THE single incident by the mention of
which the short history of the Hidden Life is broken in the narrative
of St. Luke is, as is well known, the tarrying of our Lord in the
Temple of Jerusalem, when He was of the age of twelve years, and when
He did not let His Mother or St. Joseph know where He was, or the
motive of His absence from their side. This mystery has two different
aspects, as it is considered with reference to our Lord's work for
the glory of the Father on the one hand, or to our Blessed Lady and
His treatment of her on the other. We have spoken elsewhere of the
first of these two aspects of this incident. It seems that our Lord
desired to show, among other things, His immense devotion to the work
of instruction, especially to that most important but less
conspicuous branch of instruction which is carried on in the
catechetical schools of the Church. He wished to set an example, both
to teachers and to scholars, in such schools, and to consecrate by
His own presence and participation the labour of the one and the
docility of the other. He could hardly leave behind Him a more
conspicuous proof of the value which the school held in His eyes,
than by making this the one occasion on which He departed, in so
pointed a manner, from His usual habit of close and obedient clinging
to the company of those who were to Him in the place of God, and were
intensely dear on all grounds. Other motives may also have had their
share in determining His conduct on this occasion, and also in the
pro vision which He has made for the preservation of this incident in
the history, when so many other most interesting occurrences must
have been passed over in silence. But we need not dwell on this part
of the subject here. When we turn to consider this action of our
Lord, and all that passed in consequence, with reference to our
Blessed Lady, we see in the first place that, if our Lord had simply
intended us to learn by His example the great importance of the
catechetical teaching of which mention has been made, there was no
need for all that part of the incident which relates to the ignorance
in which our Blessed Lady was left by Him, and the sorrow which she
and St. Joseph must have felt in finding that He was absent from
them, and in their search for Him. It must be quite certain that if
He had expressed to them the slightest wish to remain in Jerusalem
for those three days, there could have been no opposition on- their
part to His desire. They would willingly have remained with Him, and
then their witness to His desire to spend the time as He did spend it
would have remained to the Church, without any narrative of the
sorrows of our Lady and the tearful search for Him which she had to
make. The one most remarkable point in the mystery is not that He
spent His time in the Temple or in the school, but that He left our
Lady and St. Joseph, without a word of warning, because He was called
to some thing which belonged to that work of His Father which He came
into the world to do. It is this which seems, more than anything
else, to require explanation. The answer to this question will
perhaps reveal to us a new truth concerning our Blessed Lady and the
position which she occupies in the history of the Incarnation. We
have hitherto considered her in the great exaltation which she
received, in consequence of the unique privilege conferred upon her
of becoming the Mother of God, and in the display of wonderful
virtues which we see in her from the first, which reveals to us
something of her pre-eminent personal sanctity. She is the one
created soul that was to profit to the very full by the graces and
blessings of the Incarnation, to correspond fully to the merciful
designs of God in that mystery, to be the perfect and faultless copy
of the virtues and the character of her Blessed Son. As the time drew
near for the manifestation of our Lord to the world, as far as such
manifestation was made in the course of His Public Life, another duty
fell, as it seems, into the hands of Mary, which involved, on this
and perhaps on other occasions, a certain amount of suffering, which
was a part of that piercing of her heart by the sword of which holy
Simeon had told her. She was our Lord's only earthly parent, although
St. Joseph had over him a certain parental authority of its own kind.
