The Artisan of Nazareth

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the past, man talked less about living his life, and more about saving his soul. But in our age the emphasis has shifted from the religious and the moral to the political and the economic. The attraction toward Heaven has decreased, and the gravitation towards the earth increased. The single quest for God has given way to the double quest for power and wealth.

Modern man, isolated from God and uprooted from the great spiritual patrimony of the ages, craves to satisfy the egotism of his mind by commanding, and the egotism of his body by enjoying. Hence the successful man of our day is the man who has power and the man who has wealth.

But running counter to these modern ideals is a double force seeking to destroy them: the force of Anarchy and the force of Bolshevism.

Anarchy contends that all power is wrong, and hence would throw all governments into the dust. Bolshevism holds that all wealth is wrong, and hence would confiscate private fortunes to swell the coffers of the state.

In the face of these two extremes, the one glorifying power and wealth, and the other condemning them, the earnest soul seeks a sane solution. He asks himself such questions as: Are power and wealth absolutely wrong? Is the Anarchist justified in condemning all power, and the Communist right in destroying all wealth?

There is only one yardstick by which these ideals may be measured, and that is by the life and doctrine of Him who walks across the modern stage as time shifts its scenery from Nazareth to New York, and from Genesareth to the Thames.

The hidden life of Nazareth is the eternal answer to the problem, and the answer is that power and wealth are legitimate ambitions and ideals, but—and here Our Lord breaks with the modern world—no man has a right to power until he has first learned to obey, and no man has a right to wealth until he has first learned to be detached.

This is the double lesson of Nazareth contained in the only two simple facts we know about His hidden years: first, that He was subject in obedience to His parents; and secondly, that He was a poor village carpenter.

First, a word about power. Nazareth is not a trite story about the beauty of slavery and subjection, as some enemies of Christianity would have us believe. If Our Lord were merely a human child without any Divine prerogatives, then the carpenter shop might reveal a lesson that power was wrong.

But obedience is only half the lesson of Nazareth. Our Lord was obedient; He was a servant; He was subject. But He was more than that!

He was a Power who became obedient, a Master who became a servant, and a Lord who came “not to be ministered unto but to minister” (Matt. 20:28).

His power in the human order reached back through forty-two generations to Abraham, and in the Divine order to the eternal generation in the bosom of the Eternal Father; His power at birth was saluted by the harping symphonies of angelic glorias; His power at twelve confounded the wise doctors of the Temple as He unraveled to them the wisdom of a Son on the business of His Heavenly Father; His power at thirty made the unconscious waters blush into wine and the seething sea hush into calm, and His power at thirty-three reminded a Pontius Pilate about to exercise his authority as governor and ruler that the real seat of his power was not in Rome, but in the heavens above.

Yet He who had all this power, and who said that to Him, “all power is given in heaven and on earth,” (cf. Matt. 28:18), passed practically the whole of His life in a despised village and degraded valley, with no flash of outward pomp and circumstance, subject to a Virgin and a just man, whom He knew before they were made, and who after they were made, were really His own children.

What was all this but a lesson to the world which misunderstands power, either by glorifying it or by overthrowing it: namely, that no man has a right to command until he has learned to serve, and no man has a right to be a master until he has learned to be a servant, and no man has a right to power until he has learned to be obedient.

Why has so much of the power in the history of the world degenerated into tyranny? Why has so much of the authority of governments in the history of the world corrupted into force?

It is because those who had power did not know how to obey, and those who had authority did not know how to be subject. If those who have power, whether it be heads of governments, the leaders of nations, or the masters of political influence, recognize no power above them whose laws they must obey and whose judgment they must fear, then where shall they learn that obedience without which no man can justly govern?

If there be no King of Kings, then what shall stay power from degenerating into tyranny? What was Pilate but the power of Rome, without the obedience of Nazareth?

What is social snobbery, but royal birth without Nazarene simplicity? What is pride, but a Palm Sunday without the sobering prelude of a carpenter shop? Our Lord came into this world not to condemn power: power there must be, authority there must be.

For what is power but the Law of God in the hearts of men, as well as in the kernel of the seed? Our Lord did not come to take away power. He came to teach us how to use it.

He came to tell us that “no man shall exercise his power in the pomp of Jerusalem until he has learned to serve in the servitude of Nazareth; that no man shall be a general [until] he has learned how to serve in the ranks, and that no one shall be a lord until he has learned to be unlordly.”

Salvation in a world crisis lies, therefore, not in revolutionary attempts to upset governments, nor in the anarchist’s attempt to subvert authority, nor in the demagogic democracy which would suffer no other head to mount above one’s own—rather does salvation lie in all powers, political, social, and economic, becoming subject to a power above them.

