This post reflects on the collect and readings for Epiphany I in the Book of Common Prayer.¹ For a reflection on the Common Worship collect, see here.

Most of us probably don’t get very far in the Christian life before we start thinking about the question of guidance. For some, it will be a zealous desire to please the Lord that drives us to consider the matter. For others, it will be personal questions that bring it to the fore: Who should I get married to (or might it be better not to marry at all)? What kind of job should I apply for? Or perhaps it’s a pressing dilemma where we need to find answers: How can we overcome our marriage problems? What can I do to support my friend with his addiction problem? How can I tell a friend that I’m really worried about a choice she is making – or is not my place to say?

Every week, newspapers and magazines publish agony aunt columns for people seeking advice in these sorts of situations (and as a pastor, it can be fascinating and sometimes horrifying to read some of the advice they are given, both by the columnist and in the comments section below the article!) But for Christians, these questions raise a more fundamental one: How do we know what God’s will is for our lives? We know he is wise and good, and powerful. We know we should try to obey and please him. Many of us are (rightly, I believe) confident that he has a plan mapped out for our lives. So how do we find out what he wants us to do?

My (admittedly limited!) experience has shown me two main ways Evangelical Christians try to answer that question.² One group effectively seek supplementary revelation – some means by which God will show them what his plan is. Of course, Scripture is the basis for this group. It’s never going to be God’s plan for your life that you commit a murder or rob a bank. But most of the decisions we make in day-to-day life aren’t like that – they’re questions where we’re trying to work out what is best between equally permissible options. So this group prays about it, listens for some sort of internal nudge from God, looks for a sign, or seeks advice from others in hope that a friend or counsellor will have a word from God for them.

When I was at university, I was taught a rather different approach to guidance. This system – and it very much was a system – was developed by evangelicals who leaned hard into the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture and were hostile to the charismatic suggestion that God might reveal his will anywhere else. Life questions were effectively triaged into one of three categories. Matters of obedience were areas where God has commanded or forbidden a given choice. It is always God’s will that you believe his word and never God’s will that you slander your neighbour. Matters of wisdom were areas where there may not be a morally right or wrong answer, but there may be more or less sensible choices. It’s not a sin to marry someone 40 years older than you who doesn’t speak your mother tongue, but it might not be a good idea.³ If it wasn’t a matter of obedience or wisdom, then it was a matter of indifference – do whatever you want, God does not care which socks you choose to wear today. So long as you make sure to be obedient and to weigh wisdom, you are free to choose the path that seems best to you and in hindsight you will see that it was God’s plan for your life (which is not necessarily the same as the easiest or most obviously ‘successful’ course).

I’ve come to find things I appreciate about both these approaches. The system I was taught at university places the Scriptures at the heart of understanding God’s will. It frees you from the paralysis and second guessing of seeking for a particular sign. It guards you against mistaking your subjective feelings and desires (so often corrupted by sin) for the voice of God. But the more charismatic approach has its virtues to. For one, it is more relational, both in the sense that seeking advice from a range of people is much less individualistic than deciding based on a mental triage and also in as much as it certainly feels more like an attempt to relate personally to God. You illustrate the ‘charismatic’ approach by telling a personal story, whereas the ‘conservative’ one can sometimes be reduced to a flow chart. I have met people who take each approach who seem to do a great job of bringing out what is best while avoiding what is worst in them.

What both of them risk overlooking is the quality Paul commends in Romans 12:2 – discernment. Paul says that as we allow the mercies of God which he has expounded in the Gospel to shape our thinking, we will be transformed by the ‘renewal of your minds, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God’. The Gospel has the power to produce a new state of mind, an attunement to God’s will that is neither a new revelation, nor a mere codification of the instructions that follow in chapter 12. Slowly but surely, we are to be reprogrammed so that our instincts and intuitions are in harmony with God’s will. Seen in this light, the search for a new or more intimate revelation can often be a short cut which bypasses this need for interior renewal, while the triage system can end up replacing character development with technique.⁴

Ultimately, such discernment is a gift of God’s grace and it is for this gift that we are led to pray by the collect for this week. With the absolute minimum of pretention, we ask that God in his mercy will help us grasp his will and faithfully fulfil it.

O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people which call upon thee; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

But this is Epiphany season – the time when we celebrate and remember the ways in which Jesus manifested his divine glory among us. How does all this talk of discernment bring us to him?

The Gospel reading for this week, Luke 2:41-52, reveals to us the boundless understanding of God the Son incarnate. As he engages with the teachers of the Law, everyone there is stunned by his insight. It isn’t so much his breadth of knowledge that impresses the crowds, we can’t be sure just how much of the Scriptures he would have known at that age. But the uncanny acumen he shows in asking questions, and the profound yet intuitive grasp of the things of God displayed in his answers has everyone floored. Even his parents are astonished. Clearly, he had depths which they had never reckoned on, dimensions of his mind which a childhood in Nazareth had not yet drawn out. And yet he is still just a child. His faculties have not yet fully developed – Luke tells us he grew wiser as well as taller as he matured into adulthood (Luke 2:52).

