The
Example of Nazareth
“….it is your Christian duty to
obey your parents, for this is the right thing to do” (A)
The
home of Nazareth is the school where we begin to understand the life of Jesus –
the school of the Gospel. The first lesson we learn here is to look, to listen,
to meditate, and to penetrate the meaning – at once so deep and so mysterious –
of this very simple, humble, and beautiful manifestation of the Son of God.
Perhaps we learn, even imperceptibly, the lesson of imitation.
How gladly would I become a child again, and
go to school once more in this humble and sublime school of Nazareth: close to
Mary, I wish I could make a fresh start at learning the true science of life
and the higher wisdom of divine truths.
But I am only a passing pilgrim. I must renounce this desire to pursue
in this home my still incomplete education in the understanding of the
Gospel. First, then, a lesson of
silence. May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of
mind, revive in us, besieged as we are by so many uplifted voices, the general
noise and uproar, in our seething and over-sensitized modern life. May the
silence of Nazareth teach us recollection, inwardness, the disposition to
listen to good inspirations, and the teachings of true masters. May it teach us
the value of preparation, of study, of meditation, of personal inner life, of
the prayer which God alone sees in secret.
Next,
there is a lesson on family life. May Nazareth teach us what family life is,
its communion of love, its austere and simple beauty, and its sacred and
inviolable character. Let us learn from Nazareth that the formation received at
home is gentle and irreplaceable. Let us learn the prime importance of the role
of the family in social order.
Finally,
there is a lesson at work. Nazareth, home of the ‘Carpenter’s Son’, in you I
would choose to understand and proclaim the severe and redeeming law of human
work; here I would restore the awareness of the nobility of work; and reaffirm
that work cannot be an end in itself, but that its freedom and its excellence
derive, over and above its economic worth, from the value of those for whose
sake it is undertaken. And here at Nazareth, to conclude, I want to greet all
the workers of the world, holding up to them their great pattern, their brother
who is God. He is the prophet of all their just causes, Christ our Lord.
“Whatever you are doing, put your
whole heart into it…”
From an address given at Nazareth by Pope Paul VI
