His Increase

A first birthday, Epiphany readings, and the joys and pains of motherhood

The first birthday has come and gone. Our now one-year-old was delighted by the candle, by the cake, by the adoring faces of his siblings excited to see him smash the chocolate icing into his toothy mouth. “Ba!” he says a lot, and points with his double-jointed pointer imperiously directing our gaze to a bottle, a Bible, a brother, a million other things. To all the gifts and possibilities he sees and faces.

Celebrating our youngest at the beginning of a new year is precious. It’s made me think, again, how fast time goes, how much children grow and change. How privileged I am, and we are, to witness yet another beautiful human being learn about himself and the world and the world to come.

It makes me ache with joy and heartache, both. We are blessed so abundantly here, and yet we are not home. Our little man’s round and elastic baby skin is patched with eczema, little red spots that can be itchy and bothersome, especially that one in the crook of his right elbow (it’s healed for now, thank goodness). His scalp is flaky and an irritated pink at times. This all despite the special lotion and shampoo and other creams. While I am grateful for the supplies, they only deal with symptoms. They can’t change what they signify, that he is mortal.

That’s why, in part, I’ve been thinking about Mary and Jesus a lot these last weeks. Her big moment was during Christmas, of course, but some of these Epiphany-tide readings really bring to light—no pun intended, really—Christ’s purpose, and her conflicted experiences as His mother.

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More than other mothers, Mary feels wondrous joy and stark, ominous pain. First with Simeon, on the heels of his beautiful confession, who speaks a terrible truth to the mother of God: “A sword will pierce your soul, too.” One wonders if the Lord sought to give her a small anesthetic, a needle-like prick of the horrors she would witness, if only to make them less—even very less?—dreadful when they finally came.

Then, twelve years later, when her Son seemingly disappears for three days. It’s the Passover, or was. Three sunrises and sunsets of growing fear and frantic searching have led Mary and Joseph back to the temple in Jerusalem, to God’s holy house. The holy place of His abiding presence. And there He is, their Son and not theirs.

Mary’s anxiety and guilt, two ends of motherhood’s crushing responsibility, drive her to vocalize her panic and her relief, her frustration and culpability. “Son, why have You treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for You in great distress.” Another translation, poignant in its foreshadowing, says “agony.” She knows they should’ve been more conscientious of their perfectly conscientious Son. Her distress is borne out of her understanding of who He is, the son of God, and that she and Joseph are still responsible for Him, this child who will soon leave childhood behind. It is her fault, and Joseph’s fault, that they did not keep watch over Him.¹

Only because He is perfect can she ask with any degree of righteousness why He did what He did, which is to say that He did not tell his mother and stepfather where He was going. There is a sliver of doubt in the question, too, an echoing of John’s later question of who the Christ is: what they’ve experienced is not what they expected from a perfect Son. So is He actually perfect? Is He actually God? If He is, then what in His name is He doing?

“Child Jesus in the Temple.” Jan Steen, 1659-1660. Source.

Well, He is doing what He came to do. He is questioning the teachers, and in so questioning, teaching them. A child on the cusp of manhood, looking forward, to His Holy purpose and fulfillment of the greatest promise ever made. For the first time, He is asserting, Himself, that He is of His father. His light has come.²

A blink of an eye before, maybe ten years, Jesus was sitting on Mary’s lap. Perhaps He was toddling about her knees, beginning to test his hesitant legs. Kings from far away appeared at the house. Regal Gentiles reverenced Him, this little humble King, bringing gifts to acknowledge His majesty. One of my favorite Epiphany books—The Third Gift—tells how myrrh in resin tears is harvested from prickly trees, and how one boy and his father who sell the tears come to meet the magi.³ It is a mystery to the boy that a baby would receive something that is used for burial, for times of grief and weeping.

It is no mystery to us, who know the rest of the story. Soon, very soon, will come another Passover, another three days, the fulfillment of Jesus’s purpose. He nods to this, too, at his first miracle, the wedding at Cana. This is the last time we see Mary before she stands before the cross. Here, she does some clumsy witnessing, the only mother ever fully justified in trying to share with others how gifted her child is. For unlike the rest of us with our sinful offspring, her Son really could do truly marvelous things. There’s no wine left, and she knows—really in-her-bones knows—who can remedy the situation. But she is still a mother, flawed and fumbling, and so brings it up.⁴ Jesus reminds her, reprimands her, with a pointed question and assertion: “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” That hour is that future Passover. He is the Man moving on His own now, with new and mostly clueless disciples. He is treading the path that to them, and to Mary, is foggy and dim.

