Advent with Luke #5 – Humble Everydayness
Today, Nazareth is a bustling, crowded city, population 80,000, two-thirds Muslim and one-third Christian – and they get along famously! Back in Bible times though, Nazareth barely qualified as a village, with a population of maybe 100. A little town in the middle of nowhere, a poor place where everybody knew everybody else, and all of them scratched out a living. Hardscrabble poverty. I love it that God chose such a place for God’s most dramatic act since Creation. The history of everything pivots, not in the corridors of power, or in a great city like Rome or Athens, or among the wealthy, educated elites, but in a little, no-account place among nobodies.
Archaeologists have uncovered what’s left of some modest New Testament era houses. The Greek Orthodox Church of St. Gabriel is built over an ancient spring where Mary might have encountered the angel. But then the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation nearby (a splendid, newer building filled with stunning art) also claims to mark the spot. Fascinating, isn’t it? – this tradition that Mary heard (and saw?) the angel while sitting near or coming to draw water from a well. There is always something mystical and alluring about water. Our bodies are more than half water! With no running water in Nazareth, the well would have been the source of life. Mary’s child will live for months in the watery home of her womb as she would have continued coming to this well every day.
The plain, everyday-ness of small town Nazareth is the fitting stage for what God was trying to show us in Jesus. Sure, there was gossipy chatter in such a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business during her pregnancy. But things settled down. Jesus grew up like all the other little boys there – and there couldn’t have been many in such a tiny village! Did he have playmates? Friends? A couple of those fake gospels written long after those we know fabricated stories about some boys picking on Jesus, prompting him (since they thought of him with divine power!) to strike them dead; then, regretting his impulse, he raised them from the dead!
The real Jesus, and his parents and siblings, evidently didn’t do anything spectacular. Jesus was just a kid, then a teen, then a man, an apprentice in his father Joseph’s building business, doing his chores around the house, helping neighbors, weathering the cold of winter. Forget the dazzling miracle-worker Jesus for a moment, as he only dazzled for 3 of his 30 years. Just a guy, a neighbor, a son, a friend, who looked and acted like everybody else. God in the flesh, God with us, and with us in the normal course of normal days, inviting us to learn to notice God in the everyday, in even dull, hard-working days and unphotogenic places.
Nazareth is noisy today, but Mary’s Nazareth would have been so very quiet. You could hear the breeze, birds, a laugh from the other side of town, a hammer, someone walking. Mary’s advantage, enabling her to hear, was the quiet stillness of her place – reminding us to find or create quiet places just to hush, and hear. Also, she could see more and further. With no ambient light, the only nighttime illumination being small pottery lamps or small campfires, her sky was brilliantly illuminated. I bet she, and then Joseph and Jesus and his siblings, pondered Psalm 8 quite often.
Theirs was a culture that believed in and were on the lookout for enchantment, the mystical, the divine. Angels weren’t cute jewelry items or lawn fixtures. They were real beings – and the most famous one of all was the one who showed up in the place: Gabriel, mighty warrior, an important figure way back in the Old Testament book of Daniel. Martin Luther suggested that, at first, Gabriel was offended when God asked him to serve, not as a warrior leading the heavenly host, but as a mere messenger boy. But he humbled himself, and did as God wished. Such humility is what our whole story, and God’s way in every time and place, is all about.