Wist ye not?

‘Wist’ is an Old English word with Germanic derivations from wissen, to know. We still use words like ‘wit’ to describe a certain form of thinking usually connected to clever play with words such as in puns. It is good to be reminded that the English language has both Germanic roots as well as Latinate roots. At the heart of this remarkable Gospel story from St. Luke, about the boy Jesus being found in the temple in Jerusalem at age twelve, is the rhetorical question that he puts to Mary who was worried about where he was. He had stayed behind in the temple among the doctors of the law, “both hearing them and asking them questions,” to the amazement of all that heard him.

 

“Did you not know,” he says, “that I must be about my father’s business?” The whole scene is a kind of epiphany, the making known or manifestation of the things of God in our midst. The story is always read on The First Sunday after the Epiphany, just after the celebration of the coming in and going out of the Magi-Kings. Like that story, it, too, is all about teaching. There can be no knowing without the idea of things being made known, or manifested. In this story, as it has been received and understood in over fifteen hundred years or more of liturgical use and commentary, is the Christian idea and teaching that Jesus is both true God and true man. Here he is the divine teacher and the human student.

 

It is the only story of Christ’s boyhood, found only in Luke’s Gospel following upon the infancy narratives. An infant is, literally, one without speech. Thus, this story marks the first time that Jesus is reported as having spoken. The whole scene signals what we might call, to use a later Jewish term, Jesus’s bar mitzvah, the transition from childhood to adulthood, and which carries over into the Christian traditions of ‘confirmation.’ What that entails is a knowledge of the Law, the Torah, for which the individual within the community’s life of prayer and devotion undertakes personal responsibility. It is about growing up into an understanding of ideas that are made manifest and which you undertake to grasp and make them part of yourself. It is about taking responsibility for your own education and learning, humanly speaking. That presupposes that there are things which are to be known and embraced in the constant pursuit of learning. There is the teaching but then there is the struggle to learn for us all; each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold.

 

This story most clearly relates to the idea of a school as a place of teaching and learning. It may seem odd to us that age twelve might mark the transition point to adulthood but that has very much to do with a literate culture of readers and the idea of reaching an age where you begin to step up and enter an adult world. Some of our students are not yet twelve years old (as I learned from the Junior School Chapel!); others are exactly twelve; and many are older than twelve - teenagers to use a term invented around 1940 - and some of us far, far older! But the underlying idea concerns education as a process of learning and growing up into an understanding of what has been taught and is being learned and, often as not, over and over again. One of the meanings for the word ‘religion’ is the idea of re-reading. That is what belongs to many religious and philosophical traditions - a re-reading year in and year out of passages of Scripture that convey major intellectual and spiritual principles and ideas.

 

Jesus here signals to Mary the purpose of his incarnate life, his being with us in the flesh of our humanity as derived from her. He is the Word made flesh; the things of God are made manifest through his sacred humanity and in all of the things that belong to the purpose of epiphany. At the heart of that purpose is the idea that there are things which God wants us to know and that ennoble and dignify our humanity; in short, they belong to our ultimate good in fellowship with God and with one another.

 

Learning is not a straightforward matter. We often forget and have to learn again - all of us. We often grasp things in an incomplete and partial manner and even in a mostly mistaken way. As Paul puts it, “we see in a glass darkly.” Yet we see and what we are given to see has the power to change us, to transform us “by the renewing of our minds” upon the things of God made known to us. In this case, it is through the witness of the Scriptures in the classical traditions of the churches. That idea of learning through the manifestation of things to be learned extends to the classroom and to every other area of our life. It belongs to the essential idea of a school.

 

It may be that like Mary in the story, we “understand not the saying which he spoke.” We don’t always get things right off. But we are meant to be like Mary and “keep all these sayings” in our hearts. We are being opened out to the purpose of God’s engagement with our humanity and what that means for our good. It means that there is a good to be found in our constant pursuit of learning. It is, as our mission statement suggests, something life-long. For learning belongs to the most essential features of our humanity, the idea of ourselves not only as knowers but as lovers of wisdom. “Wist ye not,” Jesus says, a word which recalls us to a kind of wisdom. Such is the “business” of the Father revealed in the Son and Word of God.