We All Live in Nazareth

The Catholic Liturgy for Holy Family Sunday, Dec. 29, 2019. Gospel of St. Matthew 2:13-23. Theme: We All Live in Nazareth

Even though it’s still Christmastime for a couple more weeks, you’ve no doubt noticed that many of the sights and sounds of the season are slowly disappearing. Things are gradually starting to look and sound and smell rather ordinary again.  And today’s Gospel is very much like that as well.  

It starts out feeling like Christmas, with the extraordinary intervention of angels and God-inspired dreams, but ends with the more ordinary down-to-earth reality of a devoted husband looking for a safe place for his little family to live.  There are many interesting things in today’s story of the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt and their return home. But what catches my attention is the closing verse which summarizes the entire next 30 years of the Christ Child’s life in 6 simple words: “He shall be called a Nazorean.”  

Nazareth was the Virgin Mary’s hometown and so that’s probably a big reason why the Holy Family chose to go there upon their return from Egypt.  But another important reason is that it was considered the boonies, the sticks, a backwater village of only a few hundred people.  So, it was far out of sight and far away from any possible lingering danger to Jesus that was started by King Herod.  There are no heavenly angels proclaiming God’s praise to shepherds there. There are no mystical magi following a miraculous star and bringing precious treasures to a king. Those extraordinary things all belong to royal Bethlehem and majestic Jerusalem.  

But Nazareth is an ordinary everyday kind of place, where the Holy Family lived an ordinary everyday kind of life.  That’s why it speaks to me so powerfully. I’m at very much more at home in Nazareth. For me, Nazareth symbolizes living by faith and not by miracles. Nazareth means going to work and earning a living. Nazareth means trying to do our best to know, love and serve God within the ordinary situations in which we find ourselves. 

That’s where I live. That’s where most of us live.  But most amazing of all: that is where God the Son, freely chose to live for 90% of his life as a human being. Bethlehem is forever privileged as the place where God became flesh, but Nazareth has the honor of showing us what this means and what it looks like. It is where the extraordinary happenings of Christmas give way to the ordinary, because it is in Nazareth that the God who created each one of us, lived every-day of his life just like each one of us.

Nazareth is where we truly find Jesus as the Savior who heals and blesses and transforms our humanity by sharing fully in it.  Nazareth is where he lives out his Christmas name of Emmanuel: God-with-us. God-among-us. God-as-one-of-us:

• ·       He chose to live and grow up in a family like we all do, experiencing life among those with whom he lived, worked and socialized;
• ·       He became a craftsman, a laborer, following in his adopted father’s trade and earning his living by the sweat of his brow and the work of his hands.
• ·       He had to pay taxes to the emperor, deal with bills, and meet with the men of the village to arrange for protection and provisions.
• ·       He went to synagogue every Sabbath, and prayed with Joseph and Mary every night;
• ·       He enjoyed times of celebration with weddings and births, and mourned in times of sickness and death. 

Now stop for a moment and ask yourself: what does this say about the dignity of our ordinary life if God himself came down from Heaven to live it for 30 of his 33 years? What does it have to say about our everyday lives being potential pathways to holiness? About living our everyday lives in an intimate relationship with God so as to reach the Kingdom of Heaven? I believe it says a whole lot about how these things which are, after all, the reason why we have Christmas in the first place!

Because of Nazareth, because Jesus chose to live the kind of life we all live, we are able infuse our ordinary lives with extraordinary grace and blessings.   We can do this every morning by offering up our day and everything it in a spirit of solidarity with the life lived on earth by the Lord Jesus. And when we do so, when we choose to live our ordinary lives in union with his, then everything we do – all of our prayers, works, joys and sufferings – everything…becomes a gift to God and a means of blessing for us and those we love. We become partners with Jesus, our Beloved Brother and Savior, in the work of transforming humanity and bringing salvation to the world.

Yes, the events of the Bethlehem manger were awesome and I do love Christmas very much… But the glorious angels gave their message to the shepherds and then returned to Heaven…And the mystical magi paid their homage to the Newborn King and then returned home to the East…However, Nazareth…Nazareth has never ever disappeared from the face of earth but has lived on for centuries in Christians like you and me who make the decision to live our ordinary everyday lives in solidarity, in loving union, with Jesus the Nazorean.