A 'Runaway' Child

Martyn Payne

On Your Marks:

Again and again throughout the Bible we find God searching for those who are lost. In many ways the whole Bible is a story of 'lost and found'. People choose to go their own way and leave the security of God's love but God does not give up on them. God comes searching to bring people home because, as St Augustine's prayer puts it, 'we are restless, until we find our rest in [God]'.

This session is part of a series that explores this theme in stories from the Old and New Testaments. In each we see individuals who are lost for a variety of reasons, but God rejoices to find them again and bring them back to his loving arms.

This outline focuses on the story of Jesus lost in Jerusalem for three days and how Mary and Joseph then find him in the temple.

Get Set:

Use the retelling of this story from The Barnabas Children's Bible, story 253, page 222.

You will find the Bible story in Luke 2:41-52.

Go!

1. In one sense this lost and found story is different from all the others in the series. It focuses not on the one who gets lost so much as those who lose him. And this time it is not God who is searching but Mary and Joseph. How frantic they must have been!

Yet the story is still about the joy of finding the lost, and Jesus himself experiences being found. It is another way in which Jesus has entered fully into the experience of being human and so can understand how we feel.

Children will have their own experiences of being lost and found - something that seems to happen to many of us at some time when growing up. So start the session by giving the group the opportunity to share what it felt like.

Have you ever got lost? Where was it? When was it? How did you feel?

Who found you? What did they say? What did you learn from it all?

2. In one way, this story is also about being so absorbed in doing what you love to do that you forget your responsibilities! Jesus enjoyed talking about God in the temple with the priests and teachers there. He lost all sense of time.

Maybe the children in your group can relate to this?

Where is their favourite place to be? What do they love doing the most?

Do they perhaps spend so long doing their favourite activity that they forget other things they should be doing or places where they should be?

Use these questions and the earlier ones from the first activity to help you make a bridge to the events of this lost and found story.

3. Only Luke includes a story about Jesus as a child in his Gospel.

I wonder why Luke chose to include it?

Try hot seating Luke the writer. Maybe a leader could be Luke and the children be invited to ask the questions.

Why did he include this story?

What was he trying to show?

What new things about Jesus does it reveal?

Doesn't it just show Jesus up as being disobedient, or at best forgetful?

How does it help Luke's aim to present Jesus to those who have never heard about him?

Would the Gospel suffer if this story were left out?

4. Try the exercise Bringing a Picture of Life. There are several well-known pictures of this incident from the Bible that you could find via the Internet. Or why not use a modern interpretation from The Life of Jesus through the Eyes of an Artist published by Barnabas. A CD of the images is available directly from BRF.

In this activity the group reconstructs the scene of the picture with some simple props and then can move on into suggesting possible words, actions and thoughts for the characters involved. This exercise can really open up the story imaginatively as well as helping to establish the basic facts of what happened.

To help with this exercise, first read the story in The Barnabas Children's Bible, story 253.

5. Mary and Joseph were obviously very puzzled by what had happened. Luke tells us that Mary thought these things over in her heart.

What do the children think she learned from all that happened?

Talk this over with your group.

6. In terms of Jesus' life story, this incident records the very first words that we ever hear Jesus 'speak'. Interestingly, it is both a question and also rather mysterious. He says something unexpected that makes people think. This is a pattern for what is to come.

To illustrate this, you might like to try a fun game of trying to carry on a conversation across the group for as long as possible about a given situation but anything anyone says must be in the form of a question. For example, the situation might be at the swimming pool and would go like this:

Have you brought a spare towel?

Did you ask me to bring one?

Didn't you bring one last time?

Why would I do that?

and so on.

Jesus' questions weren't quite so frivolous but they did get people thinking and wanting to find out more.

7. The story leaves lots of things unexplained. For example:

Why didn't Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus was missing much earlier?

Where did Jesus spend the night in Jerusalem?

What sort of questions was Jesus asking?

What questions did the priests and teachers ask of him?

Why didn't Mary and Joseph try looking in the temple sooner?

Why did Jesus not let his parents know what he was doing?

Why didn't Jesus get much more of a telling-off?

Any or all of these might get your group talking - and asking questions!

8. Younger children might like to recreate the scene in the temple with some peg dolls as the people (available in packs from stationers). Include some rolled-up card to become the temple columns near which they met and some smaller paper scrolls to represent the scriptures about which they were talking.

9. It is possible that Jesus had recently experienced his Bar Mitzvah, which meant he had become 'a son of the law' and this pilgrimage to Jerusalem may have been his first. Maybe in the temple he was discussing the very passage that he had to learn off by heart for that special day.

For a time of prayer together choose a particular passage from 'the law' that could have been one he would of known well, such as Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

Read the passage carefully and slowly, pausing in between each of the verses and giving a moment to pray for God's help to do what it says there, namely:

Love God with all our hearts.

Learn his laws.

Talk about his ways to others.

Write down the special things God says to us.

Find ways to remember that God is with us wherever we go.

Return to the Ideas homepage