Most of the people we meet in the Bible are grownups.  Adam and Eve may be brand new when we are introduced, but they are born full grown! Likewise, we meet Abraham as an adult, and Paul, and Peter. In the Gospels of John and Mark, that is how we meet Jesus, too.

But there are significant exceptions.  We meet the twins Jacob and Esau in the womb–already at it, hammer and tongs–and watch as their sibling rivalry descends into deception and violence before finally resolving in reconciliation.  We meet Moses as a baby, threatened by Pharaoh, set adrift in his little ark by his desperate mother—only to be found and adopted by Pharaoh’s own daughter, and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, with his own mother as nurse.

Then there is Samuel, who would grow up to become a prophet-priest, anointing both Saul and David, Israel’s first kings.  But first, little Samuel was God’s answer to the heartfelt prayers of his (previously barren) mother Hannah. In gratitude, his parents dedicated their son to the LORD, and he grew up in the temple, raised by the priest Eli–with annual visits from his mother, who made his robes.  The text succinctly summarizes Samuel’s growing-up years: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the LORD and with the people” (1 Sam 2:26, NRSVue).

Unlike Mark and John, both Matthew and Luke begin Jesus’ story with an account of his birth.  But after an account of the Holy Family fleeing as refugees from Herod and his son Archelaus, Matthew jumps to where John and Mark begin their Gospels, with the adult Jesus’ baptism.

I am sure you have seen this print of Jesus as a toddler, playing in the sawdust in Joseph’s carpenter shop. In his chubby hand he holds a nail, and his shadow stretching on the floor behind him has the shape of a cross. The point is clear: Jesus was “born to die.”  Certainly, some gospel accounts can be read in that way. In fact, New Testament scholar Martin Kähler famously called the gospel of Mark a “passion narrative with an extended introduction.”

But Luke tells the story differently. Rather than jumping immediately to grownup Jesus, he gives us a bit of Jesus’ childhood, including a story of every parent’s nightmare.

On their way back home from their annual Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph suddenly realize that they don’t know where Jesus is!  They search for him frantically, retracing their steps to Jerusalem.

After three days (three days!) Mary and Joseph find their son in the temple, in an intense conversation with the religious leaders. We learn that even as a boy, Jesus has attained a terrifying sense of his identity and calling: “I must be in my Father’s house” (Luke 2:48).

Luke concludes this account with a summary statement, echoing (although not quite quoting from) Samuel’s story: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). This is typical of the way that Luke uses Scripture.  Unlike Matthew, who quotes biblical passages, Luke alludes to texts, writing in the style of the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture, the Septuagint.

Luke’s account does have ample foreshadowing of Jesus’ death (remember Simeon’s words to Mary when Jesus, only forty days old, was first brought to the temple: “a sword will pierce your own soul, too” (Luke 2:35). Still the way that Luke tells the story—with his echo of the account of Samuel’s growth and maturing—suggests that Jesus’ life, not just his death, matters.

Focusing so intently on Jesus’ death has had sad consequences for American Christianity.  In an interview with NPR journalist Scott Detrow, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine, described

having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

Jumping straight from Christmas to Good Friday, we can conveniently ignore Jesus’ teaching and his lived example.  Jesus shows us what being human–created in God’s image (Gen 1:27)–really means.  The International Theological Commission of the Vatican (2004) put it very well:

In him, we find the total receptivity to the Father which should characterize our own existence, the openness to the other in an attitude of service which should characterize our relations with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the mercy and love for others which Christ, as the image of the Father, displays for us.

If we focus solely on the cross, our faith becomes more about death than life: more about going to heaven when we die than living here and now; more about escaping the world in the Rapture than caring for the world and its people.

Did Jesus die for us? Of course he did.  From the first, Christians have understood Jesus’ death as bridging the gap between God and people, conveying the depth of God’s love and the bottomless reach of God’s forgiveness and grace.  But Jesus was not “born to die.” If all that matters to us about Jesus is his death on the cross, we can (as Russell Moore sorrowfully observes) conveniently ignore the humble servant Jesus of the Gospels, and substitute a macho warrior Christ, largely of our own making.

Did Jesus die for us? Of course he did. But Jesus also lived for us, and indeed lives for us, as Immanuel: God with us.  Friends, the incarnation is a big idea: far too big be restricted to the Atonement alone. As theologian Edwin van Driel writes, “the category of redemption is not rich enough to explain the wonder of his presence” (Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology [Oxford: Oxford University, 2008], 165).

God’s act of creation already presupposed that God would consequently enter time and space as a creature, in order to enter fully into relationship with us. Rather than our relationship with Christ being merely, or at least primarily, functional (our sin is the problem; Christ’s death is the solution), van Driel proposes that “the intimate presence of God in Christ is the goal of all things,” so that “all aspects of our lives are related to him” (van Driel 2008, 165).

Friends, Jesus lived for us. Empowered by his invincible life, let us resolve to live for him, too–to do those things that Jesus did among us: feeding people, healing people, freeing people, proclaiming the good news of God’s salvation and the completion of God’s creation.