Knowing and Doing

First Sunday after the Epiphany
St. Luke 2:41-52
© 2010 Rev. Matthew L. Whitehead

In its most basic sense, the will of God is easy to know. God has not hidden His will from us, but rather has revealed it to us through the Prophets and Apostles, and we can discern God’s will by reading it in the Scriptures. We know that it is God’s will that we ‘love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, and minds… and to love our neighbors’;1 We know that it is God’s will that we should keep His commandments, that we should worship Him in His Church, that we should give of ourselves for His sake. We know these things because we were taught.

But knowing and doing are two different things; any parent can tell you that. We teach our children how to behave, but they do not always do as we say. Even though we are adults, we are just like children before God: Our Father has taught us how to conduct ourselves, but we do not always do as He says. We come up with some creative excuses, too: ‘The woman You gave me made me do it’,2 ‘The serpent tricked me’,3 “Am I my brother’s keeper?”,4 ‘The end justifies the means’, ‘It will not hurt anybody’, ‘Nobody will know’, and so on. In the end, our excuses are insufficient; they are miserable attempts to justify ourselves, for even though we know the will of God, we do not always do it.

Today’s Gospel Lesson gives us a picture of the Holy Family. We see them doing the will of God by making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem. At first reading this does not seem like such a big deal, but if we read this passage in light of what the Church has traditionally taught about who Mary and Joseph were, and the hardships they experienced as the parents of Jesus, then we see in them a remarkable example of not only knowing the will of God, but doing it in the face of incredible difficulty and humiliation.

The Church has traditionally believed that Mary lived in the Temple as a little girl; Her parents, Joachim and Anna, had dedicated her to that end, much in the same way that the prophet Samuel had been.5 At age twelve the Temple officials had to find something to do with her, lest her monthly cycle defile the Temple. Joseph, a respected elder in Israel and a widower, was chosen by lot to receive Mary as his wife, that she might be cared for. Joseph was not happy about the arrangement because of the difficulty it would cause his family; he already had children by his deceased wife that were about the same age as Mary, maybe even older. Nevertheless, he obeyed his spiritual authorities and took Mary, but he left her to the care of household and went away to ‘build his buildings’. When he returned home he found Mary, at age sixteen, to be six months pregnant. Now he was in a bind: he could either face the shame of accusations that he defiled her outside of wedlock, or he could face the embarrassment of not protecting this beloved maiden of Israel. For fear of scandal, Joseph tried to lay low, but soon enough it was all discovered. Mary and Joseph were dragged before a Temple court, and they were given the test of bitter water to expose their guilt.6 They both passed the test as blameless, but surely the people still talked; this was, after all, good fodder for gossip: a well known and respected elder of Israel had been accused of violating one of Israel’s most beloved young virgins.7

This is is the background that we must keep in mind when we read about the Holy Family in today’s Gospel Lesson. Nobody doubts that Mary and Joseph knew what God’s will was. Certainly they had both been well trained in their studies of Torah; but they had also both been visited by angels, who brought them God’s will directly and explicitly. What is admirable about Mary and Joseph is their faithful obedience to God, despite the hardships they had to endure.

They were faithful to educate the young Jesus in the Jewish faith. This is evidenced in Jesus’ interactions with the religious scholars, that they marveled at this young boy’s understanding. But their faithfulness went beyond merely educating Jesus in the academics of Judaism, they also trained him to be devout. They knew that it was God’s will for them to observe Passover in Jerusalem.8 Now, Mary and Joseph were not obscure people: Before Jesus’ birth they had both held some degree of fame; Their betrothal, a fifty-something widower to a teenage virgin, only magnified that fame; The pregnancy with Jesus, no doubt, swept through the people like wildfire; Certainly the priests and Temple officials remembered them, and all of the controversy that had surrounded them. And yet, each year they returned to Jerusalem, and endured the scandal over and over again. One can only imagine the pointing, the gazing, and the whispers that filled the air, as the nearly seventy year old Joseph came into town with his twenty-eight year old wife and twelve year old son. They endured such derision because they knew God’s will for their child, and they could do no other.

Knowing and doing are two different things, but for the Holy Family the gulf between knowing and doing was immense. Their obedience to God, for the sake of their own souls and for the sake of Jesus, required incredible humility on their part. It is for that reason that many in the Church celebrate today not only as a Sunday within the octave of Epiphany, but as the Feast of the Holy Family.9 We can entreat their prayers, that we might “[be given] grace to follow their good examples”,10 to not only know, but to do God’s will, whatever the cost. This, after all, is the emphasis of today’s collect, that “[we] may both perceive and know what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power to fulfill the same.”11

1 Lev 19:18; Deut 6:5; 30:6; Mt 22:37; Mk 12:30; Lk 10:27; Cp. 1928 Book of Common Prayer [1928 BCP], 69.
2 Gen 3:12.
3 Gen 3:13.
4 Gen 4:9.
5 1 Samuel 1-3.
6 Num 5:11-31.
7 Protevangelium of James, especially paragraphs 1-16. This account of Mary and Joseph was undisputed in the Church, even among the Protestant Reformers. It was not until late after the Reformation that it fell into obscurity and subject to doubt.
8 Deut 16:1-8 (cp. Exo 12:11; 23:15); The Passover sacrifice was required to be made “at the place which the Lord… [chose] to place his name in”, which in the time of Christ was only at the Temple in Jerusalem.
9 According to the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar and the Anglican Missal (among others, perhaps).
10 From the “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church”; 1928 BCP, 75.
11 From the “Collect for the First Sunday after the Epiphany”; 1928 BCP, 109.