Bobby Fischer was a teen chess prodigy and a social misfit. Steve Martin is literally a comic genius. That arrow through his head went through a Mensa brain. Two-year-old Elise Tan Roberts, Mensa’s youngest member, can name 35 world capitals and identify three types of triangles. Wait a minute. Since when are there three kinds of triangles?

Mensa, by the way, is a group that "provides a forum for intellectual exchange among members. Its activities include the exchange of ideas in projects dealing with intelligence or Mensa."

Madonnna and Shakira are both divas who make headlines on and offstage. But with confirmed IQs of 140, each of them could just as easily excel in the boardroom or courtroom. South Boston street-tough "Good" Will Hunting was "wicked smaaht" — just as competent in vector algebra as he was in a playground brawl.

All these people are incredibly intelligent. But they’re just as colorful as they are clever. While we value intelligence, we really seem to enjoy people who are quirky smart. mental_floss magazine is committed to the quirky and smart in culture. It recently chronicled "The New Einstein’s" — geniuses who think outside the box to arrive at unimagined places:

MIT physics professor Marin Soljaãiç was tired of waking up in the middle of the night to the chirping of his cell phone’s low battery alarm. Our phones do everything else — why not plug themselves in as well? He invented "WiTricity," the first step toward wireless electricity. Magnetic coils can resonate at a frequency that makes other coils across the room resonate. It’s wireless transmission of energy, similar to how a plucked guitar string makes its neighbors vibrate through harmonics.

An unnamed Doberman/border collie mix made the Einstein list by performing successful cancer surgery on its owner. The dog was obsessed with a mole on its owner’s leg, sniffing at it for months and eventually biting it off! The woman’s doctor later confirmed that the mole was cancerous and that her dog may have saved her life. Tumors release toxins, and it turns out that those toxins stink enough for a dog to smell them. Today, trained dogs have detected lung and breast cancer with almost 90 percent accuracy.

Roland Fryer, an innovative yet controversial New Einstein, is making school cool. He created a program in New York that rewards classroom performance with cell phones full of minutes. Teachers and students use the phones to text about assignments, while celebrities send encouraging messages through the phone system. In Chicago, his program gives ninth-graders $50 for every "A" they make. These rewards are de-stigmatizing the inner-city notion that learning is uncool. But should we really reward intelligence with cash? I guess that’s an issue for future Secretary of Education Alex Trebek to address.

Now imagine if you will, a scene in a Harvard lecture hall where a 12-year-old is stunning Ph.D. economists with his understanding of free-market dynamics. Another genius at work?

The Passover festival in Luke 2 was like a denominational convention for us today. People came into Jerusalem from across the land. They shared meals stretching on for hours. Conversations focused on theology, culture and religious life.

As the annual event drew to a close, everyone headed out and traveled long distances home. Everyone but Jesus. His parents were a day’s travel away from Jerusalem before they realized their son was missing.

Not exactly Einstein parenting, but far from parental neglect. Joseph and Mary’s clan would have been watching each other’s kids on the journey — not uncommon for how extended family worked in the ancient Near East.

As it turns out, the only people who were actually watching Jesus were all the best and brightest of Jerusalem’s religious leadership. The Passover conversations kept going on as a 12-year-old asked and answered difficult theological questions. In the temple, Jesus, even as a 12-year-old, taught not only the elders of his own day but us as a postmodern culture today.

He taught with authority. UC-Berkeley chemical engineer Jay Keasling is one of the mental_floss New Einstein’s. He defines genius as someone who "is extremely bright, extremely creative, who thinks completely out of the box." That’s the read on the prepubescent scholar. Jesus was a genius, and outside-the-box understanding would always mark his teaching ministry.

Mark uses interesting wordplay on the Greek  (authority) to call attention to the uniqueness and impact of Jesus’ teaching. Synagogue-goers were "astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."

Jesus had an actual authority that was different from those in the role of spiritual authority. His teaching was capable of more impact than theirs. He could forgive sins. He had rule and reign over evil spirits. He knew what was in people’s hearts.

We can personalize the idea of the authority of Jesus’ teaching by asking ourselves some spiritually formative questions. We could ask ourselves:

• Why do I trust the authority of Jesus?

