by James Martin
you would exit as a holier one.
As I mentioned, you have to kneel to pass through the Door of Humility. That action is a striking image of the life of belief. For humility is the gateway to faith. Without it, we rely simply on our own efforts, without recognizing our dependence on God. Without it, we rely simply on our own reason, without opening ourselves up to the possibility of the miraculous. Without it, we cannot fully enter into the world that God has in store for us.
Paradoxically, our model in this is God, who humbled himself by becoming one of us, who entered our world by passing through the body of a young woman who was probably writhing on the floor of a stable, a cave, or a little room. In a way, Mary was a Door of Humility as well.
Humility is the key to almost everything in the spiritual life. And I hope that one day I might be a holier, in other words, humbler, pilgrim.
George and I made it home just in time for Mass.
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THE BIRTH OF JESUS
Luke 2:1–20
(See also Matthew 1:18–25)
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In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
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CHAPTER 4
Nazareth
“Jesus increased in wisdom and in years.”
ON THE DAY WE visited Nazareth, Sunday Mass was about to begin in the Basilica of the Annunciation. George and I found some empty spots in the hard wooden pews just as the procession started, and we tried to comprehend an unfamiliar language. But although I speak only a few words of Arabic, it proved easy to follow the familiar parts of the Mass. The sounds and cadences, I realized, were also closer to Jesus’s original language—Aramaic—than English. I closed my eyes and wondered what Jesus’s actual voice sounded like.
Afterward, we visited the Church of St. Joseph, a modest structure built in 1914 atop the remains of a medieval church. That earlier church was itself located on top of what tradition claims to be the carpentry workshop of Joseph. Tradition may claim it, but most scholars do not. In The Holy Land Murphy-O’Connor bluntly calls it a “pious tradition that has no foundation.”1 So much for that. On the other hand, Murphy-O’Connor notes that remnants of a first-century village have been excavated at the site, and evidence of silos, olive presses, and areas for storage are visible.
The pious tradition of the location of the workshop may have no foundation, but Jesus’s youth, adolescence, and young adulthood in this town do. He was known during his public ministry as “Jesus of Nazareth,” and he spent most of his life here.
Yet oddly, between his birth and his entrance into public ministry there is only one incident from his life mentioned in the entire New Testament. When Jesus was twelve years old, his family went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. On the way back, as Luke tells us, Mary and Joseph realized that the boy was not with their traveling party. This is not as callous as it may seem. It was natural in a group of pilgrims that included extended families for a parent to assume that the child was with another relative. Frantic (“in great anxiety,” says Luke), Mary and Joseph rushed back to Jerusalem where they found the twelve-year-old in the Temple, calmly speaking with the Jewish teachers there. “Why were you searching for me?” says the precocious boy. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”2
With that vignette Luke offers us a glimpse not only of Jesus’s intelligence, but also of his natural affinity for the religious world. His attraction to the Temple may be similar to a young student gravitating to a particular musical instrument or a certain sport. “Of course I would be here,” he seems to say to his parents—and to us. “Where else would I be? I love it here.”
From that point until his baptism at age thirty the Gospels offer a single sentence to describe his life. After Jesus is found in the Temple Luke writes: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” What a sentence! One verse encompasses eighteen years. The time between Jesus’s being lost in the Temple and his baptism by John at the Jordan River is cloaked in mystery and is often referred to as the “Hidden Life.”
That elision can be frustrating for believers who want to know as much as they can about Jesus. His birth is afforded more Gospel lines than his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood combined. But again, the Gospels were not written as historical documents (that is, as we understand biographies today), but as faith documents. Consequently they are not concerned as much with Jesus’s youth as with his public ministry. So that part of his life remains almost totally obscure.3
Nonetheless, running through the history of Christian spirituality is a strong current of devotion to the Hidden Life. And in Catholic circles, the person most closely associated with the Hidden Life is also, not surprisingly, associated with Nazareth. Charles de Foucauld, a nineteenth-century French aristocrat and soldier who abandoned a life of privilege for an austere existence in the North African desert, may be fairly called the Apostle of the Hidden Life.
Born in 1858 to a noble family, the Viscount Foucauld squandered an immense fortune and entered the French military in 1881. After being posted to Algeria, Charles was dismissed for “indiscipline and notorious conduct,” in this case taking a prostitute with him and passing her off as his wife. When his regiment was posted in Tunisia, he rejoined them. The viscount’s time in the military would be short-lived, but his sojourn in North Africa awakened a lifelong interest in the region. After permanently resigning from the army, he undertook an exploration of Morocco under the auspices of the French Geographical Society.
