Following God Might Get Us Into Trouble

[Note: Today’s guest blogger is Mary Heveron-Smith. Mary is a retired high school English teacher who is active in the Spiritus Anti-Racism Coalition (SPARC), along with her husband Steve.  Thank you, Mary!]

As the fourth child of seven, I had watched enough behaviors that I figured out how to stay under my parents’ radar and not make waves. My younger brother, Bernie, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid of conflict and challenged my parents often.

He won a case against that the “no-going-out-on-school-nights” rule by arguing that we would be more ready to do our homework if we could go out for a bit and clear our minds. He defied my parents’ thinking that music lessons were a luxury; he got a job to pay for lessons and became a musician. In elementary school, he literally stood up to a bully when he walked to the front of the classroom to place himself, in solidarity, next to a boy being shamed by a teacher.

When the rules and expectations of our loved ones or the people in charge don’t sit right, what do we do? If we push back, will we experience rejection? Will we get in trouble because we upset the comfortable order of things? And yet isn’t breaking a bad rule something that could land us in what the late Civil Rights leader John Lewis would say is “good trouble”? Didn’t Martin Luther King Jr. call an unjust law “no law at all”?

In today’s Gospel (second version), Luke 2 tells of Jesus dealing with family expectations and conflict. We hear Luke’s account of Jesus’ extended stay in the temple in Jerusalem, during the Passover festival. Here, Jesus is “sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” He also
impresses the teachers with His knowledge. The problem is that this is all taking place while his parents are heading back to Nazareth in a caravan that they thought included their son! Mary and Joseph are in a panic, and when they are all finally reunited, they scold Jesus. (This story is movie-scene worthy.)

Jesus pushes back: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” he asks his parents. Mary and Joseph don’t seem ready for this. Luke writes that “they did not understand what he said to them.” So Jesus goes back to Nazareth with them and “was obedient to them.”

But like any good mom, Mary was tuned in, and it didn’t escape her what had just happened. If you read on in this Gospel, Luke then goes on to write, “and his mother kept all these things in her heart.” I’m imagining Mary lying awake at night, stressed and yet full of wonder over her boy. Jesus had been lost. And when he was found, he spoke his cryptic words, that He must be in his “Father’s house.”

Mary must have seen how comfortable Jesus was during his extended stay at the Passover festival, as he sat with the teachers. Maybe she sensed that the pull toward His life away from home had begun. Like all of us at some point, Jesus was dealing with parental expectations and the stirrings of desire for what His life was going to be. Jesus had begun to get into the “good trouble” that would characterize His life.

Hearing and following the voice of God can be a challenge, because doing so can get us in trouble. Yet I’m thinking “good trouble” is just what God wants us to be in right now.