He was arguing for confidence in God on the part of his parents, not for a knowledge of his whereabout.  The same thing that made them anxious concerning him, prevented them from understanding his words—­lack, namely, of faith in the Father.  This, the one thing he came into the world to teach men, those words were meant to teach his parents.  They are spirit and life, involving the one principle by which men shall live.  They hold the same core as his words to his disciples in the storm, ‘Oh ye of little faith!’ Let us look more closely at them.

’Why did you look for me?  Did you not know that I must be among my father’s things?’ What are we to understand by ‘my father’s things’?  The translation given in the authorized version is, I think, as to the words themselves, a thoroughly justifiable one:  ’I must be about my father’s business,’ or ‘my father’s affairs’; I refuse it for no other reason than that it does not fit the logic of the narrative, as does the word things, which besides opens to us a door of large and joyous prospect.  Of course he was about his father’s business, and they might know it and yet be anxious about him, not having a perfect faith in that father.  But, as I have said already, it was not anxiety as to what might befall him because of doing the will of the Father; he might well seem to them as yet too young for danger from that source; it was but the vague perils of life beyond their sight that appalled them; theirs was just the uneasiness that possesses every parent whose child is missing; and if they, like him, had trusted in their father, they would have known what their son now meant when he said that he was in the midst of his father’s things—­namely, that the very things from which they dreaded evil accident, were his own home-surroundings; that he was not doing the Father’s business in a foreign country, but in the Father’s own house.  Understood as meaning the world, or the universe, the phrase, ‘my father’s house,’ would be a better translation than the authorized; understood as meaning the poor, miserable, God-forsaken temple—­no more the house of God than a dead body is the house of a man—­it is immeasurably inferior.

It seems to me, I say, that the Lord meant to remind them, or rather to make them feel, for they had not yet learned the fact, that he was never away from home, could not be lost, as they had thought him; that he was in his father’s house all the time, where no hurt could come to him.  ‘The things’ about him were the furniture and utensils of his home; he knew them all and how to use them.  ’I must be among my father’s belongings.’  The world was his home because his father’s house.  He was not a stranger who did not know his way about in it.  He was no lost child, but with his father all the time.