In the Jan Steen painting above, I love how Mary’s hand is in the act of reaching for Jesus’s arm. She’s a mother who lost her Son, and now He is found. She is grasping Him, desiring to touch Him, to hold on to Him. Who can blame her? She’s doing what every loving mother wants to do and often can’t help doing: to show him by her physical touch that she loves him. Her body that bore Him is marked forever. She wants to clasp Him to herself the way she did when He was a baby. But He is older now, and He no longer needs her the same way. In this pictured moment, Mary is still learning that to really love Jesus, to hold Him, means to let Him go.

And she did learn this, at least somewhat. The last words we hear directly from her in God’s Holy Word are these: “Do whatever He tells you.”⁵ He is leading now. Her time of holding Him, vibrant and alive, has passed. She can only follow and trust Him.

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There’s a beautiful address Anthony Esolen wrote in 2007.⁶ He references John the Baptist’s words to his disciples: “He must increase and I must decrease.” Esolen uses this text to point out how all of us parents, at one time or another, watch our children eclipse us—in physical strength, in knowledge, in experience. And this is humbling, because then we see how we are no longer at the apex of our temporal abilities. We are aging and getting weaker. Yet this is also incredibly beautiful. This is what, in our sinful world, is supposed to happen. Our sons and daughters are supposed to grow in wisdom and stature, just as we did when we were young, and our parents did before us. As Christians, we should pray that this happens, this wonderful gift of new life and growth, generation after generation. We should pray that, rather than we sad or bitter or resentful, we can be thankful when we are given the gift of seeing our children increase as we decrease.

I was pregnant with our now-oldest son when I originally read Esolen’s words. I ugly cried over it, thinking of how hard and special it would be, God willing, to see our unborn child grow the way he was describing.

Now he will graduate from high school in a few months. We saw him toddle, and babble, and learn his letters. Then he was reading, and I can still see him leaning over The Story Bible, sounding out the words at our kitchen table, and I cry remembering my joy at witnessing such a priceless moment. He touched the piano keys, his fat baby fingers splayed, blindly pressing. Then he was playing with one hand, and starting lessons, and now he plays the organ for church services.⁷ He has increased, certainly, thanks be to God, and we pray He continues to do so.

Now I see him hold his baby brother, cuddling him, making him laugh. He is also learning how fast the time goes, how children imperiously convinced of the slowness of their days are speeding through them and moving on, with God’s help onward and upward.

In these days of Epiphany, and in the few little verses of Christ’s childhood, I am grateful to see how He was already fulfilling God’s promise to us. In his infant weakness in the arms of Simeon, in his baby gaze at the Magi, in His child voice to the teachers and His parents at the temple. And in the first days of His ministry, He was pointing to his love for His church at the wedding feast, turning water to wine just as He would pour out His blood for the world. He came so that we might be made whole, from the smallest and youngest among us to the oldest. He came to hold us, someday forever.

I pray our one-year-old and all of his siblings learn, like their mother and father are learning, to keep fumbling. To keep grasping loved ones, holding and hugging them. To embrace the joys and pain, both, until it is time to let them go, and go on home.

1. While most of my thoughts here came from my husband’s Epiphany 1 sermon (thanks, dear!), he also pointed me to this great sermon by Pr. Petersen.

2. HT to Burnell Eckert in this meditation from Gottesdienst.

3. I pictured the book in this post from last year:

4. I’ve read numerous analyses of this text from Roman Catholic writers, and while I get their contortions to explain how Mary can say and do what she does and still somehow be without sin (thanks, dogma of the Immaculate Conception, etcetera. Good luck finding Biblical support for this), this particular example seems particularly suited to undo that idea. Let me put it this way to any mother reading this: have you ever said something to your child that you realized you shouldn’t have said? Maybe you didn’t quite put your foot in your mouth, as the saying goes; maybe you even had the best of intentions. But you probably know how many (in my case, very many) times you opened your mouth to your child and proceeded to sin. Mary can’t help her sinful nature here; she inserts herself when she shouldn’t. As you can tell, I still think she is extremely worthy of praise.

5. HT to my husband, who mentioned this in his sermon this morning (Epiphany 2 of the one-year lectionary. The Gospel reading was John 2:1-11).

6. I believe that it’s this piece, archived in Touchstone. I don’t have access behind the paywall, so if this isn’t the particular piece I’m thinking of, my apologies.

7. I wrote about before. No, I can’t believe it’s been over a year and a half since I wrote this. Wasn’t it just last summer?