If they do this, then they can say that they are entitled to obedience because they are obedient to the power above them; then they can say they must be respected as an authority. because they have learned to obey their Author, then they can say they must be reverenced, because they are reverent to their God.

Nazareth has yet another lesson to teach, and that is that no one is entitled to wealth until he has learned to be detached. In other words, Nazareth is not just a simple glorification of poverty, a fatalistic resignation to squalor, a calm indifference about hardship and hunger. Neither is it a condemnation of wealth.

In Nazareth Our Lord was poor; He was a needy village carpenter; He worked for the mere necessities of life. But He was more than that!

He was not just a poor Man. He was a rich Man who became poor, just as He was a powerful Man who became obedient. His wealth was the treasure of Heaven which rust does not eat, nor moths consume, nor thieves break through and steal (cf. Matt. 6:20).

His wealth was the wealth, not of a carpenter of Nazareth, but the wealth of a Carpenter who made the universe with its canopy of glittering stars, and its carpet of lilies which “toil not, neither do they spin” (Matt. 6:28).

His wealth was the mansions of His Father’s house which He had seen, but the beauty of which the human “eye has never seen, nor the ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (cf. 1 Cor. 2:9).

Yet, with all the wealth of God, He became poor; for He chose to be born in a shepherd’s cave, to work as a tradesman, preach as a vagabond, with “nowhere to lay His Head” (Matt. 8:20), die on a poor man’s cross, and be buried in a stranger’s grave.

The world before had heard of wealthy men giving away their wealth to be philanthropists. The world had heard Buddha ask his disciples to renounce wealth, had seen Crates of Thebes give his gold to the poor, and heard the Stoics eulogize poverty at rich banquets; but the world before had never heard of poverty being not an ascetic rule, not a proud disguise for ostentation, not a philosophical ornament nor a mystic mood, but a step to higher perfection which is union with the Spirit of God.

Others had said, “Sell all you have”; but only He added, “Then come, follow me” (cf. Matt. 19:21).

His life and doctrine are not those of many of our social reformers who, seeing the abuses of wealth and the excesses of capitalism, provoke class conflict and demand a division of wealth even though it was honestly earned.

Those who would harangue the rich find no support in the simple Nazarene. No one has a right to despise the rich until like Our Blessed Lord he has proved he is free from the passion of wealth.

That is why He could be as hard on the selfish rich and say to them that it was “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. 19:24).

The poverty of Nazareth was not a condemnation of wealth; neither was it a glorification of wealth; neither was it a canonization of poverty as such. It was the preachment of the beautiful doctrine of detachment, by which men free themselves from the passion of wealth for the glory of God and the salvation of souls—even though that wealth is only their own will and a few fishing boats and tangled nets.

Why has so much of the wealth of the world ended in wars over wealth? Why have so many of the rich been greedy, and so many of the wealthy been misers? Why have so many of the poor been bitter, and so many of the wealthy unhappy?

It is because they do not know what it means to be detached. It is because they’ve never learned the lesson of Nazareth, which is to have all things and possess nothing.

If they understood Nazareth aright, there would be no occasion for saying, with Professor (Cyril Edwin Mitchinson) Joad of Cambridge University, that “God is cheaper than a living wage and the governing classes have found it expedient to exploit Him to the utmost.”

Our Lord never sought to keep the poor satisfied with their poverty, nor the miserable satisfied with their misery, just because they were poor or because they were miserable. He glorified not the poor man, not the rich man, but the poor man who was not always poor; the poor man who once was rich; the poor man who by the law of detachment possessed everything, because he desired nothing; the poor man who became poor, not by giving away his wealth, but by exchanging it for the incommensurable riches of Heaven.

And all this is only another way of saying, not ‘Blessed are the rich,’ nor ‘Blessed are the poor,’ but “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3).

When He who was rich became so poor that He could state it: “The foxes have their holes, the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Luke 9:57); and when He to whom all power was given in Heaven and earth girded Himself with a towel and on the night before He died humbled Himself by washing the feet of His own apostles (cf. John 13:4-5), He taught us how to be poor without being Communists and how to be obedient without being revolutionists.

He reminded us that poverty and slavery no more entitle a man to the Kingdom of Heaven than do wealth and power, but that the rich man would enter Heaven if he would be poor in spirit and the powerful masters would enter Heaven if, following His example in the Upper Room, they would act as the servants of God.

The carpenter’s shop therefore is not a truism about the beauty of poverty and the holiness of slavery. It is a paradox about the richness of the poor in spirit, and the power of the masters who serve.

As a matter of fact, Our Blessed Lord is the only One who ever walked this dreary earth of ours of whom the rich and the poor, the masters and the servants, the powerful and the slaves could say: “He came from our own ranks! He is one of our own!”

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From The Eternal Galilean, Chapter III, Fulton J. Sheen (1934).