Mary was therefore the one person in the world towards whom our Lord
was to behave uniformly in that manner in which it was necessary that
He should behave, in order to supply us with a perfect example of the
conduct of a Child to His Parents. This was the object of that long
example of subjection and obedience which is conveyed to us by what
we know of this very period of the Hidden Life. Of this period it is
specially mentioned, and, moreover, of the years which followed this
mystery of the twelfth year in particular, that He was then subject
to His parents. It follows from this that if there were any sphere of
conduct or duty as to which obedience to parents, and even
consideration for their wishes and feelings, might be out of place in
the life of a perfect follower of our Lord, it might be necessary
that there should be some example in His Life as to this, in which
deviation from uniformity of obedience might be set before us, as the
conduct of our Lord Himself. For it would not be well that Christians
should be left to conjecture or reasoning in such a matter. Putting
aside for the moment the particular call which our Lord must have
followed when He let His parents depart from Jerusalem without
warning them that He was to stay behind, this example at least, and
in the first place, teaches us that there are some duties which
over-ride the duty which we owe to our parents, and that this is the
case with all calls and obligations as to which it can be truly said
that they constitute or consist in the affairs or the work of the
Father. That is, as the ground for our obedience to parents consists
in the fact that they are to us in His place, by His will, so there
may be special occasions and whole ranges of duties as to which we
may have to put aside the duty to the subordinate authority of the
parent, in order to obey the supreme and original authority which
resides in God alone. The occasions for such conduct are numberless
in life, and they are parallel to those other cases in which the law
or command of a legitimate ruler, who has his authority from God,
must be set aside in order that we may obey the decrees of God
Himself, and of these we may use the words of the Apostles to the
rulers of the holy nation, that we must obey God rather than man. 2
The
parent may conceivably desire the child to commit some sin or do some
injustice to a third party, and in such cases the command of parents
is to be disobeyed. Another large range of cases is more like this in
which our Lord has set us the example, not indeed of disobedience,
but of omission to consult the wishes of parents, namely, where there
is a case of the child being called by God to serve Him in some state
of life which is not what the fond ambition of the parent has marked
out for him, and so there is resistance-or hindrance on the part of
the parent to what we commonly speak of as a clerical or a religious
vocation. There have been thousands and thousands of instances in the
history of the Church, in which the guidance which has supported the
call of God in its rights on the obedience of the child at all costs,
even of pain and grief to the parent, has been found in this
beautiful mystery of the twelfth year, in which our Lord acted as if
it was best to omit all regard to His parents for the sake of obeying
a higher and more direct call on His obedience. It may well seem that
some such lesson as this was needed to qualify and explain the
doctrine of implicit obedience, which might be founded on the most
perfect example of our Lord in the practice of that virtue. His
example, to be quite perfect and applicable to all possible
contingencies, needed the supplement and crown which is supplied to
it in this mystery. If we ask ourselves why our Lord did not content
Himself with informing His parents of the call of God which required
Him to spend these particular days in this particular way, certain as
it was that no opposition could have been raised either by our
Blessed Lady or by St. Joseph, the answer seems to be that that
example might not have been enough to meet the case of which we are
speaking. For the duty of following Divine calls represents them to
us as paramount and supreme, the exercise on the part of God of that
supreme dominion of His by virtue of which He may dispose of His
creatures as He will, for life or for death. For our Lord to have
informed our Lady and St. Joseph, would have so far qualified the
force of this example, that it might have been said, when appeal was
made to this incident in His Life, that He had shown consideration to
their rights by asking them or at least informing them of His
intention, and it is quite certain they could not have refused their
joyful consent. Thus it might have been said that they were
consenting. But there were to be many cases in which earthly parents
might not act or feel as our Lady and St. Joseph might have felt in
this matter, and the true doctrine concerning obedience to such calls
is, not only that parents ought to consent to them, but that they are
not even of right to be consulted about them except as persons, like
any others, who may have a great interest in their children and may
be able to give valuable counsel in cases where the call of God has
not been perfectly ascertained. The example of our Lord on this
occasion was to cover even what may be extreme cases, in which
parents may be violently opposed to the execution of the Divine call,
in which they do not recognize it as such, but consider it a call to
something which is actually contrary to God. This is the case
constantly with many good Protestant parents, when their children are
convinced of the duty of submitting to the Catholic Church. It is
very frequently indeed the case, that such parents are tempted to
treat their children as undutiful, and thus to claim an authority in
a matter which is entirely foreign to their position in the
Providence of God. And as the children who are likely to find the
claims of the Church para mount, are also likely to be dutiful and
modest, there may arise much perplexity and disturbance of conscience
for them, which may issue in their letting themselves be persuaded
that, the nearest authority to them being that of their parents, they
