30 th December: 1 st Sunday of Christmas

The Changing Shape of Vocation

When my children first went to secondary school, the Open University published a book about bringing up teenagers. ‘Perhaps we should buy a copy,’ I said to them one day. I can still remember my daughter’s reaction, more than 25 years later. ‘Anyone would think we were a problem.’ I tried not to sound defensive or patronising. ‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘we just want to do this parenting stuff as well as we can.’

We never did buy the book. Thankfully, I don’t remember their teenage years as a ‘problem’. But as a grandparent now, I’m increasingly aware that growing up in a changing world is full of challenges, for parents as well as children.

My parents left school at 14 and started work. They were expected to contribute to the family income and never experienced the luxury of what we now call ‘adolescence’. Young people seem to enter this transitional world at an ever earlier age: too old to be treated as children, not yet ready for the responsibilities previous generations had thrust upon them. Societies in the developed world prefer their young to be educated, which gives them more time to wonder what their lives are for when they eventually leave adolescence behind.

The twelve-year-old Jesus was not biologically a teenager, but in the eyes of his parents and community he was on the threshold of adulthood. Boys of his age were moving from the female-dominated world of the home into the public world governed by men. Bar mitzvah, the rite of transition, was still a year away, but as he approached it we can imagine Jesus wondering what lay ahead of him.

Luke’s account of Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem for Passover is the only story in the canonical gospels of the hidden years between infancy and adulthood. He and his family would have travelled with others for reasons of safety as well as solidarity. Losing Jesus reflects badly on Joseph, now seen as a father who cannot keep his family in order. Searching for Jesus has Mary and Joseph leaving the safety of the group, putting themselves at risk to look for their lost son.

It would be easy to view the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple through modern eyes, a precocious adolescent, whose retort to his parents seems at first insensitive, even self-centred, given their understandable anxiety. But this is Jesus beginning to take his place in the public world of men, where Israel’s teachers debate the meaning of Moses under the Roman occupation.

Jesus seems to be utterly absorbed by the rabbis’ discussions about Israel’s vocation at Passover-tide. Jerusalem’s air is heavy with hope that one day God’s people might be able to live freely in their ancestral lands. Maybe he wonders what it means to be in his Father’s house, when its high priest is appointed by a foreign ruler. Are the discussions swirling around this twelve-year-old encouraging him to wonder where his vocation lies? What must he leave behind if he is to fulfil his heavenly Father’s call? What will he be asked to embrace as his vocation changes shape?

Today’s parents can be very protective of their growing children, keen to ensure that their offspring hang onto the best of their early years as they begin to find their way in the world ‘out there’. Sons and daughters can react by distancing themselves from parents, socially and culturally as well as geographically. A student I knew had grown up in a financially stretched home, where he received every encouragement to pursue his education. Though he was clearly grateful for all that his mother had given him (he never mentioned his father), his visits became more infrequent as the gap between his two worlds widened.

The student’s experience was hardly unique. Think of those who migrate to live in a foreign country, whether for work or safety. The more they settle, the more conscious they become of the space that separates the worlds they know. I met a mental health professional who worked in sea-side Suffolk but grew up in Zimbabwe. He spoke about moving back and forth between different religious worlds. ‘Every time I visit my family in Africa I’m acutely aware of how differently I live my life here, including my faith, and how much I’ve left behind. My father wouldn’t recognise the world I live in now.’

How much did Jesus leave behind as he prepared to move from the female-dominated world of the home into the public world governed by men? Luke suggests that he remained loyal to his mother’s world, as he returned to Nazareth with his parents ‘and was obedient to them’. Like Samuel in the Old Testament reading, he emerged into adulthood with his reputation among family and community enhanced. The same is true of his developing relationship with his heavenly Father.

But as his story continues, there is no doubt that a gap did open up between the two worlds that Jesus knew. We don’t know the details, but as his public ministry got under way he realised that ‘family’ was more than kin and community (Luke 8:19–21; 4:23–30). This is not simply Jesus’ growing away from his roots. Better to see it as his growing into the vocation that emerged at his baptism, when his heavenly Father’s voice addressed him: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ (Luke 4:22).

When today’s churches speak of vocation, they often have in mind a wider group than those who are entrusted with some kind of authorised ministry. Vocation is the calling of all the baptised. But not only the baptised. Vocation is essentially human, the fruit of belonging to a creation that is called into being by God’s ‘let there be’ (Genesis 1). The Bible never defines vocation, unlike these words, often attributed to Aristotle: ‘Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there is your vocation.’ Their meaning too can be stretched. ‘Where our gifts and talents engage with the needs and opportunities of the world, there lies our vocation.’

We can imagine Jesus’ vocation being nurtured by the relatively private worlds of family and community. Synagogue and temple drew him into the public realm. And his vocation came into its own as he engaged more deliberately with the needs and opportunities of the world represented by the Jordan and Jerusalem, the villages and towns of Galilee, all of them under Roman occupation.

The changing shape of Jesus’ vocation encourages today’s disciples to reflect on theirs. The words in Colossians 3:12–17 are addressed to those who have ‘stripped off the old self with its practices and have [been] clothed with the new self’ (Colossians 2:9–10). If they reflect the baptismal ritual of taking off and putting on clothes that symbolise old and new life, they suggest that the vocation of the baptised comes into its own as we engage with the world ‘out there’. The renewal of the inner life of individuals and congregations is essential in this (Colossians 3:2–3, 15–16), but clothes are what we wear in public.

‘God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved’ (the words echo the accounts of Jesus’ baptism) are called to display the character of Christ wherever our gifts and talents cross the needs and opportunities of our everyday world. Living by ‘compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love’ in a rapidly changing world is as challenging for us as it was for Jesus and his first followers. If our vocation doesn’t always meet with human approval, we can at least pray that it expresses the ‘wisdom and divine favour’ that nurtured the calling of Jesus from the beginning.