This passage is filled with paradoxes and should leave us asking a big question.  After all the extraordinary events around the birth of Jesus, family life seems to have settled into 'normality'.  When Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the temple after three days being 'lost', Mary scolded her son, reprimanding Him for not treating them with respect.  She refers to Joseph as His father and angrily expresses her fear of losing Him.  Jesus, in the same way in which He had been asking penetrating questions of the religious professors, now asks Mary why they did not assume that He would be in the temple.  Then He asks if they had understood that He had to be in His Father's house.

Of course, the unfair habit of anxious parents is to scold a lost child - it is a bizarre expression of relief after so much suppressed fear.  But Jesus' response to Mary's agitated question was to put a question to them.  They had been given the responsibility to be trustees of God's Son, so was it not right for Him to be in God's house?  Jesus was not lost at all. He knew exactly where He was; and exactly who He was too.  Paradoxically, it was they who needed Him to save them from being lost.  He was not the son of Joseph but the Son of God.  Because they had lost sight of His identity, they could not see that His place was with His Father, in God's house doing His business.

Mary and Joseph did not understand (although Mary clearly remembered the episode and gave a detailed account to Luke many years later).  The big question remains, ‘Why did they not understand?’  They had been obedient to Moses' law, they had done the right things, but they did not recognise that God lived in their house.  They had seen Him as serving them, and so they were incapable of learning from Him.  Despite all their privileged encounters with God's messengers, they were blind to who Jesus was (Isaiah 6:9-10).  

They were like so many today, assuming that Jesus will adapt to their convenience.  They had performed the religious ritual and gone home.  But Jesus was with His Father; and for Him, that was ‘being at home'.  The contrast of mindsets is so stark: ritual versus relationship.  It is the same today: and the Bible says only a relationship with God through Jesus Christ will bring peace with God, confidence of heaven and the assurance that the Lord wants to be ‘at home’ with you (John 14:23).  If you cannot see that, then ask God to open your eyes; and if your friends are blind, ask Him to open their eyes too.  To have peace with God is to be ‘at home’ with the Almighty (Romans 5:1-2).