are safe in obeying them in such a matter. In these cases the example
of our Lord in this mystery is of the greatest use, and it furnishes
the incident in His own Life in which He has practically taught in
His own conduct what He afterwards insisted on when He said, He that
loveth father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. We may
pass on now to the direct example of our Blessed Lady in this mystery
of her life, as to which she seems to have been purposely left in a
kind of darkness as to our Lord's meaning which was not fully cleared
up at once. If we consider her virtues in the whole course of these
eventful days, she is in the first place an example to us of devotion
to the sanctuary, and of love for the sacred festivals and seasons of
the Church. It does not appear that the women among the Jews were
obliged by the precept, like the men, to attend at the festivals. But
to her every such occasion would be the greatest of privileges, which
she would never miss if she could possibly be present. It is probable
also that her immense recollection and absorption in the worship of
God in the Temple may have been in part the cause of her ignorance of
the fact that our Lord had left her. The next point in the history is
the sudden and most piercing blow which fell on her when the
discovery was made, while at the same time we may be sure that it was
now as it was afterwards on many occasions in the Public Life, and
most of all at the Passion, that she bore with perfect tranquillity
and without losing her internal peace and union with God and His
will, the severe trial of the time of separation. In her readiness to
fear that she might be in some measure in fault herself for the
losing of our Lord, in her diligence in searching for Him without any
delay, in her patience under repeated disappointments, in the care
with which she comforted her afflicted spouse, and her calm wondering
consideration of the ways of Providence, she becomes a perfect model
for souls who have in any way or measure lost that habitual presence
of, and familiarity with, our Lord, in which many of His servants
continually live. There is much also to be learnt from her demeanour
when her Child was at last found, for she does not seem to have
interrupted the lesson that was going on or to have shown publicly
any exaggeration of feeling. Again, there is perfect simplicity in
her question to our Lord. She mentions her sorrows without fear, and
put her question without hesitation. There is no complaint, but there
is a clear and simple petition for light as to the reason of His
conduct. And we may be sure from all these intimations of consummate
virtue, that there must have been the same perfection in those parts
of the Mystery of which we have no direct account given in the
Gospel, and that her resignation and submission to the will of God,
and her confidence in His love, even under so sudden a cloud of
grief, must have been infinitely pleasing in His eyes. The Evangelist
tells us that when our Lord answered that His parents need not have
sought Him, because they must have known that He must be occupied
with the affairs of His Father, they did not understand what He said.
This must mean, not that they did not understand that it was His duty
above all things to be at the work set Him for the time by the
command or the interests of His Father, for that could not be
doubtful to any who knew Him, but that they did not see the
connection between His leaving them so abruptly and His faithfulness
to His Father's work. What they did not understand was that His
devotion to the work of His Father, implied the necessity of leaving
them without warning, or the superfluousness of their anxious search
after Him when they missed Him from their side. That is, they did not
see that the paramount rights of God over His time and labour might
have been taken for granted by them as the sufficient reason for all
that He had done. The connection in this case was a truth which was
not yet necessary or ripe for promulgation, though the time was to
come when it would be most important for the Church that it should be
fully understood. When the account of this incident was committed to
writing by St. Luke, probably from the reminiscences of our Blessed
Lady, the time had indeed come when this principle had to be acted
upon continually by the children of the Church and continually
enforced by her rulers. Then all things must have seemed clear
enough, and many grateful souls must have owed their salvation or
their peace to the doctrine founded on this example of our Lord. This
mystery, then, shows us our Blessed Lady in a new aspect, for she has
to suffer something in her tenderest affections, something the
sharpness of which no one but herself could know, for the sake of the
witness which our Lord had to bear to a great principle of Christian
life and perfection. It may be considered as a part of her office as
the Mother of the redeemed as well as of the Redeemer, that she
should have to bear this trial, which was to be so fruitful in light
arid strength to thousands of souls who were to belong to the Kingdom
of her Son. For the sake of securing this witness to the principle of
which we speak, we see that our Lord did not hesitate to plunge in
grief, for as much as three days, the heart of the Mother whom He so
tenderly loved. These sufferings of Mary were the birthpangs of a
thousand times a thousand holy vocations, and we may rate the value
of such callings and of faithfulness to them, when we see them
purchased by the price at which they were paid for in the tears of
this Blessed Mother. Thus she becomes in an especial sense the Mother
of such vocations, not only as having had to suffer for their
security, but as having won from God by her sufferings the right to
protect and watch over them after they have been entered upon. The
graces which she may have added to her treasures during these days of
suffering must have been immense and splendid, for our Lord was
certain to remunerate most largely any cross which a soul so near to
Him bore so perfectly. This mystery therefore must mark another great
advance in the consummate sanctity of Mary.
2
Acts iv. 19
