Luke 2:49
Luke 2:4949“Why were you looking for Me?” He asked. “Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?”
Read as the young Jesus showing devotion to Jehovah and to spiritual things — a model of a child putting worship first. "My Father" is taken in the sense in which any faithful servant may call Jehovah Father, without implying anything about Jesus' nature.
These are the first recorded words of Jesus in Luke's Gospel, which is not nothing — Luke has chosen what to put first. And what they contain is a claim about the temple: I must be in the house of my Father. A twelve-year-old, in Jerusalem, calling the temple his Father's house. Set that next to , where Jehovah says the Lord whom you seek will come suddenly to his temple. And next to , where Jesus clears the courts quoting God's words: my house will be called a house of prayer. The possessive is consistent across all three. The reply is also worth noticing for its assumption. Jesus is surprised his parents did not know where to look. He treats his belonging in that house as obvious. This is a gentle passage to raise, because nothing in it is polemical and most Witnesses know the story from childhood. Ask what a boy means by "the house of my Father," and then read alongside it. Compare , , .