1 G. A. Chadwick. ST. LUKE — 7
98 THE GROWTH OF THE CHILD JESUS
duty of that lowly life bound Him to the Father. Those silent years were doubtless rich in experiences which are not written down, which were not told to any, but which were forming and confirming the faith in which He was to live and work and die.
^ Christ's pure quiet life in Nazareth was the greatest fact in His whole great career. It was this life that gave significance to His death.
Nazareth stands for the home life. It contains the greater part of His great career. By far the greater number of years was spent here. Here were more praying for others and over the life plan, more communing with the Father, more battling with temptation and narrow prejudice and ignorance than in the few years of public service.
Nazareth stands for that intensely human life of Jesus lived in dependence upon God's grace exactly as other men must live. It was lived in a simple home that would seem very narrow and meagre in its appointments and conveniences to most of us. He was one of a large family living in a small house, with the touch of elbows very close, and with all the possible small, half-good- natured frictions that such close, almost crowded, touch is apt to give rise to.
He worked with His hands and bodily strength most of the waking hours, doing carpentering jobs for the small trade of the village, dealing with exacting, whimsical customers, as well as those more easily suited.
He was a son to His mother, an eldest son, too, and may be, rather likely, of a widowed mother, who leaned upon her first- born in piecing out the small funds, and in the ceaseless care of the younger children. He was brother to His brothers and sisters, a real brother, the big brother of the little group. He was a neighbour to His fellow villagers, and a fellow labourer with the other craftsmen. In the midst of the little but very real and pressing problems of home, the small talk and interests of the village life. He grew up, a perfect bit of His surroundings, and lived during His matured years.
And who can doubt the simplicity and warmth and practicality and unfailingness of His love as it was lived in that great Nazareth life? We will never know the full meaning of Jesus' word " pure," and of His word " love," and of all His teaching, until we know His Nazareth life. The more we can think into what it leally was, the better can we grasp the meaning of His public utterances. Nazareth is the double underscoring in red under every sentence He spoke.
ST. LUKE II. 40 99
Those three years and odd of public life all grew up out of this Nazareth home life. They are the top of the hill ; Nazareth is the base and bulk ; Calvary the top. Here every victory had already been won. The public life was built upon the home life. Under the ministering to crowds, healing the sick, raising the dead, and patient teaching of the multitude?, lay the great strong home life in its purity. Calvary was built upon Nazareth.^
2. He grew in spirit by the exercise of His moral powers in resisting the temptations arising from mere natural desire, which needed to be controlled in Him as well as in all men. While the grace of God was upon Him and in Him, to inspire and aid His good endeavours, it did not supersede His own free moral agency. The discipline of Hfe came to Him, as it does to all, and challenged Him to conflict; and He acquired moral strength and wisdom only through experience and trial, by over- coming whatever foe or hindrance lay in His path of holy obedience. And this was not an easy victory, but involved con- flict, self-denial, and suffering. For we read that, "Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered " ; and that " he was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin " ; which He could not be, without a real conflict between desire and will, between flesh and spirit. The dif- ference between Him and other men was not in His exemption from trial and moral discipline, or in His impeccability or inability to do wrong, but in the fact that in Him the spirit, or will, never succumbed to temptation, but remained steadfast and sinless though continually solicited ; while in others the will is often over- come, and so weakened in its power of resistance. The conflict in Him was to retain His integrity, in others to recover it. And the indispensable help in this conflict, without which no wisdom and no virtue can be established, was to detect the first approaches and manifold disguises of moral evil, and a reinforcement of spiritual strength from the infinite Source of all strength and wisdom. That charge so often made to His disciples afterwards, "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation," was drawn from His own deep and life-long experience.
^ You are not to think of " grace " here in its ordinary evan- gelical acceptation. But there is no fear, surely, of your making