Jesus, the Nazarene

Poised to moved to chapter three of Matthew, I found myself turning around, looking at a big question mark hanging over the village of Nazareth.  I mean, can we ‘tawk’, why Nazareth?   Hadn’t God made his point with Jesus being born in obscurity in and around barn animals in Bethlehem?  So why would God have Jesus grow up in Nazareth, when no one in the land thought too highly of the little town.  After all, the question hangs in the air, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’¹

We can only surmise, as Scripture does not give us any information about Jesus’ life in Nazareth.  One thing we know—he returned from Egypt to live there with Mary and Joseph, once he was safe from Herod’s insecure tirade—and he lived there until he began his public ministry at the age of thirty.  So most of his life was lived in the little village nestled in the hills of Galilee.

^“There is almost nothing in Jesus’ life which attracts the reverent imagination more than the prodigious silence of these thirty years.”²  Indeed.  Most of jesus’ life we have no biographical information—all those years in Nazareth!  In Mark’s gospel, chapter six, he mentions Jesus, his mother, brothers and sisters … not Joseph.  It is believed by most biblical scholars that Joseph died in Jesus’ late teens or possibly his early twenties, thereby leaving Jesus as the head of the household, to care for his mother Mary, his four brothers, and couple sisters.³

Thankfully, he had been taught the trade of his earthly father, that of a carpenter—though the Greek word used for carpenter, tekton, was more like a craftsman or artisan.  The trade enabled him to be the provider. [Since we were just referencing the names of God, it bears mentioning that one of the names used to describe Yahweh or Jehovah, was Yahweh-Jireh, meaning ‘the Lord will provide’.  Typically, we reference this aspect of God’s personage as Jehovah-Jireh, which originated with the patriarch of the Jewish people, Abraham, when God provided a ram as a sacrifice instead of his beloved son, Isaac, who he obediently tied to the altar.⁴ Jehovah-Jireh, my provider, his grace is sufficient for me – do you remember the old song?]  Apparently, it is not just part of God’s nature to provide, but his Son’s as well.  Oh, I do so love this.

With the pressure of providing for the family, you see, Jesus empathizes with the weight on the working man; he understands that which presses in, even in the middle of a night’s sleep, waking the soul, disturbing the thoughts of ‘how long can I keep this up?’  ‘How long until all of the cards start falling down about my head?’  This is the same Jesus of whom Paul wrote about in Hebrews 4.15 – Jesus ‘gets’ what you and I are going through, in every respect. 

It was in Nazareth that Jesus spent time on the hillsides, taking in scenes from Nature which would later form the bases of his parables, about things the average, simple man could understand and appropriate—about the sower sowing seeds, some which fell away, others which took root—about the shepherd, his sheep, the sheepfold, and the shepherd’s intimate familiarity with his own sheep, such that they knew the sound of his voice—different from all other shepherds.

In Nazareth, Jesus learned to be faithful in all ways.  I’m wondering—am I faithful in the obscure times when no one else sees?  Am I devout on my own time, or only when folks are watching?  For these are the lessons for you and me from the little village nestled in the Galilean hills.

Question: how faithful are you when no one is watching?  Are you a person of integrity when no one is taking notice?

Oh, and then, we can only imagine the day when Jesus told Mary ‘good bye’ … when he knew his time had come, and he was to meet up with John the Baptist at the river Jordan.  How about Mary, who had pondered all these things in her heart?  Was she in any way prepared for the day she would kiss her son on first one cheek and then the other, and bid him ‘shalom’?  We know what was to come, but how much did this Mary know of the heartache that was soon to be hers?⁵

2 - Romano Guardini, The Lord

3 – Jesus’ four brothers are named, his sisters are not

4 – Genesis 22.14

5 – What do you make of Nazareth?  Why was this the town God chose for Jesus to spend most of his life?