts and surprises that both made sense and never did. This carried over into his life, a truly “freewheelin’” spirit.1 As the film shows (and tells in its title), being an enigma has defined him as an artist. While this first pleased people, enthralled them, and made them want to make Dylan into their own image, this same trait would famously upset people when he put down his acoustic guitar and “went electric.”
Well, today’s Luke reading is the first time Jesus “goes electric.”
The movie shows that Bob Dylan often did something that nobody expected him to do, yet made complete sense in hindsight as you got to understand more of who he is. Dylan would have been disappointing if he didn’t defy what would have been easiest for people to understand. And this is Jesus, too.
Jesus, too, shows that he is an enigma even to his parents, but that’s also part of what makes him Jesus. Yet if we really knew him, it’s almost impossible to see him doing anything else.
The First Words
And so we get this story from Luke, the first and only glimpse we get of boyhood Jesus, where Jesus utters his first words in Luke’s gospel after his parents lose track of him, finally stumbling upon him in the temple in Jerusalem where he’s holding court with the rabbis. As many render the twelve-year-old saying to his parents, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?” These words crackle like a Fender guitar being plugged into an amp, and they’re both a challenge and a revelation. His parents get the first taste of his spiritual medicine the world would taste, where sometimes grace includes a confrontation. In these two little questions and what follows, Jesus shows a holy pattern of the Lord: he rebukes our ways, gives us his wisdom faster than we can even process it, then comforts us that he is really with us while pointing us forward in a promise that there is much more to come, for the story is bigger than us.
If Jesus is an enigma even to his parents, his words are also something of a mystery to Biblical translators. While many settle on the emphasis on the temple’s place—“Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”—this is a best-guess paraphrase of a line that nobody has fully understood, which more literally is something like, “Did you not know I must be in the things of my Father?” And so a different traditional reading has Jesus saying as translated up top, “Didn’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?”
Hear that again, “Didn’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?”
Hearing him this way, it’s not really so much about the place Jesus is in but what he’s doing there: asking questions, teaching in return, and being in a communal relationship with others who want to know his Father. He’s attending to what his Father needs doing.
Then there’s that other question, “Why were you searching for me?” We might more clearly hear it as, “Why couldn’t you find me? Didn’t you know where I should be?” And from our 20/20 hindsight…yeah Mary, yeah Joseph, why wouldn’t you go right to the temple first? Maybe they went to its outer courts and didn’t see him. Maybe they were panicked and overwhelmed by the Jerusalem crowds, and when you’re panicking, sometimes you forget to look for God in the obvious places. Then when you do find him, it can be almost as embarrassing as when you take too long to find your car keys (as the saying goes, they’re always in the last place you look for them). And like that feeling of relief, maybe in the darkest nights of our souls when we finally stumble upon Jesus, we might also get that surprising, relieving embarrassment, “Of course Jesus was there.”
And at last, Mary and Joseph do find him. And he scolds them—last week’s saints have become this week’s sinners, and their sweet, precious, swaddled in cloth in a manger by was chiding them! After a bit of that surprising, relieving embarrassment, Scripture tells us they grow deeper in love together as Jesus grows.
In that electric moment, those two who knew Jesus best—who saw him not just as infant Jesus but as a toddler, then small boy, then burgeoning pre-teen Jesus, who knew him better than anyone in the world—realized that not even they knew him as well as they thought they did. They thought they’d find him predictably in the crowd or predictably with their family. They thought Jesus was going to be right where they expected him.
And so in Luke’s gospel, this is the first time Jesus acts as the subject of Scripture, as commentator Joel Green says. He’s no longer just the object of our affection and adoration like he is in Christmas, but he is now the active Author of life. Times, yeah, they are a-changin’, and Jesus shows us that he’s not going to be our sweet child boxed into our definition either, but that his life is going to be often defying what we think we know about him and what we think we want from him so he can give us something even better.
Where are you looking?
Again, I don’t know how your Christmas was. But if you haven’t felt Jesus in your life in a long time, when is the last time you really looked for him where you knew he ought to be?
If you don’t know where Jesus is, have you looked past where you assumed he was in your family, with your tribe, or wherever else it would be most convenient? For so often, where we want Jesus to be is not where he actually is. Sometimes, and especially when we feel spiritually lost or stuck or cold or with a flickering candle, where we don’t feel like we are burning with his Holy Spirit, sometimes we forget to actually go to the really obvious places where he is.
While that might be in a place like a church, it might be somewhere else. The next time you think you’ve lost God, pause and think of his words in the temple. Where is his Father’s business?
If you feel like you’ve lost touch with Jesus, when is the last time you were with people struggling in the world in deeply challenging ways, truly in rock bottoms or on the knife’s edge of reality? When is the last time you went to a meeting of people in recovery or grief or otherwise really-going-through-it? When is the last time you visited a prisoner? When is the last time you stood up for someone who couldn’t stand up for themselves? If you can’t find him, these are the first words Jesus has to say to us as we go into the new year: “Why can’t you find me? Don’t you know where I must be? Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?”
Jesus is going to defy all of our expectations many times over. We’re going to lose him, especially when we take him for granted. Yet the good news over and over, from his parents losing him all the way up to the cross, is that when we think we’ve lost Jesus is exactly when he will surprise us. He’s not just a Christmas baby that we put our expectations on, he’s not just an enigma of a man “blowing in the wind,” he’s at once a bigger mystery and yet exactly where it makes sense for him to be.
Don’t be surprised that he surprises you. Just keep looking for him wherever his Father has business.
