Читать книгу A Child's Life Of Christ - Stretton Hesba - Страница 9

CHAPTER V. Nazareth.

HEROD died a shocking death, after terrible suffering both of mind and body. Once even, in his extreme misery, he attempted to put an end to himself, but was prevented by his attendants. A few days only before he died he put to death his son Antipater, and appointed his son Archelaus to succeed him as king in Judaea; but he separated Galilee from the kingdom, and left it to another son, Herod Antipas. He was in his seventieth year when he died, after reigning thirty-seven years; one of the most wicked and most wretched of kings.

It was now safe for Joseph and Mary to bring the child back to their native land. They seem to have had the idea of settling in Judaea again, instead of taking Jesus to the despised province of Galilee but when they reached Judaea they heard that Archelaus reigned in the room of his father, Herod, and that during the Passover week he had ordered his guards to march into the temple amid the throng of worshippers, where they had massacred three thousand of the Jews. Such news naturally filled them with terror, and they might have sought safety again in Egypt; but Joseph was warned in a dream to go on into the land of Galilee. He was left to choose the exact place where he would settle down, and he returned to Nazareth, his and Mary's early home, where their kinsfolk lived. There was every reason why they should go back to Nazareth, since Jesus could not be brought up in his own city, the mournful little village of Bethlehem, where no child of his own age was now alive.

Here, in Nazareth, they were at home again; and long years of the most quiet blessedness lay before the mother of Jesus, though the trifling daily cares of life may have fretted it a little from too perfect a bliss for this world. The little child who played about her feet, who prattled beside her as she went down to the fountain for water, who listened with uplifted eyes to every word she spoke, never gave her a moment's pain, or made her heart ache by one careless or unkind word. Never once had the mother's voice to change its tone of tenderness into one of anger. Never had a frown to come across her loving and peaceful face when it was turned towards him. As he grew in wisdom and favor with God and man, she could rest upon that wisdom and grace, never to be disappointed, never to be thrown back upon herself. The most blessed years ever lived by woman were those of Mary, in the humble home in Nazareth.

It lay in the heart of the mountains, at the end of a little valley hardly a mile long, and not more than half a mile broad, with the barren slopes of hills shutting it in on every side. The valley was as green and fertile as a garden; and the village clung to the side of one of the mountains, half nestling at its foot. From the brow of the hills rising behind the village a splendid landscape was to be seen, westward to the glistening waters of the Mediterranean, with Mount Carmel stretching into them; northward as far as the snowy peaks of Hermon; and southward over the great plain of Jezreel, rich in cornfields; all the country being dotted over with villages and towns. The landscape is there still, and the deep blue sky hanging over all, and the clear atmosphere through which distant objects seem near, and the sighing of the wind across the plains, and the hum of insects, and the songs of birds; all is as it was when Jesus Christ climbed the mountains, as he loved to do, and sat on the summit, with a heart and spirit in full harmony with the loveliness around him, and with no secret sadness of the conscience to make him feel that he was not worthy to be there.

It was no lonely life that Jesus led. We read again and again of his brethren and sisters; and though it is not generally thought that these could have been Mary's children, but the children of her sister, they were so associated with him that all his life long they acted as his own brethren and sisters. With them he would go to school, and learn to read and write, for all Jews were carefully educated in these two branches. The books he had to study we know and possess in the Old Testament. Very probably he would own one of them, though they would be so costly as to be almost beyond his means, or those of his supposed father. We should like to know that he had the Book of Psalms, those psalms which Mary knew so well and had sung to him so often; or the prophecy of Isaiah, in which his young, undimmed eyes, that had hardly looked upon sorrow yet, and had never smarted with tears of penitence, would read and read again the warning words of the Messiah's sufferings, " a man of sorrow, and acquainted with grief." When he was alone yonder on the breezy summit of the mountain, did he ever sing, " The Lord is my Shepherd? " And did he never whisper to himself the awful words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Besides his cousins there were his neighbors all about him, quite commonplace people, who could not see how innocent and beautiful his life was. They were a passionate, rough race, notorious throughout the country, so that it had become almost a proverb, " Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? " Jesus dwelt among them as one of them; Joseph the carpenter's son. He could not yet heal the sick; but is there no help and comfort in tender compassion for those who suffer? The widow's son at Nam was not the first he had seen carried out for burial. The man born blind was not the only one groping about in darkness who felt his hand, and heard the pitying tones of his troubled voice. We may be sure that amongst his neighbors in Nazareth Jesus saw many a form of suffering, and his heart always echoed to a cry, if it were but the cry of an animal in pain.

In one other way Jesus shared the common lot of boys. He had to take to a trade which was not likely to have been his choice. Whether as the eldest son of a large family, or the only son of a woman left a widow, he had to learn the trade of his supposed father. The little workshop, where neighbors could always drop in with their trifling gossip, or at work in their own houses, where they could grumble and find fault; this must have been irksome to him. The long, monotonous hours, the insignificant labor, the ceaseless buzz of chattering about him; we can understand how weary and worn his spirit must have felt as well as his body. If he could have been a shepherd, like Moses, the great lawgiver, and David, his own kingly ancestor, how far more fitting that would have seemed! How his courage and tenderness toward his flock would have been a type of what he would be in after life! The solitude would have been sweet to him, and the changing aspects of the seasons from year to year. In after life he often compared himself to a shepherd, but never once is there any reference to his uncongenial calling in the hot workshop of Nazareth, where the only advantage was that it did not separate him from his mother.

Does a blameless life win favor among any people? There was one man in Galilee, one only in the wide world, who never needed to go up to Jerusalem to offer any sacrifice for sin. Neither sin-offering nor trespass-offering had this man to bring to the altar of God. The peace-offering he could eat in the courts of the temple as a type of happy communion with the unseen God, and of a complete surrender of himself to his will. But, let the people scan his conduct as closely as village neighbors can do, not one among them could say that Jesus, the son of Joseph, had need to carry up to Jerusalem an offering for any trespass. Did they love him the better for this? Did he find honor among them? Nay, not even in his father's house.