A Submissive Lord

On Sunday, the pastor of the church we are visiting preached from Luke 2:39-52, the passage where the 12-year-old Jesus stays in the temple while his parents unwittingly leave him in Jerusalem and travel toward home.  I've read this passage quite a few times before, but I have somehow skipped over verse 51:  "And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them." 

Perhaps I've never read this verse since I became a parent.  Because this time through, the verse just blew me away.  Jesus, at age 12, knew his purpose:  He "must" be in His Father's house.  It's pretty clear that his parents didn't get it, and who can blame them?  So, when his mother confronted the lost-and-found Jesus, Jesus spoke the truth to her but then "came to Nazareth and was submissive to them."  Here we have the perfect One submitting to the imperfect parents.

I know that Jesus was humble.  He "humbled Himself and became obedient to death."  But to my mind, this obedience, humility, and submission was to God, not to people. 

But to think of Jesus submitting to imperfect parents really hit close to home for me.   I kept wondering, Why?  Why would Jesus submit to his sinful parents?  Surely there were times when he actually knew better than they.  But this is not the picture of a know-it-all teenager.  It is the picture of a submissive, obedient child who honored his parents despite their imperfections.

I think the answer to "Why?" question is related to my previous post about submission:  because the authority of his parents came directly from the authority of God.  He submitted to his parents not because they were worthy of His submission, but because God was, and because God gave them to him as parents.  (And of course, in reflecting further on the above verses, his very death was a picture of submission to governmental authority.  He submitted to earthly authorities because in doing so He was submitting to God.)

This has all kinds of applications for me as a parent.  I've often heard parents give excuses for failing to guide a child in an area because of the parent's own failure in that area.  Truth be told, I have wondered myself whether I could in good faith guide my child to do exactly as I did not do.  I think this verse provides a resounding "Yes!" to these questions.  Our authority as parents doesn't come from anything we've done and is not based on our self-righteousness--otherwise, how in the world could Mary and Joseph have parented a child who was perfect when they weren't?  How could He have been expected to submit to them?  Instead, our authority comes from God and from His Word, which is true even when I fail and was true even when Mary failed.

The verse also applies to me as a wife, church member, employee, and citizen.  How can I consider myself to be above submitting to authorities when my own Lord submitted to the earthly authorities provided to Him?  The picture of Jesus submitting to earthly authority certainly takes the sting out of Paul's admonitions to "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" and Peter's instruction to "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution."  We're not being asked to do anything that our own Lord didn't do.