God's blessing on the house — text found on a medallion, recited at the requiem Mass for A. G. Matoš.

The text on the medallion reads: God's blessing on the house/Where there is faith — there is love/Where there is love — there is also peace/And where there is peace — there God reigns, the father of your home.

"The ancients felt that our body is a house. For only he is truly a man who is a living house of God: templum Dei absconditi (temple of the hidden God), a living church, where the spirit is the priest, the heart the altar. The eyes — two wondrous windows." 

                                                                                             A. G. Matoš

"Our authors, already familiar to readers of these pages, Raffaella and Ciro, in their book 'We Need Nazareth' (C'è bisogno di Nazaret), have set about the task of seeking answers to what the Gospels do not tell us about the life of the Holy Family. Their work helps readers enter the house of the Holy Family in Nazareth in order to picture the days, the feelings, the difficult decisions, the indescribable joys. But not in order to tell fairy tales, but rather to help each of us illuminate our own history through the appearing of the Lord's glory."

The greater part of Jesus' life unfolds in Nazareth, in the house of Joseph and Mary. Those roughly thirty years are described as the "hidden" years, since Scripture is silent about them, a silence broken only by two events: the Holy Family's flight into Egypt and the finding of Jesus in the Temple at the age of twelve. These three decades were probably spent in the ordinary duties of everyday life in Nazareth.

The town of Nazareth, whose name many interpret as deriving from the Hebrew root netzer, "flower, bud". The word is used in Isaiah's prophecy (Is 11:1-2), which announces the coming forth of "a shoot from the stump of Jesse", that is, the coming of the Messiah from the house of David. St Jerome expressed the same thought, writing to the Roman noblewoman Marcella: "Let us go to Nazareth and see, according to what its name means, the flower of Galilee."

Pope Paul VI says: "The house of Nazareth is the school in which we begin to know the life of Christ. It is, indeed, the school of the Gospel. Here we first learn to look, to listen, to reflect, and to come to a full realisation of the great and hidden power that lies within this utterly simple, humble and wondrous revelation of the Son of God. Here, too, perhaps we learn a little to imitate him. Here, in fact, we understand the manner and the way by which we may easily come to know who Christ is. Here, above all, we understand how much value must be given to everything that pertains to his sojourn among us – and this includes, in some sense: places, times, customs, language, sacred rites, indeed everything of which Jesus availed himself in order to make himself known to the world. Here everything has a voice, everything has meaning. Indeed, here, in this school, we come to see why spiritual discipline must be observed if one wishes to follow the teaching of the Gospel and to be a disciple of Christ. Oh, how gladly would we wish to return to our childhood and entrust ourselves once more to this humble yet so exalted School of Nazareth! Oh, how ardently would we wish to renew our effort to acquire true knowledge of life, at Mary's side, and understanding of the divine truths. But here we have paused only as pilgrims, and we are compelled to set aside that desire, for we recognise that in this world the work of coming to know the Gospel can never be entirely completed."

Romano Guardini adds: "Here there is nothing extraordinary. The man who walks this road does what anyone who wishes to do good ought to do: his duty, here and now. Nothing more, nothing less. He gives divine worth to the moment he is living. This means nothing fantastic. He makes use of his own resources and abilities. He does what his vocation demands. Even the simplest and most commonplace reality is received by God's hands and lived intensely. It matters not what a man does, whether great or small, easy or perilous. It must be what is needed now... man receives, so to speak, from time to time, God's charge from God's own hands."

According to Charles de Foucauld, Jesus' example is about a hidden life in Nazareth, a life of family, work and relationship with others. He understands it as: "an example of obedience to God, of conformity to his will, of humility, work, poverty, penance, meditation, solitude, prayer – one of the three perfect lives which God wished to set before the world as a model: a simple life, withdrawn, humble, continually obedient to God, merciful towards men, devoted to those with whom he lived, poor, upright, penitent, industrious…". The house of the Holy Family enjoys the peace of a household, of a home, something rather like a monastery. Mary and Joseph spend their life in prayer, work, penance and meditation on the mystery of Jesus: "The life of Mary and Joseph at Nazareth was therefore divided into two parts: one quite short, devoted to basic manual work... the other very long, devoted to prayer. Mary and Joseph (…) are immersed in the blessed contemplation of their God who is among them, who is one of them."

But Christ's hidden life at Nazareth is viewed in a different and deeper way in John's Gospel, above all with regard to the miracles or 'signs' that Christ performed in manifesting his true glory: Christ appears, in the first place, as the Father's co-worker in carrying out the Father's work of salvation. Salvation is the Father's work, and Christ performs works that announce and inaugurate the Father's work of salvation.

