The Epiphany of Work.
This Gospel may be called the Epiphany of Christ to the world of youth to that large portion of the great human family which has life before it, with its boundless capacities of use and abuse, of happiness and misery, of good and evil. How and in what sense is it an Epiphany to the world of youth? To answer this question intelligently, and at the same time to give breadth to the subject, is by no means limited to one age or one circumstance of human life; we combine the two in the words of the text "Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?" and "He went down with His parents and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them."
I. The Epiphany before us, is, in the first place, that of the two lives, the seen and the unseen, the relative and the personal; in other words the human relationship to the Divine. For a considerable portion of the life of all men the two relationships are at one. The parent represents God to the child, and the child sees God through the parent. It is a sweet and lovely time for the mother, which Nature perhaps would bid her protract. She feels that only good can come of it; so pure and so heavenward are her own aspirations for her child. Cannot her son continue to seek heaven except through her? Is there any moral blank, is there any spiritual necessity to forbid her saying, as a thing for all time and for all life, "So be it, it is good for us to be thus"? Yes; she must learn the great lesson, "All souls are Mine!" The child has a Father in heaven, and at the first dawn of reason he must be about his Father's business.
II. "He went down with them and was subject unto them." And this is all that is told us of the boyhood of the Saviour. The one feature of His thirty years' education upon which the Word of God dwells, is subjection; all else is taken for granted; the industry and the piety and the beautiful example, and this only is dwelt upon. "He was subject" because, being interpreted, He was courteous, He was reverent, He was generous, He was courageous, He loved Himself last, He thought Himself least; He practised in youth the graces of charity; He trod from His boyhood the way to the Cross. His Father's kingdom was the interest of His boyhood, and submission was its work; from this beginning it was but a natural progress to the long self-repression of the village home and the drudging workshop, thence to the Baptism in Jordan, and the temptation in the desert, thence into the homeless unrest of the ministry, the scorn and rejection of men, the dulness and coldness even of His own, and at last the agony of Calvary and the shameful death of the Cross.
C. J. Vaughan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 49.
References: Luke 2:49. A. Barry, Cheltenham College Sermons,p. 421; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty,vol. i., p. 59; A. C. Price, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 273; vol. iii., p. 292; B. S. Bird, Ibid.,vol. x., p. 126; H. R. Reynolds, Notes of the Christian Life,p. 185; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons and Addresses in Marlborough College,p. 1; Homilist,3rd series, vol. v., p. 228.