Found in the Father’s House / Luke 2:40–52 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday January 4th 2026/ Season of Christmas / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday January 4th 2026: Season of Christmas / Luke 2:40–52 “Found in the Father’s House”

And the Child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favor of God was upon Him.

Now His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, but supposing Him to be in the group they went a day’s journey, but then they began to search for Him among their relatives and acquaintances, and when they did not find Him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for Him. After three days they found Him in the Temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard Him were amazed at His understanding and His answers. And when His parents saw Him, they were astonished. And His mother said to Him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, Your father and I have been searching for You in great distress.” And He said to them, “Why were you looking for Me? Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s house?” And they did not understand the saying that He spoke to them. And He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. And His mother treasured up all these things in her heart.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends when you are looking for something and someone says “It’ll be in the last place you look,” they will frustratingly be right. You don’t keep looking for the thing once you have found it. On the other hand they would have nothing to say to you at all if you simply go to the most likely place the thing would be and find it there. In that way it would both be the first and last place you’d have looked.

The Prophet Isaiah says, “Seek the LORD while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near;”[1] I’m sure Saint Joseph and his bride the Virgin Mary called out Jesus’ name as they sought after Him. Around every corner in that great city of Jerusalem they must have hoped with all their heart, in their distress, that they would quickly find Him no longer far from them but rather right there near to them. But alas Jesus was not in the first or second or even third place that they would have look for Him and after three days, likely worrying the about the absolute worst, perhaps even worrying that this Son of God in their care might be found dead, they did finally find Him in the last place they thought to look, in the Temple, “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” And Jesus’ response upon being found was to say to them, “Why were you looking for Me? Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s House?” Which is to mean that the Temple was in fact the very first place they ought to have looked for Him and if they had looked for Him there, in His Father’s House, He wouldn’t have been ‘missing’ for those three days. Because He’d been there the whole entire time.

This child, no longer in swaddling cloths, no longer hidden away beneath the Egyptian sun, but now on the cusp of adulthood — at least in the Jewish way of ordering adulthood — was not simply their responsibility He was God in the flesh; the very Son of God, the long promised Saviour. No parent or guardian had ever been given such a responsibility.[2] This young Jesus, the glory of God, the very image of the invisible God who in His incarnation, young life, adulthood and eventual death, resurrection and ascension is retroactively counted as the firstborn of all creation;[3] this Jesus is the one Saint Paul later confesses “would fill all things,”[4] now the technical term for this ‘filling all things’ is omnipresence. Meaning as God Jesus is everywhere all at once both in time and space and outside time and space. This is mysterious and hard to fathom, yet filling all things and being everywhere all at once in this way doesn’t actually make Jesus easy to find. So on the one hand, as we celebrate His coming to us at Christmas, we are reminded that the Word of God, this Jesus, by becoming flesh and dwelling among us created a bit of a challenge. In His taking on our flesh Jesus humbled Himself to be found in the Virgin’s Womb, to be swaddled in cloths as an infant, to be carried on the hip as a toddler and led by the hand as a child,[5] and you can bet the farm, you can bet your bottom dollar, on the fact that His mother Mary and His Guardian Saint Joseph were careful to keep their eyes on Him as their little Jesus had grown and become strong, filled with wisdom. In those years, marked by our Gospel reading from the Gospel of Saint Luke, Jesus had made Himself in His flesh to be more like a needle in a haystack by comparison to His almighty omnipresence and that’s the challenge. He became one child out of many and as we heard from Pastor Ulmer last week even a mighty King with all his military and bureaucratic resources couldn’t find this child Jesus and simply had to resort to murdering all the boys around His age in Bethlehem. Over the remainder of the years leading up to today’s Gospel reading had Mary and Joseph heard of the massacre of the innocent boys of Bethlehem? Was the worry of Jesus being found out for who He truly was while He was apart from them weighing heavy upon on their hearts as they searched for him in the streets of Jerusalem?  