Paul VI continues: "Nazareth teaches us, first of all, silence. Oh, that the value of silence might grow strong within us once more – that wonderful and so necessary quality of the soul – at a time when, in this turbulent and overly troubled life of ours, in this age of ours, we are assailed by so much shouting, noise and clamour! O silence of Nazareth, teach us to be steadfast in good thoughts, absorbed in inward inspirations, well disposed to hear the secret counsels of God and the instruction of true teachers. Teach us how necessary and how precious is preparation, study, meditation, a personal and hidden way of life, and prayer seen in secret by God alone."

Silence envelops Nazareth. A silence that must not be broken. It is necessary to enter into it, to bear it in keeping with its own harmony, and to set out on a path that is always new and thoroughly relevant. Distant echoes resound from its depths. Recall the "still small voice" that marks the Lord's passing, which Elijah perceived in the theophany on Horeb (1 Kings 19:12-13), or the Entrance Antiphon of the Second Sunday after Christmas: "For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half spent, your all-powerful word, O Lord, leaped from heaven's royal throne." Or again that luminous point of John's Prologue: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν: pitched his tent among us)".

The life of Jesus, ό τέκτων, in its silence, was wholly immersed in the universality of the world, likewise wrapped in silence – a world that, always, in every latitude and in every culture, has had to struggle for life, and often to die so that others might live. It is worth listening again to Paul Gauthier: "in the history of mankind, the burden of labour weighs heavily upon those who must suffer, not only to secure the life of their own family, but still more for the profit of the small number of skilled or wealthy people who live off the labour of others. Jesus wished to take upon himself this great sin of the exploitation of man by man, in order to free humanity from that exploitation, revealing the great dignity of the least of these (Mt 25:40). The great work of redemption, which Jesus would complete on the wood of the cross, he had already begun in Nazareth, working with wood…

 Gauthier says: "In Nazareth there was someone whom everyone thought they knew [...]. He was a man among men, in every way like his brothers, sharing the same flesh and blood, living in the most ordinary social condition, that of a worker of his own time and his own land. The workday lasted the whole day, coinciding with the rising and setting of the sun, as the psalm says: 'The sun rises... then man goes forth to his work, to his labour until the evening' (Ps 104:32-33). Except when it was interrupted by the sabbath and the feast days of the Jewish calendar, this was, for years, the rhythm of Jesus' life.

Jesus works for Joseph and with Joseph, helping him and learning from him the carpenter's trade – not because it is bodily exercise conducive to good health, nor as a pleasant pastime; he works because work is imposed upon him so that today and tomorrow he may have a piece of bread to eat, to earn his living, ...precisely by leading a hidden life, precisely by labouring at humble tasks, the silent Christ of Nazareth teaches us how to do divine things with human devotion,...how can one not cry out: "Lord, could you not have found for your hands a more urgent task, a more divine occupation than this trade of planing boards, in which you squander your strength, in which you seem to waste the brief days of your life as Redeemer?"… For just as holiness lies not in some distant future but in the present moment, so too it lies not in the extraordinary but in the ordinary detail, generally prosaic, which we call banal (Salet (1955).

Paul VI: "O Nazareth, home of the Carpenter's Son, it is here above all that we wish to understand and to proclaim the severe yet redeeming law of human labour. Here we wish so to renew the dignity of work that all may come to know it. In this house we wish also to recall that work cannot be an end in itself, but that it receives its freedom and its worth not merely, as is said, from its economic importance, but also because it guides us towards a wondrous goal. From here, finally, we wish to greet the workers of the whole world and to show them the great model – their divine Brother, Christ our Lord, the herald of all their rightful aspirations."

In the Jewish tradition, work was highly esteemed as a fundamental dimension of the human person, willed by God in relation to creation. Work was closely bound up with the Torah. In this regard, the thought of the wise Gamaliel is highly significant: "It is good that the study of Torah be accompanied by a gainful occupation, for the effort expended in both keeps one away from sin: when the study of Torah is not combined with work, it ends in failure and leads to sin" (Cit. in Elena Bartolini, Work in the Jewish Tradition, in The Work of Our Hands, PSV 52, 101). It was the duty of every father to teach his son a trade. Failure in this task meant predisposing him to become a thief. It could be said that the handing on of the practical knowledge that makes work possible stood on the same level as the obligation to teach the Torah to one's own children. Indeed, "if a man studies two paragraphs of the Torah in the morning and two in the evening, and spends the rest of the day at his work, it is accounted to him as though he had fulfilled the whole Torah [all the commandments]" (Midrash Tanchuma, Beshallach).