The piety of the local Muslims sparked in Charles a new interest in his Catholic faith, which led to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There he became fascinated with the spirituality of Jesus’s Hidden Life. It dawned on him that the “life of Nazareth,” the ordinary existence that Jesus led before his public ministry, could be followed by every person as a path to holiness. So Foucauld gave away all his possessions and entered a Trappist monastery in Syria; he later moved to Nazareth to work as a gardener at a monastery of Poor Clares, a women’s religious order. But this still did not satisfy him, so he returned to North Africa, where he lived among the Tuareg people in Morocco. There Charles hoped to found his own religious order,
whose members would embody the spirituality of the Hidden Life. Though greatly respected by the locals, he was killed by Tuareg rebels in a botched looting in 1916.
Seemingly Charles “failed” in his life, but after his death several religious orders, including the Little Brothers of Jesus and the Little Sisters of Jesus, were founded on his inspiration. During my time working in Kenya, I came to know a community of Little Sisters who lived down the street from the Jesuit community in Nairobi. Their lives consisted, as Charles would have hoped, in doing “ordinary” work—as maids and factory hands, farmers and cleaning women—and spreading the Gospel in everyday circumstances.
During our visit to Nazareth I was delighted to spy on our map a tiny rectangle marked “Charles de Foncauld Monastery.” Was this (misspelling and all) the convent where he had worked as a gardener? It was only a few blocks from the Basilica of the Annunciation, so after peering at the ruins of Nazareth, George and I set out to find it. After losing our way several times, I stopped at a souvenir shop and asked the owner, who spoke French, if she could direct us to the Charles de Foucauld monastery.
“Mais oui, le grand philosophe!” she said. The great philosopher, Michel Foucault. Evidently shopkeepers are well-read in Nazareth.
When I said, “Non, non. Charles,” she shook her head.
“Le monastère?” I asked hopefully.
“Ah,” she said, and motioned vaguely down the street.
A formidable stone wall running the length of the block surrounded what appeared to be a monastery. I wasn’t sure if this was the Poor Clare monastery where Charles had lived or a men’s religious order that had named their monastery after Charles. There was no sign, but we rang the rusty doorbell beside a stout wooden door set deep into the stone wall. No answer. We went around the corner, walked down a hill, and rang the bell at a high metal gate.
“This is a school,” said the caretaker who opened the gate only a crack. “The monastery is up there.”4
We returned to the original entrance, knocked again, and waited again. “Tant pis!” George said. Too bad. But I wanted desperately to gain access.
Many of us wish that we could gain access to the story of Jesus’s years in Nazareth. But like those monastery walls, the New Testament keeps that part of Jesus’s life hidden from view.
I am fascinated by the Hidden Life. On the one hand, it is marvelously mysterious: we know very little about what Jesus did during the years in Nazareth. At the same time, it’s not an insurmountable mystery. We have plenty of solid biblical, archaeological, and historical studies that can tell us a good deal about life in first-century Nazareth. And recently there has been a veritable explosion of findings about ancient Galilee. As a result, there is a surfeit of books about the level of influence of Roman and Greek culture on Galilee, the sociological and economic situation at the time, first-century Jewish religious practices, what the archaeological finds say about family life in the region, and, more broadly, daily life in Jesus’s time.
But there’s another reason I’m drawn to the Hidden Life, and it’s similar to what attracted Charles de Foucauld: In Nazareth Jesus’s life was most like our own. None of us is going to be preaching and performing miracles—at least not as Jesus did—but all of us live everyday lives, as Jesus did in Nazareth, being taught and cared for by our parents, loving and squabbling with our families, playing with our friends, learning what it means to be an adult, and in time earning a living. Was Jesus any less the Son of God when he was doing ordinary things? No.
But what was Jesus’s life like during his thirty years in Nazareth?
THERE ARE A NUMBER of superb scholarly studies on life in ancient Galilee and, more specifically, first-century Nazareth, then a tiny town in southern Galilee. Drawn from archaeological research and a variety of historical sources, together they paint a picture of a largely agrarian society, populated mainly by the lower classes and the poor, in the midst of an abundantly fertile region. Even during our pilgrimage to Galilee in the blazing heat of late August, the area was dotted with gnarled olive trees, tall date palms, and all manner of crops. During the wetter months, the landscape bursts into colorful bloom—or so we were told! The Jewish historian Josephus, writing a few decades after the time of Jesus, described one strip along the Sea of Galilee’s northwest shore as the most productive parcel of land in all of Israel.5
Despite the fertile land, though, the region of Galilee on the whole remained, as archaeologist and New Testament scholar Jonathan L. Reed describes, “on the fringe of the Roman Empire, both geographically and politically.”6 Roman roads avoided it until the second century. So it was something of a backwater. As for Nazareth, most scholars estimate that anywhere from two to four hundred people lived there in Jesus’s day.7 Thus, Nazarenes lived in a backwater of a backwater.