But Jesus says something even more perplexing in this passage – it’s actually his earliest recorded words. When his mother confronts him about going missing, he questions their frantic searching. They should have known immediately where he would be – in his Father’s house. That is where he must be. In the Father’s presence is where Jesus belongs.

Luke’s previous scene was in the temple, and it is tempting to imagine that this is Jesus’ first time back there since the presentation. Jewish men were expected to make the pilgrimage from age 13 and we know contemporary rabbis recommended taking sons a year or two earlier to familiarise them with the requirements of the pilgrimage.⁵ We simply can’t be sure. But once he found himself in the presence of the Father, he would not willingly leave. This was where he had to be. Jesus’ words reveal a unique closeness between him and the Father. And they reveal that his incredible insight is not down to being some kind of child prodigy. Rather, it stems from being his only begotten Son, always, eternally, perfectly attuned to his Father because he shares completely in his Father’s divine mind. The limitations he took on in the incarnation do not change who he is fundamentally. So in this scene, we are catching a glimpse – years before he ever began his ministry – of Jesus’ identity as the incarnate Son of God. He is the wisdom of God made man.

Joseph and Mary do not understand all this at the time. They are not intuitively tuned to God’s Son. As far as matters of obedience are concerned, they are doing their duty by trying to find the child entrusted to them. I think it would be very severe to call their confusion sinful.⁶ But they lack the discernment we pray for this week, the discernment Jesus embodies to a supreme degree. Hearts more deeply in tune with God, hearts which ‘get’ Jesus better, would have known he had to be in the Temple gone there straight away.

But Jesus has come to save. When he stays in the Temple, it is not to remain alone, immersed in prayer and worship. Instead, he debates Torah because he has come to be our teacher. As we contemplate his words and actions, he is formed in us. We share in Christ, in whom is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:3). His blessed mother – who has already been highlighted as characteristically ready to believe God’s words (Luke 1:45) – may not understand immediately, but she treasures up all she has heard in her heart.  

And it may have been decades before she fully grasped what Jesus meant. This is the second of two back-to-back scenes in the Temple from Jesus’ childhood. In the first, Mary is told that opposition to her Son will coincide with a sword piercing her heart (2:34-35). In this one, Jesus is seemingly lost for three days, two disciples leave and then hastily return to Jerusalem (c.f. 24:13-35) and a woman is corrected for seeking Jesus in the wrong place (c.f. 24:5). It’s not much, but Mary might be collecting hints which together will one day fit into the picture established in Jesus’ death and resurrection, where his true glory and God’s true wisdom are most fully displayed. It is, as Paul said, in view of God’s mercies that our minds are renewed.

The post image is William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1860. You can see the real thing in my hometown at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

1. The Prayer Book is a bit less obvious (at least to me!) in marking out Epiphany as a season than Common Worship is. Whereas CW has Sundays of Epiphany until the Feast of the Presentation, after which we switch to Ordinary Time until Lent, the BCP has Sundays after Epiphany, continuing to count them until Gesima-tide (the BCP’s preparatory season before Lent). In the past, I have doubted that Epiphany season is really a thing in the BCP. However, if you look more carefully and remember that there can be no more than four Sundays between Epiphany and the Presentation, a distinct season does emerge. All four Sundays take a consecutive reading from Romans 12-13 as their Epistle reading and an event in Jesus’ life that manifests his glory as the Gospel reading. Both these patterns are broken for the fifth and sixth Sundays after Epiphany, which strongly suggests that the Epiphany Sundays are intended to be taken as a group. ↩︎
2. A number of anecdotes lead me to suspect that Pope Gregory the Great had a system of guidance that gave significant space to God revealing his will through Dad jokes, but I’ve never seen that worked out in any detail. Perhaps someone will do a D.Min. in it someday. ↩︎
3. This was a genuine example in a guidance seminar I attended. There was sometimes a nod to the idea that ‘wisdom’ is also a Biblical category, but as I remember it these sorts of common sense observations were what was emphasised. ↩︎
4. Maybe it’s important to notice that I encountered both these approaches primarily in student work. Discernment is something we must cultivate over a lifetime and for young people both approaches have useful things to teach us about how to grow in discernment. ↩︎
5. See, e.g. Leon Morris, Luke, TNTC, p104. ↩︎
6. Even Mary’s reproof of Jesus need not be read as sinful. Verse 51 makes clear that it is right for Jesus to be submissive to his parents, who were charged with his welfare in childhood. Despite the limits of their understanding, they nonetheless had the right, even the responsibility, to decide when and where he went. ↩︎