Now on the other hand the Word of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us also made God more easy to find, because you could lay your eyes on Him in a way that Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets could not. In His incarnation His mother and guardian Joseph could not find their Jesus anywhere and everywhere as they searched for Him, the child in their care was not everywhere and anywhere to be found. But they could eventually lay hold of Him and take Him up into their arms with joy once they’d found Him. And so it is today: we cannot find Jesus anywhere and everywhere in His body either. Today we find His presence where He promises to be found. If someone is looking high and low for God, for the Lord, for this Jesus, Jesus may just as easily say to them “Why were you looking for Me? Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s House?”

Think of it like this: the air is full of water, you’ll know this to be true if you’ve ever run a dehumidifier in the dry Saskatchewan winter, it’s truly surprising to see what water can be drawn out of the air even when we can’t perceive that same water with our senses, but even still when I’m thirsty I don’t run to switch on the dehumidifier, I’ll take a cup and go to the tap, and there I’ll find water to fill my glass. “Seek the LORD while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near.”

Many people seek God all over the place and never think to look in the most obvious of places. There is no guaranty that you’ll find Him in a self help book, or gymnasium, or out fishing on the lake, or hiking in the mountains, or at the bottom of a bottle. This reality is of course held in a kind of tension for the Christian because when you study the Bible you’ll find passages like this one from the book of Psalms written by wise King Solomon’s father King David:

        Where shall I go from Your Spirit?

               Or where shall I flee from Your presence?

        If I ascend to heaven, You are there!

               If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there!

        If I take the wings of the morning

               and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

        even there Your hand shall lead me,

               and Your Right Hand shall hold me.

        If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

                and the light about me be night,”

        even the darkness is not dark to You;

               the night is bright as the day,

               for darkness is as light with You.[6]

David knew there would be no hiding from God, everywhere David went God was with him; this is not different for you, the Lord knows you and sees you: and in the Spirit He’s aware of everything you do, He hears everything you say, He knows everything you think and yet Jesus also instituted His Last Supper on the night in which He was betrayed and promised to be with us physically in that meal in a fixed way that is different from the way He promises to be with us spiritually in our daily lives.

Was the Lord with His guardian Saint Joseph and His mother the Virgin Mary while they were seeking Him over those three day? Yes. In those three days could they wrap their arms around Him and hold Him to the breast and says, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, Your father and I have been searching for You in great distress?” No, not until they had found Him in His Father’s House.

And so it is for you too. He is with you wherever you go and He is with you no matter what is happening and yet if you want to “taste and see that the LORD is good!” And “takes refuge in Him!” and His blessings[7] you will need to find Him in His Father’s House.

The nature of the Father house would change when Jesus went to the cross, this was part of why “being found in human form, [Jesus had] humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”[8] When Jesus was 12 years old as we find Him in our Gospel reading today the Temple was the designated central location of sacrificial worship for the people of Israel, all the Jewish folks went there to worship just as Jesus’ family had done that Passover and in the Temple where the sacrifices took place there was the Holy of Holies, the place where the Ark of the Covenant had been kept, which had included the mercy seat, a sort of throne on the lid of the Ark of the golden Covenant where the LORD had promised to be present with His people. This Holy of Holies was cordoned off with a thick curtain which kept the holy presence of God separate from the people. This was a mercy because the Holiness of God was not approachable, only one designated man, the High Priest had the responsibility to enter in on behalf of the people and even so only once a year on the Day of Atonement when sacrificial blood was to be sprinkled on the golden covering of the Ark of the Covenant, upon the mercy seat.