Today the ruins of the houses in Nazareth are scant, but the archaeological evidence has revealed small dwellings built with local stones (basalt or limestone) that were stacked roughly atop one another. The floors were of packed earth and the roofs thatched, constructed over beams of wood and held together with mud. Two or three homes were clustered together around an open courtyard, where much of the cooking would have been done. Also in the courtyard might be a common cistern and a millstone for grinding grain. Animals might have been penned here as well. When I worked in Jamaica as a Jesuit novice, I saw similar arrangements: in the poorer parts of Kingston, families lived in small houses clustered together around a “yard” where common activities were performed.
In Nazareth, the small rooms that were closed off were used for shelter, sleep, sex, and, as the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, notes in her book on Mary, “giving birth and dying.”8 Evidence from the rooms points to little privacy for the inhabitants, but a great sense of community. Needless to say, in such a tight-knit community Jesus would have been very well known—his friends, his habits, his ways of speech, his likes and dislikes. This insight will become important later on and explains the expressions of shock from the people who knew him: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” say the crowds in Matthew’s Gospel.9
What kind of food was prepared in the open-air courtyards? The diet in Nazareth at that time would have been mainly grains, vegetables, and some fruits, along with olives and olive oil from the plenteous trees in the area, with the occasional drink of milk or cut of meat if the family had access to animals. Salted fish was an occasional luxury. A stew of lentils and a few seasonal vegetables might be ladled onto some pita bread for a meal, along with some welcome fruits and cheese or yogurt.10 A decent but not always reliable water source was situated at the edge of the village, at a place now called the Well of Mary.
Garbage and sewage would often have been tossed outside the house into alleyways between the small couplings of homes, much as it is today in parts of the developing world. During my time working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi, I saw how those living in the city’s slums were forced to live without water and toilets. They likewise had no choice but to deposit their garbage and sewage in small canals that ran through the slums. These foul streams and rivulets, which had to be stepped over every few feet, overflowed during the rainy seasons and stank all times of the year. It is one of the most pitiable aspects of life for those who are desperately poor.
Clothing in the Nazareth of Jesus’s time would have been simple. Most men would have worn a loincloth, a tunic, and a cloak made of either linen or, most likely, wool, probably colored in some way. Women would have worn similarly simple clothing. All of the material for clothing would have been spun, woven, and sewn by the women of the town, with the wool taken from the flocks of sheep that grazed on the nearby hills.11
In her aptly named book Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit, a fascinating study of the details of Jewish daily life in Galilee and Judea in the time of Jesus, Jodi Magness, an archaeologist and profess
or of early Judaism, reminds us that Westerners tend to view the ancient world through a “highly sanitized lens.” In even the most sophisticated cities conditions were “filthy, malodorous and unhealthy” by contemporary standards. “If we could be transported back in time,” writes Magness, “it is unlikely that most of us would survive exposure to the widespread dirt and diseases, to which we lack immunity.”12
As a result, the quality of the health of the inhabitants of Nazareth was far below modern standards. John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, scholars of the historical Jesus, sum up the conditions in the town during Jesus’s time in a sobering few sentences:
Most skeletal remains predictably show iron and protein deficiencies, and most had severe arthritis. A case of the flu, a bad cold, or an abscessed tooth could kill. Life expectancy, for the luckier half that survived childhood, was somewhere in the thirties. Those reaching fifty or sixty were rare.13
Many of the few hundred inhabitants of Nazareth, most belonging to extended families, depended upon farming to feed themselves and pay taxes, using the method of “polycropping,” or diversifying plantings to avoid becoming overly dependent on a single crop. The area was perfectly suited for the Mediterranean dietary triad of grain, olive, and grape. Larger families helped with the work on the farm, but it was not a secure living; one drought or paltry harvest could mean famine. Elizabeth Johnson summarizes the ways to earn a living: laborers were “peasants who worked their own land, tenant farmers who worked land belonging to others, and craftspersons who served their needs.”14 In that last category of craftspersons, we can include Joseph and Jesus.
The primary role of adult, married women was to care for the home and tend to children; they also worked in the fields when needed. Younger sons from large families or those born out of wedlock might attempt to find work as a soldier or even turn to banditry. (Perhaps Jesus was drawing from stories of families in Nazareth when he spoke of prodigal sons.) Women living without the protection of a father, husband, or son might work independently in baking or textiles, hire themselves out as servants, or in more desperate cases turn to prostitution.15 Life was hard, and people lived perilously close to the edge, economically and socially.