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.
Main news for 2 July 2024
The appearance of the adolescent Jesus among the teachers of the Torah and learned rabbis caused a sensation. He was very young and had clearly had no chance yet to receive any education anywhere, yet He reasoned with the well-known Jerusalem experts of the Torah as their equal. Meanwhile Jesus' relatives, with whom He had come to the city for the feast, were very troubled and anxious over His disappearance. There was nothing strange about this: Jerusalem, unlike quiet provincial Nazareth, was the capital of Judea, a large city where a provincial teenager could easily get lost. Besides, the Temple in Jerusalem was a special place with special rules of conduct, which Jesus' relatives thought the boy might not know. Moreover, He had gone where, by traditional standards, someone His age should not have gone at all. Of course, religious education among the Jews in every age was quite open and did not imply any class exclusiveness; even among the disciples of the most famous rabbis there were sometimes poor people of no aristocratic origin at all. But a certain hierarchy existed here too: one could become a disciple of some famous Jerusalem teacher of the Torah only after receiving the appropriate elementary and secondary education in a local Jewish religious school, a yeshiva. There were likely such yeshivas in Nazareth as well, as there were wherever Jewish communities and, accordingly, synagogues existed. It is hard to say whether Jesus studied in any yeshiva: none of the Gospels mentions anything of the kind. But during that visit to Jerusalem He was in any case still too young to count on becoming a disciple of any of the famous Jerusalem teachers of the Torah. Yet He was not simply listening to them; He was asking them questions, and questions of such a kind that they made the experts of the Torah marvel and ask one another which of them, or which other teachers, this teenager who asked such questions had studied under. All this could not help but alarm Jesus' relatives. Of course, taking part in the conversations of venerable teachers was not in itself a violation of the law and was not punishable in any way, but such behavior could well be taken as the unacceptable arrogance of an upstart claiming what he plainly had no right to claim. It goes without saying that Jesus' relatives did not want such a reputation for Him. All this together made them live through several anxious hours, which nevertheless ended quite well for everyone. |
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