This Gospel account is familiar to us. It is even the last of the Rosary's Joyful Mysteries: Finding Jesus in the Temple. But Polenov calls his painting, Christ Among the Teachers.
I like how Vasily Polenov depicts the event so accurately — a kind of Day in the Life of the Jerusalem Temple. Notice the shoes in the lower right corner. There's a man looking down into the big, open room from an upstairs balcony. Another man is climbing the stairs. Two men below the staircase are talking. We needn't imagine they're talking about God, they could be gossiping, telling jokes or comparing their old-man aches and pains. Maybe there's an exchange of money. It doesn't get more ordinary than that. But look, in the center is a young boy among older men. We know it's the young Jesus. He isn't teaching, but listening and asking questions as St. Luke tells us:
After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions..." Luke 2: 46
But there's another very tender part of the story. Have you seen it? Mary is standing in the archway to the right. As small as she is, we can sense her anxiety.
Jesus is very small, almost cocoon like, wrapped in white, waiting to open up. And Mary and Joseph are non-entities, from nowhere towns. In another gospel place Jesus is dismissed: "Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary? Matthew 13:55. Later, when Jesus will tell us about God and the things of God, he will reference things that are little or small: a little lost lamb, a little seed, a little bit of yeast, a little bird, an insignificant lily, a little widow with the least valuable coin...
Jesus won't spend the rest of his life sitting in the temple or atop a mountain, but he'll take what he learns from these men of religion — God's close-as-can-be loving kindness, and then take it outside and beyond the temple precincts. Maybe that's why Polenov shows us three views of the outside world — two downstairs and one upstairs. The spiritual path of Jesus is not a stay-at-home religion — not a religion to be left behind in the pew with the hymnal.
What a wonder — the twelve year old, son of the carpenter, grew and gave us a spiritual way that endures until today and which has found each of us. This is a wonderful painting of a very wonderful event.