• What are the most obvious ways Jesus’ teachings have changed me in the last year?

• If not for Jesus’ authority over me, how would my choices look different this week?

• In what areas of my life am I not giving Jesus the authority he already has?

It’s important for us to pause and recognize Jesus’ authority in our lives. His teaching and authority should have already changed us dramatically and should be changing us right now. If we can’t easily point to those changes, perhaps we aren’t respecting his authority.

Then and now, Jesus didn’t teach to stun the crowds with new and outside-the-box ideas. He came to fulfill the law — to put flesh and blood onto words they had heard all their lives. He didn’t come to model a holistically fulfilling life. He came to change people’s hearts and minds.

Jesus did the work of God. Mary was probably as embarrassed as she was shocked that her 12-year-old son went AWOL for a temple study leave. In response to her surprise, Jesus asked: "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?"

The Message paraphrases Jesus’ activity as "dealing with the things of my Father." Or, as the KJV puts it: "I must be about my Father’s business." Both of these translations demonstrate how Jesus was different from those around him.

Jesus was consumed by scriptural education. We know that because the religious leaders were amazed by his "understanding and his answers." There are two different concepts implied here. Jesus could answer questions posed by the temple rabbis. But he also showed understanding, which came from questions he posed to them.

In rabbinical education, little value was placed on simply possessing information about God and Scripture. Rabbis wanted to know if students had internalized, owned, wrestled with and understood information. This was demonstrated through their questions, not their answers.

Could a student understand information enough to show wonder and musing about what he hadn’t learned yet? Could he demonstrate that he had reflected on the Subject of the subject at hand? This 12-year-old boy didn’t just know about God. He knew God. Somehow in the education that was part of his divine-human experience, Jesus had personalized and internalized who God was.

This leads us to questions of our own:

• What do Sunday sermons feel like to us: more information to acquire? Or

something we patiently wait through before kickoff that afternoon?

• Which is a more truthful expression for us: "I know about God" or "I know

God"?

• Do we feel comfortable exploring questions about God?

• Are we in touch with our doubts and disbelief?

• Do we chase answers for questions we don’t have answers to?

• Do our questions show the depth and hunger of our reflection about God?

Jesus said he "must" be in his Father’s house — dealing with the things of the Father — being about his business. Mustn’t we be too?

Our text ends with a beautiful summary that covers Jesus’ life from age 12 to about age 30: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man."

Yet, this is not just the young man Jesus. This is the God-man. The wisdom and learning of this twelve year old boy astonished the learned theologians and spectators and caused Mary to ponder and treasure the mystery of her son’s nature.

More importantly, Jesus betrays an awareness of his mission. He calls God his Father. His heart is set on His Father’s house and His Father’s business. And then Jesus returned with them to Nazareth and was submissive to his parents.

Jesus knew he had to obey the letter of the Law. He knew he had to live a perfect life so that his death on the cross would be the perfect sacrifice that would achieve the salvation of the world that God so loved.

As Jesus grew older, three things were true of him: He was smart, he was cool and he was loved. The Bible says he "increased in wisdom," people liked him and God was pleased with him.

So, over time, how are we doing: getting smart? getting cool? getting loved? Although it’s hard to measure change over short periods of time, we can look back over the last five years and ask how we’ve changed.

• How has God made me wiser today than I was five years ago?

• How have I matured over the last five years?

• How has my reputation with nonbelievers changed?

• Is my reputation with my coworker’s better, worse, or the same?

• How would my family say I’ve grown over the last five years?

Christian therapist and author Henry Cloud offers a simple paradigm for understanding Christian growth. Growth = Grace + Truth + Time. The genius of Jesus is that he is full of grace and truth. Over time, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we should be able to see Christ’s life and teachings changing us and causing us to grow.

New Einstein’s are discovering how to grow organs, cure plagues and help the blind see. These are seemingly monumental and unimaginable tasks. Jesus wants to accomplish much simpler things in us: deepening our faith and changing our lives through Word and Sacrament and our life experience.

During this time of new beginnings and New Year’s resolutions, we have to ask ourselves: "Are we giving Jesus the chance to change our worlds?" Amen.