Paul Gauthier describes the carpentry skills of that time thus: "in those days the carpenter was a man who worked wood, iron and stone all at once, for he was at the same time joiner, carpenter, blacksmith and mason, a man devoted to the land, who knew how to do everything and to use a variety of tools" (Jesus the Nazarene, Carpenter, Brescia 1970). It was, then, a trade carried out by making the tools needed for agriculture and animal husbandry (ploughs, yokes for oxen, but also yokes for water-carriers...), in the building of houses, also making use of caves in the rocky ground, as well as the making of a few pieces of furniture with which homes were furnished. It was, therefore, a trade that brought the whole population of the village into close contact and relationship, and that guaranteed a secure professional identity: precisely ό τέκτων.

And before he began to speak, he began to live the full life of a man, immersing himself in human everydayness. Later, into the mystery of time that passes and that, through labour, brings forth weariness, the need to recover strength after the toil of bending matter – stone, wood and iron – with the help of fire, to shape the desired form. With the rudimentary technical tools of that time, the modular work of creation demanded human strength, a great deal of physical energy. Beyond the world of men, the tent was pitched also in the harsh world of things – those things sorely needed to make life more human and more dignified.

"Besides this, here we come to know the pattern of home life. May Nazareth itself remind us what a family is, the communion of family love, the grave and holy beauty of the family, the sacred and inviolable character of family property; may it show us how sweet and irreplaceable is upbringing within the family; may it teach us the family's natural role in the social order", concludes Pope Paul VI.

With all its imperfections, Nazareth was home. Though Joseph's ancestral roots lay in Bethlehem, Joseph regarded Nazareth as his home (Luke 2:4). Though Mary had relatives to the south in Judea, Mary regarded Nazareth as her home (Luke 1:26). Nazareth was imperfect, but Nazareth was home. They knew the gift of Jesus, of Christmas, of Emmanuel. They knew that God was with them. There God led them; there God was. And if God was there, there they wished to be, and to live life to the full in what they had.

For us it matters that we regard the town of Nazareth, with all its imperfections, as the home of the Holy Family. Why? Because many of us likewise find ourselves in imperfect towns, imperfect homes and imperfect situations. In other words: how do you feel about the place where you live your concrete, everyday life? Your priesthood ... your marriage ... your celibacy ... your family ... your parish ... your work ... your relatives and friends ... your children ... your health. Where do you feel life?

The first home of a child is always a woman's body. Mary was the home of her Son, just as every woman is the home of the child she bears. As are, too, the many women driven out for irregular motherhood. And again, we call for bread each day in the one prayer that Jesus left us, and bread was made by women, and Jesus makes it divine, a gift of God to man, handed over by women to the whole of humanity. In the end, when all has been accomplished, Jesus says: "I am the bread of life" (Jn 6:35). Bread, God's gift, which turns a house into a home, is shared with the poor and the stranger. The most Marian of acts, we might say today in theological language, brought back to its dimension of material consistency, is to become bread and to make a home – a home which Mary represents as an open mantle, a yurt, a nomads' tent-cosmos, a place of welcome. To make a home means to have faith that life goes on, that the future exists.

Fr Pedro Arrupe, S.J. describes Mary in this way: "Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. Mary fell in love with God in a quite absolute, final way. Her love for God determined everything in her life."

Mary spent a good part of her life at home, as did all the women of her time. Historians tell us that in those days women devoted a great part of the day to bread: bread and olives were breakfast, bread and vegetables for lunch, and bread, soup and cheese for supper. And at Passover, unleavened bread, keeper of the memory of slavery and liberation. We can imagine Mary baking bread, and we can well imagine her sharing this gesture of kneading flour and baking with her child. We can picture her with Jesus beside her. Children love to knead dough. We can also imagine how, over thirty years of family life, bread was what was shared with the poor and with strangers – for the stranger is God, sometimes even in a very strict sense, as happens with Abraham, who received three travelling messengers: "Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, 'Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes'" (Gen 18:6).

