p. 12Recognition of Home by Jesus Christ

The Incarnate Word was born in the bosom of a human family; He lived in it wholly and exclusively during thirty years of His life; He commenced His public ministry by blessing a newly formed home at Cana; the thought of His bereaved Mother, and of her desolate home-life without Him, engaged His attention during part of His agony on the Cross. These circumstances all point to one conclusion: that He wished by His example to teach us the cultivation of the virtues and affections that sanctify home, and make it a reflexion on earth of our eternal home in Heaven. He might have flashed on the world, as some expected Him, in all the perfection of manhood. He might have surrounded Himself with a court and body-guard of incarnate angels. He might have commenced His mission on earth by putting Himself in relations with the Kings and rulers of the day, and asserting His place among them as their absolute Lord and Master. No one would have felt surprised if He had done any of these things or all of them; but then the moral decay of humanity would have been left unchecked; the poor would remain as unbefriended as before; woman would still be a slave in the realm of home, where she had been destined to reign as queen; and wealth would continue as effectually as ever, to usurp the homage and divide the hearts of men. Hence, He pre-arranged to be born in a human family, as His first incarnate manifestation of Himself to the world, in order to bless all family relations, and to strike at the root of their abuse. Hence also, He chose to live in poverty, to show mankind that in His eyes it was no crime to be poor; but that, on the contrary, of all the grades of human society on which His Father looks down from heaven, the patient, uncomplaining poor find greatest favour before Him. Hence, finally, to show man the merit of home-duties faithfully discharged, He led that commonplace, unnoted life I have already mentioned, for thirty years, in an obscure village of Galilee; a life over which the Holy Spirit has drawn a veil, inscribed with these few, simple words: “He went down to Nazareth and was subject to them.”

I should be very sorry, dear reader, to incur in your mind even the appearance of exaggeration or special pleading, and yet I fear an idea of it may crop up here, and you may be inclined to say: All this hidden life of our divine Lord may be explained by the custom among the Jews, of not permitting young men to commence public life until they were thirty years old. Therefore He was restrained from commencing His public ministry before that age, by the obligation He imposed on Himself of fulfilling the law in every particular. This explanation is very simple and natural; but I do not think that it is founded on any solid, Scriptural basis. I find no trace of this law in the Mosaic books of sacred Scripture; and the only authority I can trace, in other parts of the Old Testament for calling it a custom, is a certain passage (1 Paralipomenon xxiii. 3) in which David is stated before his death to have numbered the Levites, “from the age of thirty years, and upwards.” But no intimation whatever is given there, that this standard was in accordance either with the law or with custom; and in fact, in the twenty-seventh verse of the same chapter, the very opposite seems to me to be clearly implied; for we read there the following words: “So according to the last precepts of David, the sons of Levi are to be numbered from twenty years old and upward.” Again, Samuel, David, and Solomon, who were each in his own way a type and fore-shadow of our divine Lord, were all three called into public relations with the people, long before the age of thirty; and if He had felt it expedient to follow any precedent in respect to the time of beginning His active, teaching life, it would, I think, have been theirs. Moreover, any want of authority on account of His youth, would have been more than supplied by the wisdom of His teaching, by the sanctity of His life, and above all by His miraculous works. Hence, it seems just to infer, that His determination of devoting so long a period to the observance of home duties, was grounded on some other motive than the custom alleged; and this motive must have been that which I have already indicated, namely, His desire to show us, in His own life, the importance of discharging faithfully all our home duties in hiddenness and obscurity, without love of human praise or notice.

And now, dear reader, let us look for a little at this obscure, lowly, hidden life. It was intended for our imitation, and therefore for our study; so although there is little revealed about it, it will profit us much to reflect on that little carefully. The home in which it was led was poor and simple, but well-ordered and happy. The purest earthly love was there, binding together the three holiest hearts that ever beat in human breasts; but this love, strong as it was, had only the outer fibres of its nature made of earth: in its substance and essence it was divine, nay the divinest that ever entered into the relations between the Creator and His creatures. There was the Word of the Father, by whom all things were made, loving with His heart of flesh, as well as with His divine nature, two human beings that responded to His love with unswerving, perfect fidelity. The mutual intercourse of that family was much more in thought than in word: for heart spoke to heart, and soul to soul, in the sweetest cadences of love; and there was, therefore, little need of human forms of speech, where a sublimer language supplied their place. From this love, which no man can imagine, much less describe, in intelligible words, resulted that union, and harmony, and peace, that bright and glowing, yet grave and calm cheerfulness, that sympathy of the heart with all around it, that made their home at Nazareth another earthly Paradise, with its second Adam, and its second Eve, but infinitely holier, infinitely nearer to Heaven, infinitely dearer to the Blessed Trinity than the first.

