So the family went and lived in a town called Nazareth. This fulfilled what the prophets had said: “He will be called a Nazarene.” (Matthew 2:23)
Why choose Nazareth as the place for Jesus to grow up? Matthew simply indicates in chapter 2 that this was the place they landed after returning from Egypt. He doesn’t give the motivation or reason. Luke says in 2:39 of his Gospel, “they returned home to Nazareth in Galilee”. Some see this as an indication that they were “from there”. But maybe it was their adopted place instead of place of origin? Certainly, they were “from there”, but for how long?
Nazareth was just a rural, insignificant village. Nothing really special. Its size was not outstanding; we don’t know the number of inhabitants—archaeology suggests somewhere between several hundred and a few thousand. No records are known of exceptional lineages that came from there. I would call it just a typical, Galilean rural town, that God chose for Jesus’ home town. And it was the place that his followers certainly had identified as where he was from. They didn’t try to “substitute history” and give him a more prominent place, like Jerusalem, or Capernaum, or even Bethlehem, the place of his birth and the city of King David.
Growing up in a nondescript village of northern Israel fits the pattern doesn’t it? He was born in a manger. To a surprised teenage virgin. With a recorded lineage that soars with Jewish royalty and Holy Scripture Hall of Fame inductees, and then severely dips with a prostitute woman and evil rulers.
The message comes through loudly: Jesus was one of us. He was set apart by God, but not sheltered from common life. He undoubtedly was immersed in the rigors of daily survival of village life—it was not an automated society with gleaming supermarkets, electricity grid, water towers, and city sidewalks, busy sidewalks. It was the hardscrabble of 1st century, rural Israel.
There’s a play on words in Matthew 2:23, and while it would be great to leap to conclusions and deductions, we aren’t even sure how to understand them! It says, “This fulfilled what the prophets had said, ‘He will be called a Nazarene.’” Indulge me for a moment: Was Matthew, writing in Greek, playing off the (underlying?) Hebrew? If so, does “the Nazarene” come from Hebrew nazir for “one separated to God”, hearkening back to the description of Samson in the book of Judges; or does it come from nezer, “branch” (which Isaiah uses in his writing in Isaiah 11)? The nezer seems to fit better with the messianic prophecies which are at hand, but the nazir is certainly a descriptor of the special, long-awaited One. And in pronunciation of either or both of those, the derivation of “Nazarene” can be discovered (at least in English; again, it’s different in Greek).
I wish we knew more! But what we do know is astounding: He was known as the Nazarene. God chose a simple place, one that appears to be an unremarkable, common, living environment, as the home town for the Messiah. As we read the Christmas story from start to finish, should we expect anything different?
“Father, thank you for choosing Nazareth as the home town for Jesus. You had your reasons! He was a village boy from a common place, and we are getting the message that you are consistently sending our way—Jesus identified with common people.”
Freddy Boswell 