Luke 2
Can you imagine how you would feel if your child were missing? It is a horrible feeling. When I was three or four years old, I left home to follow older boys to catch tadpoles without telling my mother. I still remember that day, that afternoon in the rice paddy. I still have the images of tadpoles and diving beetles in my memory. I do not know how exactly my mother found me there. She spent the whole afternoon asking everyone in the streets if they saw a little boy with a blue baseball cap which I wore that day. I don’t have any memory if she scolded me or not. We came home close to the evening. I believe it was a traumatic experience for a young mother to have her only child missing half a day.
How do you think our Father in heaven would feel if we are lost in sin? God the Father would do everything to search and rescue us from sin, as Jesus told in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. He loves us and wants to live in us. This is why he sent his only begotten Son, Christ Jesus among us.
When we are lost in sin, our hearts are no longer in him. Our hearts are missing before his presence. We shut the door of our hearts to God our Father. We alienate ourselves from God. The work of Christ was to open our hearts and turn them toward God.
Today in the gospel, Jesus shows where we are to stay – it is the house of God the Father. This doesn’t mean we should spend day and night in a church building. It means to turn our hearts into a house of God so that he may dwell within us and we in him.
Our Blessed Virgin opened her heart to receive Christ Jesus. Christ lived in her womb and her heart. Her heart never turned away from God. Her heart was the perpetual home of Christ. When she found her Son in the temple of God, this finding also means she found God the Son in her heart.
My brothers and sisters, where is your heart? Is it with our God? Is it a dwelling place of God? Our Lord is still looking for us. Let us open our doors to him. As the Blessed Virgin did, let the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit dwell within our hearts.
