The Second Sunday after Christmas
4 January 2026
O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully restore, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a
Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
About a year ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a very important exhibition of Sienese paintings from the later Middle Ages and early-Renaissance. As a specialist in Florentine art, I like to think of Siena a cultural backwater, but that’s not true at all. In the Middle Ages, Siena lay on the main road from Rome (and, in fact Brindisi, in the far south) into France and across the English Channel to Canterbury. It was an extremely well-travelled pilgrimage road and a trade route. And these travellers carried with them books and sculpture and paintings and fabric and all sorts of things that the Sienese got to see. And in turn the English, Burgundian, Flemish and German travellers took souvenirs they acquired on their journies, and goods for sale back to their home towns. Indeed, art historians call the fourteenth-century Gothic style “international” in no small part because of the trade along this road.
But, there weren’t just pilgrims and businessmen that travelled along the Via Francigena. Artists travelled too, including a Sienese painter called Simone Martini, who is well known for the influence of French gothic art on his work. Simone, who died in 1344, travelled to Avignon in France, where he spent the last ten or so years of his life working at the papal court, during the period of so-called “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy, when the pope was no longer in residence in Rome.
In the Siena show there were (for practical reasons given the challenges of shipping very large works of art across the world) a great number of smaller paintings that would have been just the right size to be portable. And portable art is potentially influential art. One of these pictures by Simone, from his Avignon period, was a panel in his characteristic “international style,” of a moment in our Gospel story for today, the tale of Jesus being left behind in Jerusalem after the family’s Passover visit. Now, there are a lot of pictures out there of the “tween” Jesus teaching in the Temple (don’t bother Googling it – they are mostly terrible). There are vanishingly few pictures, however, of the moment in the story that Simone depicted.
In the painting, which you can see here, we have twelve year-old Jesus being led by Joseph to his seated mother. Joseph is gesturing towards Mary, as if to say, “look how worried your mother is.” Mary, in turn, is looking up from her prayer book and extending her right hand to Jesus, and we can just hear her saying the words right out of Luke’s story: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Jesus, on the other hand, is standing with his feet firmly planted on the ground, leaning back slightly, his arms crossed (with his own prayer book held close to his chest), and a real look of consternation and defiance on his face, complete with a frown and a kind of “death stare” that I certainly would not like to be on the receiving end of.
Jesus is shown having none of his parents’ criticism. After all, they were the ones who forgot about him. “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” He’s practically telling Joseph, “You’re not my real dad!”
[All kidding aside,] it is an extraordinary image. We see a range of real, human emotions. Joseph’s expression is imploring, tyring to get Jesus to understand how worried they were. Mary’s look is stony, a mixture of anger and relief. Jesus is stroppy and defiant in a pre-teen act of bravado. Luke shows us a fairly normal, smart kid who has a sense of who he is and what he is interested in. Jesus likes to hang out with the teachers and talk about God and the scriptures. The Holy Family is a real family. This story has resonance because it is so real. I remember vividly that this was one of the Bible stories that the Sunday School students from William’s cohort all knew and were very amused by.
Today’s story shows Jesus, basically as a sixth grader, left in Jerusalem by his forgetful parents, heading to and finding shelter and support in the Temple, a safe place that he knew well and to which he was drawn. When his parents finally track him down in this age without cell phones, his mother blames him for their failure to keep an eye on him, and Jesus retorts with the smart-aleky answer that they should have known where to look for him. An answer that Mary just doesn’t get. It is a story that shows Jesus and his family integrated into the human life of his day, it shows his parents messing up in their responsibilities. It shows Jesus as a plucky, resourceful kid. Luke’s tale is not supernatural or fanciful. And while we all love those kinds of stories, too, this one is a story that we can relate to in very real terms.
The one story we have of Jesus from his tween years is a glimpse not of some young magician, some little wizard who can’t control his powers (like the boy Jesus from the Infancy Gospels of Thomas, a text the church rejected), but of a real boy and parents who aren’t perfect. I think that Simone and the members of the papal court understood this, too, and it is marvellous to think that this is the moment from this tale that someone seven hundred years ago wanted to remember, too – this is the child Jesus someone in fourteenth-century France wanted painted and hanging on his wall, or in his chapel. This is the child Jesus that the church remembers.
In this season of the Incarnation, of understanding and coming to terms with Jesus as fully human and fully divine, entering completely into our human experiences, we get this one little glimpse into how Luke understood what Jesus’ childhood might have looked like. It was not full of puffs and bangs. It was full of family vacations and family drama, conflict and love, of learning and growing, just like us. When Jesus, at his baptism, inaugurated the Kingdom and embarked upon his ministry, the ministry of teaching and healing, of gathering followers and showing the people that Love was stronger than death, he did so having been born like the rest of us in the mess and pain and dangers of childbirth, grown up in a house with parents who loved him, but were not perfect, grew and learnt through his adolescence so that when he came to his work, the work that changed everything, he did so as our brother in the flesh, our brother in our humanity.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
Christmas Feria, 3 January 2026
© 2026 Andrew Charles Blume