Jesus (13 page)

But even the sharpest historian's tools cannot craft a complete look at daily life in Nazareth, for, as with those who are the desperately poor even today, life wasn't all toil, filth, and misery, despite the crushing economic systems and the difficult physical conditions. Archaeological evidence of small stone dwellings for extended families also indicates the likelihood of close relationships and an ingrained feeling of belonging—to the family, to the extended family, and to the village. Living and working in close proximity to one another, whether in the fields or in the tightly packed houses of a small village, would have fostered a strong sense of community, particularly if Nazareth was seen by outsiders, as Nathanael's comment suggests, as a joke. Strong religious beliefs would mean an awareness of a person's reliance on God, a sense of gratitude for the blessings in life—a timely rain shower, an unexpectedly good crop, a baby delivered in good health—and the knowledge that God is part of everyone's daily life.

While Jesus's life in Nazareth would be considered hard by most modern standards, it was surely not a life without its moments, perhaps many moments, of joy and laughter.

This was the world out of which Jesus stepped—a world of poverty, hardship, and toil. But also a world of close-knit and religious families who relied on one another in tough times. And this was the background of the man who would soon speak to the people of Nazareth, who thought, falsely, that they knew all there was to know about him.

T
HIS BOOK IS MEANT
to introduce you to Jesus Christ. And one way to know Jesus better is by understanding not only his words and deeds as recorded in the Gospels, but by thinking about what his life might have been like before his public ministry began. Thanks to archaeology, that life is becoming less hidden. So even from that short exploration of daily life in Palestine what spiritual lessons might we draw from the thirty years of Jesus's life in Nazareth?

More specifically, how might Jesus's daily life in Nazareth have influenced his later ministry? And how might his “ordinary” life intersect with our own?

First of all,
Jesus understood the lives of those on the margins from firsthand experience.
When Jesus meets the poor during his public ministry and treats them with compassion, and when he directs his followers to care for the poor, it is not simply the stance of someone looking down from on high, as a wealthy person might pity the homeless man he passes on the way to the office. Rather, it is the stance of the person who himself came from a poor town, and who may have felt that compassion for years. Jesus's love for the poor came not only from meditating on the Scriptures, from seeing injustice in the world around him at the time of his ministry, and from his divine connection to the Father, but also from his life in Nazareth: his youth, adolescence, and early adulthood.

Even if he never once journeyed to Sepphoris (which is hard to imagine about a curious boy and then a carpenter eager to earn his daily bread), Jesus would have been acutely aware of the income disparities in Galilee, the taxes levied on the people, and the way that something as random as drought can wipe out a year's earnings. Jesus knew the precariousness of human life. He would also have seen how the class system forced many poor people to see themselves as powerless.

Imagine someone growing up in a backwater town and being forced to witness his social group as not only indigent, but subject to slights and insults. As an adult that person might naturally want to lift his people from such indignities. (Once on a retreat I imagined a young Jesus passing by a poor man being harassed by a wealthy landlord, and feeling anger.) Again, Jesus's emphasis on the dignity of the poor and marginalized (“Blessed are you who are poor!”) may have found its foundation not simply in what he saw as an adult, but in his experiences as a young man.

Second, and more basically,
Jesus understood human life—all the messy physical realities of being human.
Jesus wasn't simply God playacting at being human. Here's an earthy example: Last year a vicious stomach flu tore through my Jesuit community. Despite vigorous hand washing, it hit me one night. Without going into details, it was the sickest I had ever been—even including my time in East Africa. As I hunched over the toilet for the fifth time that night, I had a surprising thought:
Jesus did this
. Admittedly, he did not contract a norovirus in a Jesuit community, but Jesus certainly got sick. He got hungry. He ate. He drank. We know, explicitly from the Gospels, that he got tired, as when he falls asleep in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. The physical realities of human life were not unknown to him.

Nor were the emotional ones. As a fully human person, Jesus felt the full range of human emotions. He could be, for example, joyful. That little children wanted to be near him shows a sunny personality.
⁴¹
(Generally speaking, children are not drawn to the morose.) He had a sense of humor, as evidenced by the playful exaggeration and clever figures in his parables and stories (the man who builds a house on sand, for example, or the parent who would give a child a stone instead of bread, elements that would have drawn some laughter in his day).
⁴²
Jesus might even have been playful: after all, he seems to bestow nicknames on some of the disciples.
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Jesus feels the more “difficult” emotions too. He can grow agitated, even tetchy at times. “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?” he says to the disciples at one point.
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He speaks sharply to the Syrophoenician woman who asks for healing for her daughter. He weeps over the death of his friend Lazarus. He feels anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. And these are just the incidents recorded in the Gospels.

Even from what little we know about life in Nazareth in Jesus's day, we can reasonably posit other emotions: he loved Mary and Joseph; he treasured the members of his extended family; he enjoyed friendships as a child, adolescent, and young adult. As a
tektōn
he probably worked alongside fellow Nazarenes, helping stonemasons build a house, traveling over the hillsides with fellow carpenters to chop down trees, or walking back to his village from a job and seeing some of his neighbors at their daily tasks, and then spending a few minutes enjoying some lighthearted conversation. In Nazareth Jesus surely knew friendship. He led a fully human emotional life.

