Dear colleagues,
Not long ago I was asked by a child in church: “I don’t get it. Jesus is born in December but by Easter he’s an adult and he’s dying. How did he grow up so fast?” My answer was about how we try to compress several decades of Jesus’ life into each year so we can remember all the good bits every year. Or perhaps he would like to have Christmas once every, say, 30 years?
Given how the dates fall, we are somewhat unusually returning to school during the 12 days of the liturgical Christmas season. And given how the Sundays fall, many churches had two Sundays in the Christmas season this year. The Gospel reading I heard last Sunday contained one of my favourite lines about Jesus. The teenage Jesus has been teaching in the temple and is found by his parents, who are filled with anxiety. The scene ends with this line: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” (Luke 2:52)
This passage reminds me that while Jesus was the divine, incarnate Word, in whom “all things in heaven and on earth were created” (Col. 1:16), he was also a kid who grew up. His full humanity meant that he didn’t come to earth as a perfectly formed human. He may have been precocious (and impertinent) as a child but there were still things he needed to learn and ways in which he needed to grow. In order to be who God called Jesus to be, Jesus needed to change and develop. In a word, Jesus needed to mature.
The author of Ephesians seemed to grasp this essential truth about Jesus. In the famous passage in chapter 4 about the body of Christ we read that we have been given gifts to build up the body of Christ “until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” (Eph. 4:13) In the same way that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in years,” followers of Jesus continue that same growth in our common life and so grow to maturity. As with Jesus, so with the church.
The child at church reminded me that the liturgical year of the church is constantly moving the story of Jesus forward to the next thing. Formation for ministry and theological education can be like this too. Our programs are designed to facilitate growth. But no program can address every need that each student has and sometimes the program moves on too quickly.
The Christmas season—which isn’t over yet!—can be a time of reflection on one’s maturation. In what ways am I growing into the full stature of who God calls me to be? In what ways do I need new opportunities for growth? Where do I need to slow down so I can “increase in wisdom”? Oftentimes it can be valuable to have this conversation with a trusted friend, colleague, or mentor.
It is part of the joy of the Christmas season that Jesus calls us to the same growth and change that he himself underwent. May we all increase in divine favour and so grow to maturity together.
Faithfully yours,
Jesse
This message was written by Jesse Zink for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community.