Sermon January 5 2025  Luke 2:41ff Jesus in the Temple   Rev. Betsy Hogan

When people show you who they are, believe them.

Have you heard this phrase? It’s been running through my head all week. When people show you who they are, believe them.

Like so many other bits of hive-mind collectively-produced wisdom, it’s at once fundamentally grounded in deep veins of human experience... and also worth querying… 

And from a faith perspective, it’s fundamentally about allowing people to be true to who God created them to be… but also raises the question of our capacity, God being our helper, to change…

So in no way a simplistic concept. Far more insightful but also problematic, far more nuanced than the reason it’s been running through my head all week. 

Which is basically nothing much more meaningful than hoping that Mary and Joseph took it under advisement when they finally found Jesus after he’d gone missing back in Jerusalem for three solid days at the age of twelve –

And he apparently didn’t understand why they’d gotten so worked up.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Like, this kid might not always put obvious things first in making his decisions. Like his parents’ possible anxiety levels. Or the danger of wandering off alone in a big city. Or the manifest benefit of growing up and getting a job and generally avoiding crucifixion.

It’s a fascinating little story that Anna read for us just now, of Jesus gone missing for three days at the age of twelve -- it only appears in the gospel of Luke, and its chief purpose DOES seem to be… providing evidence for the essential truth of that little bit of human wisdom:

When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Because it’s offered up to us, this story, pretty much entirely as a kind of sneak preview prologue to ‘who Jesus is’. 

So deeply ingrained in him already that his instinct at the age of twelve, on a brief visit to the crowded festival streets of the urban centre of Jerusalem, isn’t to stay close to his parents in order to avoid (quite reasonably) getting lost, like any other ordinary child his age –

But is instead to hunker down with singular focus in the temple, without telling anyone where’s he gone, for three days of intense scriptural discourse and debate. 

Which, if Mary treasured that in her heart afterward, as the gospel tells us she did, it’s devoutly to be hoped that she also took serious preparatory note of the fact that the spirit of Godness and wisdom so obviously alive and at work in this child – 

in this quite extraordinary interest in and capacity for three solid days of learned theological conversation – is maybe also going to mean keeping a bit of an extra-close eye on him. Just generally. Or at least next time they visit Jerusalem. 

When someone shows you who they are, believe them. 

But the good news is that Mary does seem to get that. And she does seem to try. Because as the gospels stories move us into his adulthood, we do get a number of moments when it’s like Mary’s sort of hovering.

She’s a little bit on alert. Early on in his ministry especially. At once clearly aware and encouraging and proud of the Godness within him – as when she urges him to do something about the sudden lack of wine at the wedding at Canada –

But also and at the same time, still anxious about where his instincts are likely to land him. About the priorities they’ll probably engender and what he might get up to and whether he’ll be safe. She does seem early on, to sort of be on alert.

At one point early on in the preaching and teaching and accomplishing of miracles that begin to constitute his mission and his ministry, we even see her try to stop him. Try to disconnect him from all this, try to bring him home. She even hauls his siblings along with her for back-up, and that’s NOT because she’s unfaithful or doubts him or is otherwise discounting what he’s made for –

On the contrary. It’s because she knows what he’s made for. He’s shown her who he is, from childhood, and what she fears more than anything is that what he’s made for isn’t safe. It certainly wasn’t safe when he was lost in Jerusalem when he was twelve, and what she fears more than anything is that it’s only going to get less safe now that he’s grown. And it’s going to begin to threaten the authorities.

He's shown her who he is, from childhood, and she doesn’t want to have to believe it, but she also knows that she DOES have to believe it.

She has to accept it. And she does. Over time we see her move into his closest circle, clearly accepting the fullness of the import of who he is, come what may. When people show you who they are, believe them, and Mary does come to accept that.

But here’s the thing. I really wish we had more stories, between Mary with Jesus early on, and Mary with Jesus at the end – one of his most trusted and beloved circle, at the foot of the cross, and she knew all along, and finally she learned to accept it.

Because I’ll never deny – and I can’t, within a faith expression so deeply grounded in notions of repentance and forgiveness and change, God being our helper – I’ll never deny that people can change. 

I’ve known people who’ve unlearned childhood patterns, and turned away from being violent, and beaten back addictions one day at a time, and taken on NEW practices and NEW patterns and NEW ways of being healthy inside themselves and in the way they are with others. 

So I know that people can change. But I also know it’s pretty special because it’s incredibly rare. There’s a reason common wisdom includes the advice: when someone shows you who they are, believe them. 

It’s because it’s infinitely easier for someone to SAY “I promise I’ll change” than it is for them to actually do it. 

So I really wish we’d heard more from Mary, between early on and the foot of the cross. Between Jesus at twelve showing her who he is – and she thinks somehow she can forestall its risks, deny its inevitability, and protect him -- 

And Jesus as he RE-enters in the last week of his life, and he’s never wavered from showing her who he is – but she’s learned to believe it, because it isn’t going to change. All the way to the cross.

I wish we heard more from Mary, and how she learned to understand and accept that. That he wasn’t going to change. I wish we heard from her friends and whether they helped her accept that, and HOW they helped her accept. 

Because if for Mary the apparent end of the story is having to witness, to suffer, her child’s inevitable martyrdom at the hands of the powers and principalities whose tyrannies he challenged with the simple calls to love and justice and peace –

For way too many of her sisters in particular, in generations before and since, the end of the story has been their own death. 

Four women have been killed by their partners in Nova Scotia since October, and a fifth was killed by her son. And there is no way that that violence came out of the blue. But it is a hard hard thing to learn, when people show us who they are, to believe them. 

For people of faith especially, we want so much to believe instead in their capacity to change, God being their helper. We want so much to believe in their promises they’ll change. It’s so deeply engrained in our faithfulness, never mind in our essential human default toward goodness, to want so much to believe – all evidence to contrary – that whatever someone’s shown us repeatedly about who they are… it’ll change.

But Mary’s a cautionary tale. And if I say that I wish that we knew HOW she learned to accept that who Jesus was, wasn’t going to change, or HOW her friends helped her learn to accept that who Jesus was, wasn’t going to change –

At the end of the day what matters and makes her a cautionary tale is simply that she DID to learn to accept that. 

The child who’d go off on his own at twelve in the metropolis of Jerusalem, driven more by the Godness within than by the fears of his parents or ANY presenting danger that could easily have arisen…. He wasn’t going to change.

Mary’s great wisdom was learning to accept that. Whatever other glories might be afoot in this reading, her’s is a cautionary tale that bears repeating. Her’s is a wisdom worth learning to our core. It might even be the sudden blinding overwhelming light of an epiphany.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Amen.