To that end, a third point:
Jesus understood family life.
Now, it is almost certain that Jesus was celibate. How do we know this? For one thing, the Gospels talk about Jesus's mother and “brothers and sisters,” so if he had a wife it would be odd
not
to mention her.
⁴⁵
Meier also suggests that being unmarried was seen as undesirable for most rabbis of the time, and even though Jesus was not technically a rabbi, it would have been strange for the Gospel writers to
concoct
a story that he was celibate if he was in fact married.
⁴⁶
The Gospels' silence about a wife and children likely means that Jesus had neither.
⁴⁷

What are some possible reasons for Jesus's remaining unmarried? He may have intuited that once he started his ministry, it would be short or even meet a disastrous end. As a Jew, he knew the fate of other prophets. Jesus may have foreseen the difficulty of caring for a family while being an itinerant preacher. Or perhaps his celibacy was another manifestation of his single-hearted commitment to God. After sifting through the facts, Meier lands on the last reason: “The position that Jesus remained celibate on religious grounds [is] the more probable hypothesis.”
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But that does not mean that he did not understand married life—he lived with Mary and Joseph and knew married friends in Nazareth (by the time Jesus was thirty most of his male friends would have married)—or family life—he lived with his four “brothers” (James, Joses, Jude, and Simon) and his (at least two but perhaps more) “sisters.” He and his cousins (or siblings) probably lived in the same small stone house in Nazareth among a tight grouping of houses filled with other relatives. His “brothers” and “sisters” played together, fought together as any family members do, and wept together when Joseph died.

Thus when Jesus told stories about, say, a wayward son being welcomed home by his father, these insights may have been colored by his own experiences. And when he entered a family home in Galilee for a meal with friends, when he visited the house of Peter and his wife in Capernaum, when he dined with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus at Martha's house in Bethany, he understood their world. Families and extended families were a central part of the culture of Jesus's time, and so he understood them.

Jesus understood the emotional life of intimate friendships too. We can assume that he—as a fully human person—experienced the normal sexual urges as he matured, most likely experienced the typical adolescent crushes, and perhaps fell in love. At some point Jesus would have had to undergo a serious discernment about what it meant to be a good friend and share intimacy while remaining celibate. All of this flows from love, and we can see traces of Jesus's deep loving friendships in not only his patient affection for the disciples, but also his encounters with people like Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus, who is described at one point to Jesus as “he whom you love.”
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He must have been a loving and kind friend to both men and women, capable of great intimacy and affection.

Finally,
Jesus understood work.
This cannot be emphasized enough because it is so often forgotten.

Jesus does not simply stride onto the world stage at his baptism, having spent the last thirty years praying, wandering dreamily through the countryside, or idly examining a piece of olive wood when the mood struck him. Besides the daily chores of helping his family run a house, he would have probably spent many years (upward of, say, fifteen years) working as a
tektōn
with Joseph. And if Joseph died early, as it seems he did, Jesus himself might have taken over the family business. Did Jesus run Joseph's business with the men in his extended family? If so, could that kind of working together have influenced his ministry? Could that have helped him understand what it meant to make plans, to motivate a group of adults, to calculate the cost of a venture? Or did he work alone, and learn how to make difficult decisions on his own?

Jesus was a worker, and that work must have influenced his outlook on life. As I mentioned, Meier notes that Justin Martyr, a second-century theologian, gives voice to the tradition that calls him a maker of yokes. In Jesus's day only the most talented
tektōn
would have been able to fashion a good yoke for oxen (perfectly made to fit the team of oxen, so that it caused no chafing or discomfort). When Jesus said, “[M]y yoke is easy and my burden is light,” did people of his day, who knew what an easy yoke was, smile to themselves and say, “Yes, he did make good yokes”?
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Was he subtly playing on their knowledge of his background?

Think of the values that a carpenter needs. You need persistence to carry out physically taxing labors. Imagine Jesus not simply delicately sanding a small table, but cutting down trees, carrying the heavy logs back to his house, and fashioning planks for lintels and doors, all the while lugging tools all over Galilee. You need patience for slowly waiting for the wood to dry. You need a sense of fairness, for charging your customers a fair price. And if you are working alongside other laborers—builders, stone carvers, roofers, masons, and so on—who would also be constructing houses, you need an ability to cooperate and even to lead. All these traits would serve him well later in his ministry. They were useful tools.

Many of Jesus's parables are about work and workers: the man who is paid more than what others consider his fair share; the farmers in the vineyard; the person who calculates the cost of a venture, and so on. These parables came from someone who knew the notion of a fair day's work. He understood the kind of work that women did as well, having watched his mother, women in his family, and other women in the village at their labors. The brief parable of the woman cleaning her house to find one lost coin may have come from watching his mother at her daily chores.
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Though they are not many, there are tantalizing signs of Jesus's
tektōn
background in some of his sayings. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus compares those who act on his words to a house builder who has “dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock.” When a flood comes, the house stands firm, “because it had been well built.” By contrast, the foolish person, who does not put into action Jesus's words, is like the person who builds a house on sandy ground. When storms come, the house washes away.
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Was Jesus drawing on his knowledge of building—more specifically, of helping to build houses in and around Nazareth? Would his hearers have known him as a reputable builder?