Thirty Years

But his public ministry was short, perhaps not even three years. Before that, he spent thirty years in Nazareth. How often do we meditate on those thirty years?

Thirty years! Thirty years hid-den in Nazareth, a tiny, obscure village! Why did he do this?

One of two things is true. Either (1) he really was wasting his time there, or (2) he was trying to communicate some profound truths about human life to us.

Hiddeness

I think that Jesus lived so long in Nazareth—and so hiddenly—because that’s how most people on earth must spend their existence. Most people are not preparing for some great mission. For most people, their daily life is their mission.

If it is not possible to come to the Father in Nazareth, then most people are in an impossible situation. If it is not possible to come to God simply by loving and by doing what God asks each day, then most people are not going to make it.

I believe that Jesus lived in that little, obscure village in order to say clearly to all of us: You can come to my Father right where you are. Love one another. Keep the commandments I have given you. Pray. Do this and you will live.

And Jesus is saying something very profound, too, to those of us who have some kind of “official” ministry in the Church. Before his public life, Jesus spent thirty years in Nazareth. Has Nazareth preceded our ministry, whatever it is?The fact is that most of us whose vocation is to priesthood or to a consecrated life or to a specific ministry within the Church have left Nazareth too soon. We left it before we knew what the Gospel really was and before we really knew how to love and how to pray.

So Much to Do

Yes, we have had our preparations—study programs, retreats, seminars, conventions, novitiates, houses of formation, seminaries. But we are always so aware that there is so much to be done. So usually the time spent in formation is short and quite inadequate.
The needs were great in Jesus’ day also; they are always enormous. To paraphrase the Gospel, we might say, Overwhelming needs you will always have with you.

But even in the face of such needs Jesus spent thirty years in silence and obscurity.

Like Everybody Else

During that time he simply lived like everybody else. During that time he learned how to be human. He worked with his hands. He loved and served the people with whom he lived, and he generally did, on a day-to-day basis, all the things he would one day preach to the multitudes.

Many of the great missionaries and bishops in the early centuries of the Church were monks who were called out of their monasteries. This seems ideal to me, although the long period of preparation may not require a monastic setting.

In the relatively short time these men spent evangelizing, they performed incredible feats of missionary and apostolic activity. And the fruits were immense. St. Patrick, for example, converted a whole nation.

How were they able to do this? The answer is that they had spent years in prayer, hard work, community life, and study. Thus they were finely tuned instruments. They had crossed much of the desert, and they had seen the mountain.

Now they were ready to spend the rest of their lives in a powerful and undivided shepherding of God’s people. They often accomplished extraordinary endeavors in a relatively short period of time because they were ready.

I think if we could ever arrive at this kind of wisdom and restraint, our ministries, too, would possess an unbelievable and wonderful fruitfulness.

But because our preparations are poor, we spend a great deal of time commuting between Nazareth and Jerusalem. This commuting is not simply getting away for times of pray-er and refreshment. Jesus also did this during his public life.

Building Deeper

No, it is something far different, far more basic. Because our preparation was defective, we arrive at periods in our lives where we sense that we cannot continue on in any meaningful way unless we retreat and build deeper foundations. We realize that we have left Nazareth too soon.

This is very common, of course. How many people have had the opportunity, the wisdom, the courage, the time, to spend half a lifetime in preparation for ministry? It’s an inconceivable proposal for us. But it is what Jesus did. I think that if we took it seriously, it would revolutionize our whole approach to the apostolate.

But not everyone who leaves active ministry does so because he or she feels the need of it. It sometimes happens that people who would very much like to remain in Jerusalem are called to Naza-reth through circumstances. They become ill, for example, or an elderly parent needs to be cared for.

I think these people need to be given hope that God will not abandon them, and that the Spirit will guide them and feed them in his own mysterious ways.

Where You Are

But in order for them to be aware of his action where they are, they have to be where they are. They have to accept where they are, and not feel guilty  for it. They need to, as the expression goes, “Bloom where they are planted.”

Nazareth is not an easy way out. In fact, in Nazareth, the demands are very great. (This is one of the reasons why we can’t wait to leave and “get going.”)

In Nazareth we learn to stop using activity as an escape from our interior loneliness and fears. In Nazareth we learn how to be before the Father’s face.

Action and Love

In Nazareth action eventually becomes one of many expressions of love and adoration of the Father. In Nazareth, gradually the gap between action and prayer is closed.

In fact, the literature on mysticism is increasingly pointing to the ordinary as the atmosphere of final wholeness and synthesis.

It was Jesus, the Second Per-son of the Blessed Trinity, who lived this pattern before us. He lived deeply in love before the face of the Father in Nazareth for thirty years.

Nazareth

Eventually he was called out, but it was in Nazareth, before the face of the Father that he always dwelt. This is the essence of our Christian life.

Finally, there is Mary. When we look at Nazareth, we see her. We see her in silence. We see her in the background. We see her always listening to the Word of God.

Mary, who is the quintessence of the ordinary, seldom left Nazareth.

We spend many years racing around (actually or interiorly) trying to find God, but Mary always knew where he was. Right there. She never left the Father’s presence.

Mary is our model. Can we doubt that her mere presence was a terror to the demons and a source of healing or that her words were sparks of fire that went to the heart of the listener?

But all that happened naturally, as it were. She knew it was God’s work and that she didn’t have to work it up somehow.

She is the woman of immense silence and ordinariness, but also of incredible spiritual power. Devotion to her will lead us into a deeper and quieter kind of mysticism.