The Two Crucial Years

126:0.1Of all Je­sus’ earth-life ex­pe­ri­ences, the four­teenth and fif­teenth years were the most cru­cial. These two years, af­ter he be­gan to be self-con­scious of di­vin­ity and des­tiny, and be­fore he achieved a large mea­sure of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with his in­dwelling Ad­juster, were the most try­ing of his event­ful life on Uran­tia. It is this pe­riod of two years which should be called the great test, the real temp­ta­tion. No hu­man youth, in pass­ing through the early con­fu­sions and ad­just­ment prob­lems of ado­les­cence, ever ex­pe­ri­enced a more cru­cial test­ing than that which Je­sus passed through dur­ing his tran­si­tion from child­hood to young man­hood.

126:0.2This im­por­tant pe­riod in Je­sus’ youth­ful de­vel­op­ment be­gan with the con­clu­sion of the Je­ru­sa­lem visit and with his re­turn to Naz­a­reth. At first Mary was happy in the thought that she had her boy back once more, that Je­sus had re­turned home to be a du­ti­ful son—not that he was ever any­thing else—and that he would hence­forth be more re­spon­sive to her plans for his fu­ture life. But she was not for long to bask in this sun­shine of ma­ter­nal delu­sion and un­rec­og­nized fam­ily pride; very soon she was to be more com­pletely dis­il­lu­sioned. More and more the boy was in the com­pany of his fa­ther; less and less did he come to her with his prob­lems, while in­creas­ingly both his par­ents failed to com­pre­hend his fre­quent al­ter­na­tion be­tween the af­fairs of this world and the con­tem­pla­tion of his re­la­tion to his Fa­ther’s busi­ness. Frankly, they did not un­der­stand him, but they did truly love him.

126:0.3As he grew older, Je­sus’ pity and love for the Jew­ish peo­ple deep­ened, but with the pass­ing years, there de­vel­oped in his mind a grow­ing righ­teous re­sent­ment of the pres­ence in the Fa­ther’s tem­ple of the po­lit­i­cally ap­pointed priests. Je­sus had great re­spect for the sin­cere Phar­isees and the hon­est scribes, but he held the hyp­o­crit­i­cal Phar­isees and the dis­hon­est the­olo­gians in great con­tempt; he looked with dis­dain upon all those re­li­gious lead­ers who were not sin­cere. When he scru­ti­nized the lead­er­ship of Is­rael, he was some­times tempted to look with fa­vor on the pos­si­bil­ity of his be­com­ing the Mes­siah of Jew­ish ex­pec­ta­tion, but he never yielded to such a temp­ta­tion.

126:0.4The story of his ex­ploits among the wise men of the tem­ple in Je­ru­sa­lem was grat­i­fy­ing to all Naz­a­reth, es­pe­cially to his for­mer teach­ers in the syn­a­gogue school. For a time his praise was on ev­ery­body’s lips. All the vil­lage re­counted his child­hood wis­dom and praise­wor­thy con­duct and pre­dicted that he was des­tined to be­come a great leader in Is­rael; at last a re­ally great teacher was to come out of Naz­a­reth in Gal­i­lee. And they all looked for­ward to the time when he would be fif­teen years of age so that he might be per­mit­ted reg­u­larly to read the Scrip­tures in the syn­a­gogue on the Sab­bath day.