Luke 2:41-52 “Did you not know that I should be in my Father’s business?”

These words of Jesus, in the temple, at the age of 12, are the first words of him that the Gospels transmit to us, and they are at the same time disconcerting and very revealing. The attitude and tone with which Jesus pronounces them in response to his anguished parents are disconcerting, and they reveal what for Jesus was his primary mission, the reason for his coming into the world. After this they went down again to Nazareth and there He was subject to his parents in obedience, something that contrasts totally with the previous scene. The Gospel tells us that in the meantime Mary kept all this in her heart: she kept her sorrow in the face of the disconcerting answer, but she also kept what her Son had just revealed to them, and perhaps in this way she understood what Simeon had already told her: this child will be a sign of contradiction…