The Finding in the Temple

The Finding of Jesus in the Temple is the fifth and final of the Joyful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. It commemorates the moment, when Jesus was twelve years old, that Mary and Joseph found him in the Temple at Jerusalem after three days of searching. The narrative is recorded in Saint Luke 2:41-52 and is the only canonical Gospel account of the early adolescence of Christ.

The mystery

The Holy Family had traveled to Jerusalem for the annual Passover, in keeping with the requirement of the Mosaic Law that adult Jewish males present themselves at the Temple three times a year (Deuteronomy 16:16). On the return journey, after one day of travel, Mary and Joseph realized that Jesus was not among the relatives in the caravan. They returned to Jerusalem and, after three days of searching, found him in the Temple, "sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46).

Jesus's reply to Mary's question, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" (or, in other translations, "I must be about my Father's business") is the first recorded saying of Christ in the Gospels. It establishes, at the moment of his early adolescence, his consciousness of his unique relationship to the Father and of the mission for which he had come.

The mystery concludes with the return of the Holy Family to Nazareth, where Jesus "was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart." This concluding note links the Finding in the Temple to the entire hidden life at Nazareth, the long years of obedience that preceded the public ministry.

Meditation on piety

The traditional spiritual fruit of the Finding in the Temple is piety. The mystery offers two distinct images: the piety of the boy Jesus, who at twelve years old has already absorbed the Hebrew Scriptures sufficiently to ask penetrating questions of the teachers; and the piety of the Holy Family, faithful to the Passover observance year by year. Saint Augustine of Hippo, in his sermon on this passage, observes that Jesus's three-day separation from his parents and his discovery in the Temple is a foreshadowing of the three days from his death on Good Friday to the Resurrection on Easter morning, when he would be "found" again by his mother and the disciples.¹

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that this mystery contains in seed form the entire mystery of the obedience of Christ to the Father, an obedience that would culminate in the Cross.²

Praying the Finding in the Temple

To pray the fifth Joyful Mystery: announce "The fifth Joyful Mystery, the Finding in the Temple," pray an Our Father, ten Hail Marys while meditating on Mary and Joseph's three-day search and on the boy Jesus's reply, and conclude with a Glory Be and the Fatima Prayer.

After the fifth Joyful Mystery, the rosary concludes with the Hail Holy Queen and the closing prayer of the Rosary. For the previous mystery, see the Presentation.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Sermones de Tempore, Sermon 51, on the Finding in the Temple. ↩

2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 534, on the Finding in the Temple. ↩