And, if, maybe, some kind matter-of-fact friend thinks all this sort of talk sounds very nice, but is idealizing home clear out of all practical reach—you listen to this, and listen with your heart: there was a Nazareth home! There was a Jesus home in little hilly Nazareth.
Nazareth has not had the place in the heart of the Church that rightly belongs to it. Bethlehem, the place of His birth, has been immortalized in song and speech and art, and none too much. Galilee's hills and plains and blue lake have loomed up large as we follow Jesus' tireless work among the crowds. The Jordan, and Judea, and Jerusalem, play a big part in our thought of that incessant going about doing good. The Transfiguration Mount, and Gethsemane's olive grove just over the Creek of the Cedars, have figured in big, too.
To the great crowd in every generation and clime, Calvary has overtopped every other hill, and stands out tallest of all. But the little hill village of Nazareth has played but a very humble part. Yet Nazareth stands peculiarly for Jesus' everyday life, His home life, lived amid commonplace circumstances for nearly the whole of His years.
Jesus lived what He taught, and lived it first, and lived it more. That is to say, there was always more that He had lived than He taught. His teaching was sublime. It has awakened the admiration of believer and sceptic alike. Its freshness never fails. But He had woven into the fabric of actual life far more of the truth He was speaking than could possibly get out of His lips. And this doesn't mean those three public years merely; it means rather the far longer home life in Nazareth that lay behind and back of those few public years; and which were now incarnated in His person. While His lips were speaking that life was speaking yet more. His pure quiet life in Nazareth was the greatest fact in His whole great career. It was this life that gave significance to His death.
Nazareth stands for the home life. It contains the greater part of His great career. By far the greater number of years was spent here. Here were more praying for others and over the life plan, more communing with the Father, more battling with temptation, and narrow prejudice, and ignorance, than in the few years of public service. Here were more purity of life, and steadiness of purpose, more wisdom in action and patience in touch with others and with the knotty little problems of daily life, more of all this being lived than could ever find outlet at His lips.
Nazareth stands for that intensely human life of Jesus lived in dependence upon God's grace exactly as other men must live. It was lived in a simple home that would seem very narrow and meagre in its appointments and conveniences to most of us. He was one of a large family living in a small house, with the touch of elbows very close, and with all the possible, small, half-good-natured frictions that such close, almost crowded, touch is apt to give rise to.
He worked with His hands and bodily strength most of the waking hours, doing carpentering jobs for the small trade of the village, dealing with exacting, whimsical customers, as well as those more easily suited.
He was a son to His mother, an eldest son, too, and maybe, rather likely, of a widowed mother, who leaned upon her first-born in piecing out the small funds, and in the ceaseless care of the younger children. He was a brother to His brothers and sisters, a real brother, the big brother of the little group. He was a neighbour to His fellow villagers, and a fellow labourer with the other craftsmen. In the midst of the little but very real and pressing problems of home, the small talk and interests of the village life, He grew up, a perfect bit of His surroundings, and lived during His matured years.
And who can doubt the simplicity and warmth and practicality and unfailingness of His love as it was lived in that great Nazareth life. We will never know the full meaning of Jesus' word "pure," and of His word "love," and of all His teaching, until we know His Nazareth life. The more we can think into what it really was, the better can we grasp the meaning of His public utterances. Nazareth is the double underscoring in red under every sentence He spoke.
Those three years ana odd, of public life all grew up out of this Nazareth home life. They are the top of the hill; Nazareth is the base and bulk; Calvary the tip-top. Here every victory had already been won. The public life was built upon the home life. Under the ministering to crowds, healing the sick, raising the dead, and patient teaching of the multitudes, lay the great strong home life in its purity. Calvary was built upon Nazareth.
Jesus was, before He did, and before He died. He lived what He taught, and lived it before He taught it, and Jived it far more than He could teach it. The greatness of His sacrifice for sin on Calvary lay in the matchless purity, the rugged strength and trueness to ideals of His home life. It was the quality of the life poured out so freely on Calvary that gives the wondrous meaning to His death.
The ideal home life, bathed in the fine ether of love, is a real life. It has been lived. Jesus lived it. Others have in His strength. We can; and—please God—we will.