Who did Jesus move toward?

Jesus did not enter human life through wealth, safety, status, or political power. He was born to a poor family far from home and laid in a feeding trough because there was no room anywhere else. While he was still a small child his family fled the country because a ruler wanted him dead. He grew up in Nazareth, a town of no importance, in a province under Roman occupation.

He was rejected by many of his own people, watched by religious authorities, and finally handed over to an empire that tortured and executed him on a public charge. His friends ran. He died as a condemned man between two other condemned men.

1. I

   Born poor, laid in a feeding trough

   Luke 2:1-7

   Luke sets the birth inside an imperial census, which is to say inside a bureaucracy counting people for tax. Mary and Joseph are away from home, and the child is laid in a manger, the box animals eat from, because no room was available. The first people told are shepherds, night labourers whose testimony carried little weight. God's entry into the world is announced first to workers on a hillside.

2. II

   Taken into Egypt when his life was threatened

   Matthew 2:13-15

   Matthew records that Joseph took the child and his mother and left the country at night because Herod intended to kill him. Before Jesus could speak he was a child whose family crossed a border to keep him alive. Catholic teaching on migrants and refugees returns to this constantly, and not as a metaphor: the Holy Family were people who fled.

3. III

   Raised in a town no one expected anything from

   John 1:45-46

   He grew up in Nazareth in Galilee, a small place with no political or religious weight. John's Gospel preserves the contempt directly: "Can any thing of good come from Nazareth?" Jesus spent roughly thirty years of a short life in the kind of place and the kind of work that leaves no record. That obscurity is part of the revelation, not a delay before it.

4. V

   Falsely accused, condemned, and executed

   Luke 23:13-25, Hebrews 13:3

   He was arrested at night, tried on shifting charges, beaten by soldiers, and executed by the standard Roman method for rebels and slaves, between two condemned men, outside the city wall. He was, in the language of his own society, disgraced. The Letter to the Hebrews later tells Christians to remember prisoners as though they were in prison with them, which is only intelligible because their Lord had been one.