Mary extends her motherhood to the whole of humanity, as she said to Juan Diego at Guadalupe: "Know for certain, least of my sons [and daughters], that I am the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary, mother of the true God through whom everything lives, the Lord of heaven and earth. … I am your mother, the merciful mother of all of you who live united in this land, and of all mankind, of all those who love me. Here I will hear their weeping, their sorrow, and will remedy and soothe all their many sufferings, needs and misfortunes. Hear and let it penetrate your heart, my youngest and dearest son: what frightens you, what troubles you, is nothing – do not let it disturb you. Am I not here, I who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need anything more? Let nothing more worry or disturb you."

On the other hand, Scripture describes Joseph as a righteous man; we learn that Joseph was more than the ordinary carpenter so often depicted with a white lily. The righteous man loves the Word of God. He embodies virtue. The will of the righteous man clings to the heart of God, so that obedience becomes a gift that fosters intimacy. The righteous man loves to pray. He lives quietly "from within", unobtrusive yet powerfully present. He can hear the Father's voice. He loves God. Sadly, many of us think of Joseph through a distorted image, because many of us assume that he had to be persuaded to marry Mary. When you think of St Joseph, think of Abraham. Joseph was a saint. Joseph was righteous.

The Psalms give us an idea of what Scripture means when it describes Joseph as a righteous man: "Psalm 1 presents the classic image of the 'righteous' man. We could imagine it as a portrait of the spiritual figure of St Joseph. The righteous man, it tells us, is the one who keeps living contact with the word of God, who 'delights in the law of the LORD' (v. 2). He is like a tree planted by flowing streams, which yields its fruit unceasingly. The flowing waters from which he draws nourishment naturally refer to the living word of God, in which he sinks the roots of his being. God's will is not a law imposed on him from outside; it is 'joy'" (3).

But in Nazareth there is a detail that does not appear elsewhere: here people had seen Jesus grow up with their own eyes, and so they believed they knew him, that they knew everything about him: "Is not this Joseph's son?" Here praise is intertwined with an astonishment that cannot believe its own eyes, that cannot understand what it is experiencing: "How is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?" (Jn 7:15).

Thus Jesus, whose mission is outlined in the words of Isaiah, not being welcomed in his own "homeland", will bring salvation to the Gentiles (cf. 2:32; 13:29; 24:47). Jesus, in fact, "passing through the midst of them, went away" (dielthon dia mesou auton). And "passing through ... he went on his way"; the Greek text uses the imperfect, eporeueto (= he was going, he walked on). This dramatic epilogue foreshadows Jesus' death, but also his victory over death. Luke is fond of this verb, for it highlights the theme of the "journey" that spans the whole of Jesus' existence. Where does Jesus go? The most accurate translation would be "he kept on walking". Jesus does not stop. He continues on the way towards the mission for which the Spirit has consecrated him: first in Capernaum, then in Galilee and the surrounding regions, and finally in Jerusalem, where the dramatic tension anticipated at Nazareth will be resolved.

From Nazareth, "where he had grown up", Jesus departs and "keeps on walking": it is therefore necessary to leave Nazareth, to experience the meaning of Nazareth somewhere else again, wherever the Lord calls. For although the style of Nazareth does not disappear, this is a place that is limited in comparison with God's universal perspective of salvation; the Father, indeed, does not keep his children in one place, but sends them to the ends of the earth, to proclaim his salvation and to cooperate with him. Nazareth is a place of consecration, of service to the poor, of listening to the will of God; and the life that Jesus had there and lived from there – and which must be a model for our own life – consists in obedience to the dynamic of the Spirit. It is the readiness to entrust ourselves to God, to let him lead us (Giuseppe dell'Orto).

We are all tempted by one thought: "If I were 'there', and not 'here', I would be happy." If I had a different job, I would be happy. If I had a different parish, I would be happy. If only I could be somewhere else, or with someone else, I would be happy. The circumstances of our life matter, and they must be respected; nevertheless, what is essential is to begin with where God is. If God has brought us to where we are, then our happiness will not depend on this or that place. Happiness and fulfilment come from God. God was in Nazareth because the Holy Family was there. God was with them, therefore God was in Nazareth. God is with you; therefore, God is where you are.

The mystery of Nazareth concerns the Church in her entirety and in every age. "Nazareth is an abiding message for the Church", says Msgr Ratzinger. The new covenant does not begin in the Temple, nor on the holy mountain, but in the small house of the Mother of God, in the house of a worker, in one of the forgotten places of 'Galilee of the Gentiles', from which no one expected anything. Only by setting out from there will the Church be able to receive new momentum and be healed. She will never be able to give a true answer to the needs of our century against the seductiveness of power and wealth, unless Nazareth is within her a lived reality. We conclude with Charles de Foucauld: "Let us set out anew from Nazareth!"