Lost Tales

When Christmas falls on Wednesday of the week or later, there are two Sundays in the Season of Christmas.  That means that the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) in Cycle A will consider the narrative of the Slaughter of the Innocents today and the prologue to John next Sunday.  The provision for a second Sunday of Christmas is always John 1.  In Cycle B the first Sunday’s reading is the story of Simeon and Anna, and in Cycle C it is the boy Jesus in the Temple.

It can be a frustrating time for the church.  There is so little material available concerning the young Jesus outside of the Nativity itself. 

There is a lot of Christian legend surrounding the young Jesus.  There is an apocryphal story of Jesus striking dead a playmate at whom he was angry before restoring him to life.  (The Gospel of Thomas) That same document has a tale of Jesus molding pigeons out of mud at a riverbank.  When confronted by religious leaders, he tosses them into the air, where they become animated and fly away.  He thus eludes the charge of creating graven images.  There are legends that he traveled to England – some of the accounts say he went to the British Isles in the company of Joseph of Arimathea.  There are stories of the young Jesus learning magic while living in Egypt and using this knowledge to give the appearance of divinity when he returned to Israel.

But these things do not make for very faithful study.  They do illustrate the principle that nature abhors a vacuum.  These tales emerge in the absence of more genuine stories.

It wouldn’t really matter how much material we had about Jesus at age 1 or 5 or 10.  Jesus’ real work, and true significance comes a little later.  When he was about thirty.