by j. Snodgrass
Given 26 January, 2008
When I finished college at 21, the first piece of advice I got was this : Kiss your twenties good-bye – nobody gets anywhere in their twenties anymore. I resisted, I denied, and then I worked some jobs, ate some pizza, lived in some apartments, smoked some cigarettes, and here I am, just around the corner from thirty. Wow. And then I found out that this is some kind of cultural phenomena – the vanishing twenties, the disappearing decade, the lost years.
How did this happen? When did it begin? Well, I decided to start my search way back, in the opening book of the Bible, see if it might shed some light. And I found the results pretty comforting. Take Abraham, for example, when the Lord told him about fatherhood.
Genesis 17:17 – “Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” (NIV)
Abraham’s wife Sarah had a similar reaction to motherhood.
Genesis 18:12 – “Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, ‘After I am worn out and my [husband] is old, will I now have this pleasure?’”
And then of course there’s old Noah, who built the ark. But when I say ‘old’ I really mean, as we read in Genesis 7:6, “Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters [swelled] the earth.” (NIV)
Noah, what happened? “Well, I worked some jobs, ate some matzo, lived in some huts, smoked my pipe and here I am, just around the corner from six hundred.”
And then I started wondering…where was Jesus in his twenties? The gospel of Luke has him at age twelve, making mischief in the Temple and then…he’s thirty years old, being baptized for repentance…
[Actually, Luke 3:20 reports that John the Baptizer has been thrown in prison, and then Jesus is baptized in the following verse, Luke 3:21. The book doesn’t say who did it.]
What might this be telling us about Jesus in his twenties? All of the Gospels mention John the Baptizer, Luke even makes John and Jesus cousins, but each Gospel in its own way takes a few steps to distance Jesus from John, who was considered a wandering desert lunatic, wearing animal skins, eating locusts. The more we see the Gospel-writers trying to separate Jesus from John (especially with John and Jesus agreeing that Jesus is better), the more we’re led to assume that Jesus was in some way connected to this unpopular doom-and-gloom prophet, maybe as a disciple, before starting his own radical movement.
Luke 4 has some helpful hints. Jesus goes to a synagogue in his old hometown of Nazareth, and reads from a scroll of Isaiah. Then he gives a short sermon about how he’s the fulfillment of prophecies and bringer of good news to the poor. But the Nazarenes quickly lose patience, asking “Isn’t this old carpenter Joe’s boy?” (Luke 4:22) They drive him out of town, take him to the edge of a cliff, about to throw him over, but he disappears into the crowd and escapes. Bet you didn’t know about Jesus the escape-artist. In Luke 4:24 he says “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.”
I’ll leave that one alone – suffice to say, the people who’ve watched you eat dirt and chase girls with sticks as a kid are probably not going to be the first to call you Heaven’s Messenger. More fascinating from this passage is the assertion that Jesus was literate. If this were indeed true, then it’s likely Jesus would have been a rabbi or Pharisee in his twenties. The Pharisees were a radical sect of Judaism who believed in angels and bodily resurrection. Of course, Jesus has plenty of nasty things to say about the Pharisees, but this might actually be a sign that he was one.
It’s worth mentioning here that the Gospel of Luke was written for an educated urban audience, so it’s probable that the Luke author made Jesus literate so as not to let him seem like a country bumpkin…which he was – the other gospels do not show Jesus reading.
Perhaps the best hints we get about Jesus in his twenties are the scattered clues about his social life. First, let’s check out his entourage…
Luke 8:1 Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women… Mary (called Magdalene)…Joanna… Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
Now hold on a minute! What in the world is the Gospel of Luke talking about? Many women? Supporting Jesus out of their own means? Well, in these days, women were often married at thirteen and widows at twenty, sometimes wealthy. And where was Jesus always going? It’s odd, for a holy man, he doesn’t spend nearly as much time in Synagogue as he does at parties. As a matter of fact, his party-boy reputation was so memorable, that two generations after his death, two of the Gospels had to apologize for it. In Luke 7:34 and Matthew 11:19, Jesus says…
“The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.” ‘ 35But wisdom is proved right by all her children.” (Luke 7:34)
This makes it probable that long after his death, when you told someone you’d dedicated your life to Jesus, they were likely to ask “Wasn’t he a glutton and a drunk? A friend of sinners?” And this is how you were meant to answer them : “Wisdom is proved right by all her children.” Good. But what does it mean? It probably means that there was no excuse. Jesus was a party animal, who loved a good feast so well that two thousand years later, how does he want to be remembered? …Eating and drinking.
The roaring twenties of Jesus will always be a mystery – we, like the earliest Christians, arrive on the scene to find that a man has been killed, and all we can do is try to reconstruct his story backwards from the cross. He might have been a rabbi or a raver, a lady’s man or a desert disciple to the Baptizer – he sure does seem to know a lot about the dregs of society. He may have hitch-hiked by camel through India, or surfed across to Cuba and back, or lassoed a comet to explore the galaxy. What’s most likely, though, is that there’s really nothing to tell. He did some carpentry, ate some matzo, lived in a hut, smoked his pipe, and then, just around the corner from thirty, heard the call that his time had come – and so began his ministry…