At the apex of His public ministry when Jesus had instituted His Last Super, a supper which would supersede and fulfill the Passover Meal, (as an aside this is why we as Christians are no longer expected to celebrate the Passover meal) Jesus said to His disciples, “In My Father’s House are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”[9] He was about to prepare a place for them in His Father’s house upon His cross, in His time of crucifixion, and when all was finished, when the last drop of blood that He would shed was poured out Saint Luke in his Gospel tells us “while the sun’s light failed ... the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit!” And having said this [Jesus] breathed His last.”[10] That curtain in His Father’s House, in the Temple, that had separated the Holy of Holies and the presence of God there from the people was no more and now they, and you and I, all have access to the very heart of the Father’s House in a way that we never had before.

Everything no longer revolved around the Temple in Jerusalem, those days were fulfilled and the meal Jesus gave them, and gave us, was not to be eaten only at the Feast of Passover which it replaced. This Holy Supper, with Jesus as both Host and Meal, now goes with us and now, for this reason, we have Jesus’ Father’s House here in our midst when the Word is read and preach when the Sacraments are rightly administered and provided, when we are taught, washed and fed in our faith. And while your risen and ascended Lord Jesus fills all things and is everywhere He promises to meet you here with His presence in a way He doesn’t promise elsewhere. And if you have looked for Him all over the place only to find Him here now at this time His response to you may very well be, “why were you looking for Me? Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s house?”

When His mother the Virgin Mary and His guardian Saint Joseph found Jesus in the Temple that day, little did they know that not far from where they found Him around 20 years later their Jesus would be nailed to the wood of the cross in such a way as to end the need for the Feast of Passover, the very Feast they had come to celebrate. There would no longer need to be a Passover lamb, Jesus provides Himself as the Passover Lamb to end all Passover lambs. Forgiveness would no longer be hidden behind a thick curtain because Jesus has transformed you by His sinless righteousness to be able to receive for yourself the gift of His Christmas incarnation, His very body and blood, in a direct way. The blood of the lamb is no longer sprinkled on the golden lid of the Ark of the Covenant as it had been done in the past before the birth of this Jesus but in this Jesus’ conception, birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension the very body and blood of Jesus, the same Jesus nailed to His Good Friday cross of His crucifixion now comes to you in the meal, that you may “taste and see that the Lord is good.” As Saint Paul teaches, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”[11] 

When Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary found the 12 year old Jesus in the Temple we are told that everyone who heard Jesus speak “were amazed at His understanding and His answers. And when His parents saw Him, they were astonished.” How much more amazing, how much more astonishing would Jesus turn out to be once He had, in the fullness of time, increased completely in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man. This Jesus made His Father’s House into a House for you. In Psalm 122 wise King Solomon’s father King David says,

        I was glad when they said to me,

               “Let us go to the house of the LORD!”

        Our feet have been standing

               within your gates, O Jerusalem!”[12]

Dear ones your search is over, you are in the Lord’s House, in Jesus’ Father’s House, Jesus has made it yours, and you no longer need to stand with your feet in the gate. Entre in, the Lord has gifts for you, His table is set, He prepares you for the meal, all is made well in Him, there is no sin which cannot be forgiven, no hurt or harm which will not be washed away in His blood today and on the Last Day, no suffering or worry that cannot be comforted and endured in Him right now. When you find Christ Jesus in His Father’s House and you come to know that you indeed have a seat at the table, a place in that House then all your searching, all your seeking, can be over, there is nowhere else left for you to look. For some of you it will be both the first and the last place you looked to find the Lord; while for others of you, you will have looked high and low and this is now the last place you’ve looked, either way you need not continue to search for Him, He is here in this place for you. Amen.    

Let us pray:

Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Isaiah 55:6
[2] Titus 2:13
[3] Colossians 1:15
[4] Ephesians 4:10
[5] Philippians 2:8
[6] Psalm 139:7–12
[7] Psalm 34:8
[8] Philippians 2:8
[9] John 14:2
[10] Luke 23:45–46
[11] 1 Corinthians 10:16–17
[12] Psalm 122:1–2

Photo Credit: Main Photo detail from "Jesus Found in the Temple (Jesus retrouvé dans le temple)" by James Tissot from wikimedia.commons.