SERMON XIX.
CHRIST’S BOYHOOD.
Luke ii. 52.
And Jesus increased in wisdom, and in stature, and in favour both with God and man.
I do not pretend to understand these words. I preach on them because the Church has appointed them for this day. And most fitly. At Christmas we think of our Lord’s birth. What more reasonable, than that we should go on to think of our Lord’s boyhood? To think of this aright, even if we do not altogether understand it, ought to help us to understand rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ; the right faith about which is, that he was very man, of the substance of his mother. Now, if he were very and real man, he must have been also very and real babe, very and real boy, very and real youth, and then very and real full-grown man.
Now it is not so easy to believe that as it may seem. It is not so easy to believe.
I have heard many preachers preach (without knowing it), what used to be called the Apollinarian Heresy, which held that our Lord had not a real human soul, but only a human body; and that his Godhead served him instead of a human soul, and a man’s reason, man’s feelings.
About that the old fathers had great difficulty, before they could make people understand that our Lord had been a real babe. It seemed to people’s unclean fancies something shocking that our Lord should have been born, as other children are born. They stumbled at the stumbling-block of the manger in Bethlehem, as they did at the stumbling-block of the cross on Calvary; and they wanted to make out that our Lord was born into the world in some strange way—I know not how;—I do not choose to talk of it here:—but they would fancy and invent anything, rather than believe that Jesus was really born of the Virgin Mary, made of the substance of his mother. So that it was hundreds of years before the fathers of the Church set people’s minds thoroughly at rest about that.
In the same way, though not so much, people found it very hard to believe that our Lord grew up as a real human child. They would not believe that he went down to Nazareth, and was subject to his father and mother. People believe generally now—the Roman Catholics as well as we—that our Lord worked at his father’s trade—that he himself handled the carpenter’s tools. We have no certain proof of it: but it is so beautiful a thought, that one hopes it is true. At least our believing it is a sign that we do believe the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ more rightly than most people did fifteen hundred years ago. For then, too many of them would have been shocked at the notion.
They stumbled at the carpenter’s shop, even as they did at the manger and at the cross. And they invented false gospels—one of which especially, had strange and fanciful stories about our Lord’s childhood—which tried to make him out.
Most of these stories are so childish I do not like to repeat them. One of them may serve as a sample. Our Lord, it says, was playing with other children of his own age, and making little birds out of clay: but those which our Lord made became alive, and moved, and sang like real birds.—Stories put together just to give our Lord some magical power, different from other children, and pretending that he worked signs and wonders: which were just what he refused to work.
But the old fathers rejected these false gospels and their childish tales, and commanded Christian men only to believe what the Bible tells us about our Lord’s childhood; for that is enough for us, and that will help us better than any magical stories and childish fairy tales of man’s invention, to believe rightly that God was made man, and dwelt among us.