Every person knows that someday he will die. Death is a unique phenomenon: it is completely obvious and completely closed to those who have not yet experienced it. God speaks with a person, and that person remains alive. On the basis of this Gospel passage, one can say that a person who speaks with God, not somehow but face to face, receives both life and death: life full of His presence, the light of revelation for all, and death as the fulfillment of the promise, as the possibility of a full and final encounter.

The life of Jesus between the Nativity and His going out to preach is closed to us, but the story of the journey to Jerusalem gives us the only glimmer in the fog. Why, then, did the evangelist include only this episode from the Savior's childhood in his narrative? Hardly only because no other information had survived by the time the text was composed; rather, it was because this particular episode is important for understanding later events. For before us is a testimony that already in childhood Jesus was conscious of His mission.

Jesus must have been sociable as a child; otherwise it is hard to explain why Mary and Joseph, at first thinking that He was traveling with relatives and neighbors, showed no concern about His absence. We, for our part, may conclude that already in childhood He knew how to communicate with very different people, and that His conversation in the temple anticipated His coming work as Teacher. And that the temple is His Father's house is witnessed not only by His words, but also by how naturally He behaved in the temple. As for His three-day absence from those close to Him, many interpreters advise seeing it as a foreshadowing of His absence from the earth after Golgotha...

Why did Christ accept circumcision, and what is the spiritual meaning of this event? Of course, one can say that He was little then. But He allowed this to happen, and therefore, despite the fact that He was little, this event has spiritual content. So what is it? To confirm that "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22)? Or to pass through the whole path of His humility, limiting Himself not only by human appearance but also by all the limitation of human culture?

It is also certain that He knew that after Him the apostle Paul would come, sternly rebuking all who do not understand the full limitation of this rite, as of every rite in general. In the Epistle to the Romans alone he speaks of this more than once; see chapters 2, 3, and 4. For example: "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh" (Rom. 2:28), or "Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing, but keeping the commandments of God" (1 Cor. 7:19).

The Lord knew this and still allowed His circumcision to take place. In this is His humility before the Law, which He came to fulfill (Matt. 5:17), and this is precisely what allows the apostle Paul to say: "In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ" (Col. 2:11).