We must not think, however, that that home was exempt from its share of human sorrows. Over the heart of the mother there rested the shadow of the Cross on which her Child was one day to die. He too knew well what the future was to be; and can we imagine, from what we ourselves know of it, that it did not sadden His young life, not indeed from the sufferings and cruel death it had in store for Him, for these He accepted gladly, but for His people’s rejection of Him, for the world’s obduracy and ingratitude, for the eternal loss of so many souls, notwithstanding the priceless Sacrifice that was to be made for their redemption. There must have been other trials too of a more commonplace nature in which each of that Family had a share. They lived at Nazareth, in the midst of a peculiarly coarse, unappreciative people; and we may naturally infer that their refinement and apparent exclusiveness, their unwillingness to hear or talk scandal, their quiet, uniform attention to their daily duties, were all misrepresented and distorted by the envy and jealousy of these Nazarites. Sin, too, in its varied shapes of deformity and guilt must have often shocked them by its nearness and its frequency, as well as by its innate malice and ingratitude. St. Joseph also, so full of the trust confided to him, and so jealously faithful to it, and so simple and straightforward in discharging its minutest requirements—he too must have had his own trials in shielding his Virgin Spouse and her Child from the rudeness and insults,—perhaps even the studied persecution of the rough world around them. Of course, we have no revelation that these things were so; but the careful study of all the circumstances that we do know regarding that home and its surroundings prove them to be natural and most likely, and therefore fitting and useful subjects for our consideration.

The life then of the Holy Family at Nazareth was tinged with its own sorrow, as all human lives must be; and yet so clearly was the divine Hand visible in it, so convinced was each member of that Family of the infinite depth of love that underlay every trial sent or permitted to come, so united too and so conformed was the will of each to the divine Will in every vicissitude, that the spirit was never disturbed from its rest in God; the heart was filled with joy even when the eyes were welling over in tears, the depths of life were untroubled, though rude winds and dark clouds swept over its surface. Remember, dear reader, sorrow never finds its way to the inmost regions of the heart, except when the heart is not wholly given to God.

And now it may be asked was the home-life of the Holy Family at Nazareth intended for our imitation. As I shall hereafter make references to it on the supposition that it was so intended, I think it right to say something in proof of this supposition here. All our divine Lord’s actions on earth were done with a view to their being studied, and adapted to each individual human life. They were a perfect copy of the divine idea of what human actions should be, and they were revealed to us in the form in which they are contained in the Gospels, in order that they might supply us with a divine standard of excellence up to which we should constantly strive. Hence, all that we know of His Infancy and Childhood, and of His hidden Life, as well as what is told of His public ministry, all has been carefully recorded, with a practical view, in every minutest circumstance, to the special study and imitation of every human being. There is no stage of human life—youth, manhood, or old age; no condition of it—poverty or wealth, marriage or celibacy, sickness or health; no relation of it, whether to God, to our neighbour, or to ourselves, that does not find in the Life of our divine Lord, as revealed in the Gospels, its own lessons of instruction and guidance, its own helps to development and perfection. In this respect, that Life has its material type in the sun whose light, coming from one centre, has for each thing that lives or grows its own special requirement. From the humblest flower of the field to the lordliest tree of the forest, from the meanest thing with life up to man, through every variety of species and sub-species, each individual organization has its own gift specially provided for it, and plentifully bestowed upon itself exclusively by the grand centre of earthly light. So is it also in the spiritual world. A Sun shines on it, in the revealed life of the Incarnate God, whose light is the principle not only of spiritual life in every human soul, but the principle also of its growth, of its expansion, and of its perfection. Of course the example of this Life is but one element of the light it gives. Still the example does not come to us alone: it is ever accompanied with inspiration and help to trace and bring out in our souls the image of Him whose every lineament is revealed to us in the Gospel history.

The hidden Life of our divine Lord, then, was intended for our study and imitation. But you will say: what can be studied in a Life of which we have only a few lines’ record. There is much, if you only study these few lines well. Let me give you a general idea of what they suggest. “He went down to Nazareth and He was subject to them.” Hence obedience is the great primary duty of childhood. It was so precious and so all-important in the eyes of our divine Lord, that he spent thirty years of His Life in its practice. Have we no lesson to learn from this, not only for our home-life but also for our relations with the world? Then again, the obedience He paid to Mary and Joseph was an obedience not due to them; and yet it was as true and as entire as if it were the discharge of a strict duty. Now, much of the obedience exacted of us, no matter in what station of life we are, may sometimes be canvassed and disputed, and may in theory be of such a kind as to entail no clear and direct obligation on us. Are we therefore to rebel against it, and foment bad passions in ourselves and others by resistance, and set the authority commanding it at defiance? Well; the spirit of the world and of our day especially tells us that we are, and that it would be servile and unmanly not to do so; but surely the spirit of Jesus Christ tells us the reverse, and His absolute obedience to two of His own creatures for thirty years must have been intended as an emphatic declaration of His divine will regarding this hard duty of submission to human authority.

I will give one more instance of the fruitful teaching of the home at Nazareth. There is no record, you say, of the events that filled in that long period. No, there is not; and what think you is the meaning of this omission? It seems to me clear that it would teach us not to look on the notice of the world, or the praise of men, or even their knowledge of our existence, as at all necessary to the faithful discharge of the duties of life, or to the fulfilment of God’s commandments, or to the salvation of our souls. It tells us, moreover, that a lowly place in this world of ours must not make us dread that God has cast us aside, or that He forgets us; but rather that He loves us with a special love; and watches over us with a special care; and has given us in that lowly life, if we could only appreciate it, and content ourselves in it, and do its duties cheerfully, a sure protection against the many spiritual dangers of wealth and rank and fame.

I have now endeavoured to lay before you, dear reader, as clearly as I could, the chief motive of our divine Lord’s hidden Life; and I have tried also to give you a general idea of its teaching. But in His public Life also, He had many relations with homes and families, and He often spoke of their ties and duties. I trust, therefore, that it will not be amiss or uninteresting to consider in the next chapter some of those relations, as well as the bearing of some of His public words on our subject.