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Context No. 1150 of 4322 · Matthew

Context · Reflection

Matthew 2:19-23: in context

19But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, 20“Arise and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel, for those who sought the young child’s life are dead.” 21He arose and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel. 22But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in the place of his father, Herod, he was afraid to go there. Being warned in a dream, he withdrew into the region of Galilee, 23and came and lived in a city called Nazareth; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophets that he will be called a Nazarene.

Herod is dead, and an angel tells Joseph in a dream to take the child and his mother back to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are gone. Joseph obeys, but hearing that Herod's brutal son Archelaus now rules Judea, he is afraid to settle there. Warned again in a dream, he withdraws to Galilee and settles in an obscure town called Nazareth, so that what the prophets said might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.

The destination is the point: Nazareth, a small, unremarkable town in the north, so insignificant that people would later ask whether anything good could come out of it. The Son of God, having been born in David's Bethlehem and rescued into Egypt, grows up in a backwater village, spending nearly thirty hidden years in a place no one expected greatness from. There is a striking humility in God's choice of setting. The Savior of the world was not raised in Jerusalem near the temple or in a center of power and learning; he grew up in Nazareth, laboring in a carpenter's shop, unknown, in a town that would become a byword for insignificance. Being called a Nazarene carried a hint of contempt, and the Gospels do not hide it. It says something about how God works, that the long, formative years of his own Son were spent in deliberate obscurity, in an ordinary town, in hidden faithfulness, before the three years anyone remembers. Most of a life is Nazareth, the unremarkable years no one will chronicle, and God was fully present in every one of them. The hidden years matter to him.

Do I despise the obscure, unremarkable seasons of my life as wasted, when God spent nearly thirty hidden years in Nazareth, fully present in the years no one would chronicle?

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