A Nazarene

The family is almost home. The hills of Judea are in sight. And then Joseph hears a name on the road that makes his heart sink. Archelaus. Herod is dead, but Herod's son is on the throne.

When King Herod died, his kingdom did not pass to one heir. With Rome's permission it was split between three of his sons. Archelaus received Judea, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Herod Antipas received Galilee in the north. Philip received lands to the north-east. So when Joseph comes back from Egypt, expecting to return to Bethlehem perhaps, he finds the south ruled by a son of the very king who had hunted his child. And Archelaus had already shown that he could be as violent as his father.

Matthew says that when Joseph heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. That is an honest little line. Joseph has obeyed angels and crossed deserts, but he is still a man who can feel afraid. And God does not scold him for it. Instead, God speaks again. Being warned of God in a dream, Matthew says, Joseph turned aside into the region of Galilee. Fear did not make the decision. God did.

So the family travels north, up through the land, to a village in the hills of lower Galilee. Its name is Nazareth. Luke's Gospel tells us this was where Mary and Joseph had lived before, where the angel Gabriel first came to Mary. Now they are going back. It was a small place, a farming village of terraced hillsides, olive trees and vines, with homes partly cut into the soft limestone. Nobody important came from Nazareth. Years later, when someone first heard about Jesus, he said, can any good thing come out of Nazareth?

Matthew sees God's hand even in this. He says it happened to fulfil what was spoken by the prophets: He shall be called a Nazarene. Interestingly, Matthew says prophets, plural, and no single verse in the Old Testament says those exact words. Many readers think Matthew is making a word-play. The name Nazareth sounds like the Hebrew word netzer, which means branch or shoot. Isaiah had promised that a branch would grow from the stump of Jesse, King David's father. The Messiah would come from somewhere small and overlooked, like a green shoot from a cut-down tree. And here he is, growing up in a village no one thought mattered.

Joseph's fear was well founded. The historian Josephus tells us that Archelaus ruled Judea so harshly that, about ten years later, leading Jews and Samaritans sent complaints to the emperor Augustus. Augustus removed him from power and banished him to Vienne, in Gaul, which is modern France. After that, Judea was governed directly by Roman officials, one of whom, years later, would be Pontius Pilate.

A Nazarene. You'll find it in Matthew chapter two, verses twenty-two and twenty-three. God's Son grew up not in a palace, but in a little hill village most people had never heard of. So here is a question to carry with you. Where in your own small, ordinary place might God be growing something good?