Today’s Gospel has a message for all of us, and the message is that we need to invest more of our time in our family life. The Gospel story shows us Jesus at the age of 12. That was the age that every Jewish boy was expected to make his bar mitzvah and so become a responsible subject of the law. It was a ceremony of legal adulthood. One way teenagers celebrate their coming of age is to go out and do those things that the law had previously forbidden. You know your boy is growing up when he stops asking where he came from and begins to not tell you where he is going. Jesus was no exception. To celebrate His coming of age He attends the Temple Bible class without informing His parents. When His parents catch up with Him after two days of searching for Him everywhere, all He tells them is, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?†Even holy families do have their occasional tensions and misunderstandings. The most puzzling part of the story, however, is the way it ends: “Then He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.â€
We have two lives, a private or family life and a public or professional one. These two lives should be in harmony but very often they are in tension. Whereas Jesus resolved the tension by giving priority to His private life, we, unfortunately, often try to resolve it by giving priority to our professional life, leaving our family life to suffer. The celebration today of the Christian Family challenges us us to value and invest in our private life with our families before our professional life at the work place, even when our job is as important as saving the world.