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There’s a story about a man who commuted to his office.  At the end of one day, he walked to the station to come home and caught his train.  When the guard came through the train to check tickets, despite a desperate search, he couldn’t find the return half of his ticket.  Fortunately, the guard recognised him as a regular, and let him off with a stern warning.  When the man got home, he regaled his wife with his happy story.  But his wife, observant as wives always are (well usually, anyway!) replied: ‘But, darling you took the car this morning’.

Similarly, in the days when people pushed full-size prams, there were stories about women leaving prams, plus babies, outside shops, walking briskly home, only to wonder with horror what had become of the prams and their precious cargoes.

Did you ever drive somewhere and then walk home before you remembered, and then make matters worse by not being sure were you left the car?

If you’ve ever been in one of these positions, then you’ll sympathise with Mary and Joseph who, much more seriously than leaving a car somewhere, left the festival in Jerusalem without their twelve-year-old son, wrongly assuming that he was somewhere in the caravan of travellers. This is what we heard in the gospel reading just now. Their anxiety and self-reproach must have been terrible, as they set off back to Jerusalem, probably at some personal risk, travelling on their own.  Jerusalem was a relatively small city by present standards, but the population would have swelled many times over for the festival, and it took his parents three whole days to track Jesus down to the Temple.

To their surprise, there he was, engaged in intense debate with the teachers there, who were impressed by his contributions to the discussions.   What a relief for Mary and Joseph: Jesus was safe. But Mary has something inevitable to say to him: ‘Child, why have you treated us like this?  Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety’.  And then came Jesus’s strange reply: ‘Why were you searching for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

There’s something slightly precocious about all of this, with what seems a typical adolescent inability to grasp his parents’ anxiety and irritation.  This tends to reinforce our belief in Jesus’s genuine humanity.  Traditional Christian doctrine includes Jesus as being sinless, but this begs the question of what is sinful and what is not.  What, for instance, are some of the natural stages of human adolescence and development? At Christmas, many of us sang ‘Away in a manger’, the carol attributed to Martin Luther himself.  We sang:

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,

But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.

Of course, this is only a poem, and it’s just an imagined snapshot.  But isn’t it normal for babies to cry, and not just when cattle suddenly low nearby? When a baby grizzles selfishly, as all babies do, is it sinful or not? And how is a growing young man, a fully human being, to learn the concept of forgiveness if not himself forgiven for something done wrong?

I do not know the answer to these questions. However, Jesus’s utter humanity is certainly emphasised by the Christmas story: being temporarily homeless, being born in a barn, and with ordinary working blokes as his first visitors – these all point to poverty, weakness, very humble origins and true humanity.

Now here we are in Winchester. The Christmas Market has closed, and Christmas has passed.  No it hasn’t, you’ll tell me: there are twelve days of Christmas. You’re right, and I want to add that that. I’d like to suggest that Christmas never ends.

The baby born in a manger became the boy who deserted his parents for debate with the elders in the temple; who then returned to obedience to his parents, as St Luke relates in his gospel; then grew to the maturity that we see in the stories of his selfless and inspired work with the people of Israel and some Gentiles; but who was then tortured and cruelly executed for his pains.

However a conviction then arose among his followers that that wasn’t the end.  Their experiences convinced them that he was, in a spiritual mode, still alive – alive with them and available for the whole of humanity.  But it is in Jesus’s full and magnificent humanity that his significance and power lie. And it was the nature and outworking of Jesus’s humanity that led to the ascription of divinity. It was his humanity that led to a realisation that the qualities he displayed were those of God, and that therefore in that sense Jesus was divine.

So Christmas is, in my reckoning, forever: because Christmas demonstrates and celebrates God’s constant loving nature through humility and selfless care.  And these are the divine qualities that will last forever. These are the qualities that St Paul advocated in this morning’s first reading from his letter to the Colossians:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. . . . Above all, clothe yourselves with love . . . . And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Oh, for that peace: for the whole world community just at the moment and for ourselves.  Perhaps it starts with us.  After all, we are divine by virtue of our calling as Christians, and it is love and peace that are the marks of our calling.

Oh, and by the way, do be careful what you do with your cars and prams.

God bless us all.