Sunday 28th December 2014
We spend weeks before Christmas preaching about the events leading up to … and including … the birth of Jesus. We seldom hear a sermon about what happened to him and his family after Bethlehem. Did they ever get to live a “normal” life?
Although Mary seems to have had a “normal” delivery of her baby, we have just spend a month reminding ourselves of the unusual things that happened around the birth of her child. Today we have already read that following the visit of the wise men from the east, life did not settle down but because of Herod’s mania, the family narrowly escaped with their lives and became refugees in Egypt.
I’d like to say that that is a unique kind of thing to happen to a couple and a new baby but we all know it is not. In fact there are 42 million forcibly displaced people around the world. This includes 27.1 million internally displaced people and 15.6 million refugees.
But eventually after Herod died, Joseph decided it was time to return to Israel. It seems that Joseph really wanted to go back to southern Israel, perhaps return to Bethlehem. It may have been of course that he didn’t want to take Mary back to Nazareth, where she may have been the subject of gossip.
“But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. “
And it seems that is where they settled down to “normal” life. Joseph carried on as a carpenter (a more accurate description of which is builder) Jesus went to the synagogue, they joined in the pilgrimages to Jerusalem for Passover and went to local weddings. Mary and Joseph had more children.
The excitement of the Son of God being born that night, the visit of the shepherds; the visit of the Magi from the east, bringing gifts. But now what? Those things are done - in the past, distant memories for Mary and Joseph. Now they set about the task of raising a family, making a living – the excitement is gone but perhaps they had both had had enough for excitement for now.
Nazareth was a small town. It was famous for not being famous. No one had ever heard of Nazareth. It isn’t even mentioned in the Old Testament at all. Not far from Nazareth, the major highways running North/South and East/West crossed there.
That’s where God wanted His Son raised.
Nazareth is the scene of his participation in the everyday world of ordinary people.
There are 3 things pertaining to Jesus “normal” life in Nazareth.
1. Living for God despite your environment
Galilee was said to be on the way to everywhere and it was an area that people passed through. Consequently there were some who got held up and stayed there. It became an area of mixed population, Jews and Gentiles. It was this that caused the more pure blooded Judeans in the south to despise the northern Galileans with their rough uncouth dialect.
However out of all the towns to come from in Galilee there were better ones to choose than Nazareth. To say you were Galilean was bad enough but to say you came from Nazareth was even worse. Isolated in a valley Nazareth was not seen as an important part of national and religious life. This coupled with a bad reputation in morals and lack of religious zeal Nazareth was bad news. But Jesus came from Nazareth and was known as a Nazarene. When hearing this about Him it caused Nathaniel to say with cynicism, "Nazareth? Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?"
(John 1 v 46)
When we meet people one of the things we like to know is "Where do you come from?" Mostly it is because we are interested. We might have been there we might know people they know.
It is said that the child is the father of the man and it is frequently assumed that a child brought up in circumstances that have some kind of deprivation, whether material or emotional will become an unfulfilled adult. When a person rises above that we express surprise and offer congratulations.
It is true that our past affects us very greatly. Our minds are programmed through prevailing experiences that we had in early childhood such as the family we were raised in, the churches that we went to or didn't go to, the neighbourhoods we grew up in, the friends that we had or didn't have and so on,. These external factors all had an effect upon our development.
Our environment isn't all that shapes up because every one of us has a different way of interpreting the world in which we live and God has created us uniquely. In addition there are experiences that we have had, they may have been so traumatic that they are burned into our minds because of their intensity. All of these experiences have been stored in our memory like a file on our computer.
In the light of all that it can be tempting to say, “I can't be where I want to be in terms of my character, my achievements and my relationship with God because of my past”.
The boy Jesus grew up with gossip about the strange circumstances of His birth, in a large family, in a despised town, nurtured by parents who were probably poor, when the Jewish religion was at an all time low, when the nation was under foreign occupation and in a state of fear and change.
Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes found it hard to take Joseph's Son seriously. When He started to preach and teach they said in shocked tones "But isn't this Joseph the Carpenter's son?" Rejection hurts and many a promising young person has had their vision snuffed out by the mocking taunts of others. Even Jesus’ own family were embarrassed by Him and didn't support the launch of His mission. (Mark 3 v 21) If Jesus had given up it could easily had been said "It couldn't be helped He was hindered by Nazareth”.
But this wasn’t’ the case. And I think I know why. Jesus did not get his sense of identity, self-worth and confidence from the opinion of the crowd but from his relationship with the Father. At his baptism Jesus emerged from the water to hear God say, "You are my beloved Son in you I am well pleased.”
He must have held on to that when even his own brothers and sisters thought him mad and tried to make him give up his mission.
Joyce Huggett, who wrote the book on prayer, called Listening to God, received this word from the Lord for someone but I think we can apply it to many people and possibly ourselves
God says, “I your Creator see the ways circumstances crippled you. I haven't forgotten one joy or one sorrow that you experienced. I know how these joys and sorrows have reached down through all their years of your life, freeing you, binding you, making your heart sing or making your heart cry. I know the healing that your life-tossed soul needs. I can loose the tethers and free you from all that began to bind you from the moment you were conceived.
2. Living for God in your
environment
Jesus stayed in Galilee and
ministered to many people who were hindered by negative factors who thought
they could never be any different, that they future was set in stone. But Jesus
came to them in Galilee. And the gospels
give us the amazing stories of what happened. Blind people saw, lame people
walked, dead people lived, invalids became healthy, prostitutes gave up the
game, cheats became honest, liars became truthful as Jesus set them free. Jesus
was never bound by Galilee and we don't have to be either.
If we read the gospels we
find a Jesus who brought glory to Galilee. In John we read of the miracle of
the changing of water into wine. At the end of that story there is a lovely
phrase. "There he showed his
glory."Jesus calls us to show the glory of God sometimes in the most ordinary of places.
The whole of Israel could be tucked into half of some of the states of America. Israel was at that time a province of the Roman Empire in which Jesus’ position was that of a peasant carpenters son. Yet his task was to proclaim himself the founder of an everlasting kingdom to lead a world wide society to redeem humanity to God. Jerusalem, Rome or Athens might have seemed much more appropriate for such a task but Jesus simply accepted that Galilee was where God had chosen for him to be.
Do you know that you and I are Jesus' Galilee today. The ordinary Christian is in the place through which Jesus shows His glory today. Paul said, 'We have this treasure from God but we are like clay jars that hold the treasure’. This shows the great power is from God and not from us.”
3. Living Spirit filled lives is normal Christianity
And my final thought is about
what is normal Christianity? We are told
in the Bible that Jesus could not do many miracles in Nazareth because of their
lack of unbelief, whereas in Capernaum along the road they embraced him with
humble joy.
It seems to me that because
in these days in the west we seem to be surrounded by Nazareth type cynicism
rather than Capernaum like enthusiasm we think that low level faith in the norm
and that transformed, Spirit filled overcoming life is for only the especially
pious or naïve. Sin is normal, saintliness; impossible.
Many years ago Chinese pastor
Watchman Nee asked the question, “What is the normal Christian life? Well I for one will not accept that is a bland sterile life where I do my duty but never expect that I should feel any joy or sense of God touching my heart and mind. Neither will I accept that it should be an emotional roller coaster where I am either intensely of fire for God or I am in the depths of despair. I for one will not accept that it is a defeated life where I will never overcome a besetting sin or conquer a recurring fear. Surely we must have a faith that means we are not bound by our past, paralyzed in the present or petrified by the future.
I believe that there is a life in Christ that means we walking daily, through our normal life empowered to live in freedom, power and peace.
HA Ironside wrote,
"I am persuaded that the mistake that thousands of people make is to imagine that Christianity is a natural thing, a natural life lived on a higher plane than the ordinary life. This is not so. It is a divine life manifested in the energy of the Spirit.”
Read: 2 Peter 1:3-9
What is
normal Christianity? It is an ordinary
life, lived in the power of the Spirit.
It is not reserved for an elite group of super saints. It is not a dream
or imagery or poetry but real. When men and women seek Christ in the right way
he grants strength and power through his Spirit in your inner being.
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