A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Luke’s reason for writing his letter. He wrote in Luke 1:3 that he wanted people to have an orderly account of Jesus’ life. The fact that Luke wanted an “orderly” account may explain why he is the only writer to include the story that we are looking at today. However, there is also the thought that Luke was writing primarily to the Greeks and wanted them to have details about Jesus’ life that would personalize him and make him real. There’s a possibility that Luke included this to emphasize that Joseph and Mary raised Jesus following all of the requirements of the Law. It could be any of these reasons, none of these reasons, or a combination of them and others. We don’t really know.
What we do know is that Mary and Joseph lost Jesus.
Have you seen the pictures captioned “you had one job?” The picture might show a pack of hamburger buns in a wrapper that says “hotdog buns.” Across the top of the image, it’ll say, “you had one job.” If memes had existed when Jesus was twelve, I am sure that there would have been one of Mary looking for Jesus captioned, “you had one job!”