Amazon.com: Books: Luke: "Luke"
Working feverishly on my sermon for Sunday. I am disappointed in what Darrell Bock had to say on this week's text.

I am preaching through the lectionary and the text this week is Luke 2:41-52. This passage brings to mind all sorts of questions and mysteries and yet Bock seems obvious to them.

I understand that this is an English only, commentary "lite" if you will, but much of evangelicalism doesn't read the text very carefully. Much modern thinking wants an authoritative question and answer approach with a text like this. They often want the mystery removed.

Now I am not saying that Bock doesn't read carefully. But his treatment of this particular passage is far from satisfying.

Reading the story, many questions and mysteries strike me. Especially interesting is the idea conveyed in verse 52: "And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men." This verse causes me to ask: What does it mean that Jesus grew in wisdom? Wasn’t he the all-wise God? How do we make sense of this verse? Isn’t Jesus God incarnate? Can God grow in wisdom? At what point did Jesus become wise to the fact that he was God incarnate?

Clearly, definite answers to these questions are unavailable. Yet it often feels to me that evangelicalism is unwilling or unaware of questions such as these. And if modern thinking stumbles upon questions like these then they must have rational answers. In the age of reason would we dare raise these questions without answers? Only a postmodern crowd could stand the tension and the mystery.

Yet this is what I am drawn to in many of these texts. The mystery. The questions. In my rural, modern context, questions and mystery don't preach. We need answers. The last thing we want to think about is Jesus as a budding adolescent sitting around talking theology with a bunch of long-bearded rabbi's. Especially if the text isn't kind enough to fill us in on what they were discussing.