'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