The Childhood of Jesus

Continuing with Fouard's Life of Christ:

Chapter VI : Jesus at Nazareth

I. The Childhood of Jesus

Luke ii. 40

The Youth of Jesus. J-J Tissot

All that we know of the Childhood of Jesus is comprised these words of Saint Luke: "The Child grew, and waxed stronger in the fullness of wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him." There was therefore a transitional period in the life of Jesus, — a period of growth in body, which grew like that of other children, — a period of progress, even "of the soul, which fortified itself," according to another reading of the sacred text.

How are we to understand this interior development of Jesus?  The common feeling is that His wisdom and His power declared itself by degrees, although He possessed them in their plenitude even from His Conception; and hence this increase in strength was only an apparent progress.  However, we should not forget that the Saviour willed not only to appear, but to be in reality, a Child; now, it is the law of childhood that, just as the organs, at first imperfect, develop little by little, so the intelligence awakes in perfect concord with it.  Since Jesus was once a Child, did He have to submit Himself to the gentle influences of age and its changeful growth?  Yet, if we admit this point, how are we to reconcile that absolute Omniscience possessed by the Man-God in virtue of the Hypostatic Union, with any intellectual increase, however small we may consider it to have been, even worry no more than an experimental knowledge, as many theologians define it?  Here there is, we must confess, an inexplicable problem; and it will wiser by far to humble our minds before it, than to insist stubbornly upon a satisfactory solution.  We believe, with firm faith, that Jesus is the Son of God, that He is God even as is the Father, and by this He is always infinitely wise, infinitely mighty; and the other hand, we read in the Gospel that Jesus was really a Child, and that He grew, in age, in grace, in wisdom.  No one of these truths involves a contradiction; certainly we do not know how they were reconciled in Him; and yet, if it were otherwise, the Incarnation would cease to be, — what God has willed that it should for ever be, — a Mystery, which escapes the grasp of our reason without shocking or contradicting it.

However it may have been with the interior life of Jesus, outwardly at least there was nothing to distinguish Him from the children among whom He lived, and in Mary's arms He appears to us as Bossuet has painted Him: "Thou lovely Babe!  Happy were they who gazed upon Thee, stretching for Thy arms from out the swaddling bands, lifting up little fingers to caress Thy holy Mother; now, upheld by her firm hands, adventuring Thy first short steps; now practising by Thy baby-tongue with stammerings of the praise of God, Th Father!  I worship Thee, dear Child, at every stage of Thy divine growth, the while Thou art nursed at her pure breasts, or while, with feeble wails of infancy, Thou dost call for her, or while Thou dost repose upon her bosom, clasped in her warm arms."

The mysterious tide of this divine Childhood passed away in the obscure village in which Joseph and Mary dwelt.  We know already the name of their retreat; it will suffice to describe its site, to make it understood why Jesus loved Nazareth, and preferred it to any other abode.

Judea is scarcely more than a succession of hill-ranges, running from the north to the south, at some distance from the Mediterranean.  In the west they slope down to the sea-shore; in the east they are broken suddenly, to leave a passage through which the Jordan flows, hemmed in by their steep walls and that of the mountains of Hauran.  Thus four parallel lines of hills make up the whole of Palestine; plains along the seaboard, the highlands of Juda, the bed of the Jordan, and, beyond that, the hills of Perea.  Only one valley, that of Esdralon, breaking through it transversely, cuts the first chain into two parts: one of these stretches north to the Libanus, — this is Galilee; the other extends south as far as the desert, — that is the land of Juda.

Nazareth belongs to Galilee, and nestles down along the mountainside, shielded from the plane of Esdralon by the many hilltops which are crossed by those winding footpaths and steep, hilly roads.  On the confines of the village these crests stand apart from space (as it were), so to encircle with their wooded heights a grassy vale.  Some scholars have presumed that this verdant amphitheatre was once the crater of an extinct volcano, and indeed the fertility of the spot supports their conjecture.  In fact, Palestine has no more smiling glade than this little valley of Nazareth.  Antoninus the Martyr compares it to a paradise.  "Its women are of an incomparable grace," he says, "and their beauty, which surpasses that of all the maidens of Juda, is a gift from Mary.  As for its wines, its honey, its oil and its fruits, it yields not the palm even to fruitful Egypt." Today Nazareth has lost these glories; but it still has its meadows, its shady hollows, watered by cool springs, its gardens have nopal and fig trees, where the olive mingles with orange and pomegranate trees, in fruit and in flower.  To the southwest, the village spreads down the slope of the mountain, and the campanile of the Latin Convent marks the location of the abode of Jesus.

Nazareth has no other horizon besides this circle of wooded eminences, which shut it in on every side, but from the brow of the hillside on which the village is built Jesus could in one glance embrace all that territory which He had come to conquer: to the north, the mountain peaks of Libanus and Hermon, covered with eternal snows; to the east Mount Tabor, like a dome of verdure, then the deep river bed of the Jordan, and the high table lands of Galahad; from its southern side, the plane of Esdralon reached from His feet as far as the mountains of Manassah; on the east was the Sea, and Carmel, with its many are reminders of Elias.

Galilee of the Gentiles, as its name indicates, did not form a little world by itself, like the land of Juda.  Its inhabitants were of various races.  Phoenicians people the frontier of Tyre and of Sidon; mingling with the Jews were Arabs and Assyrians, who together cultivated fields of the province; a few Greek Colonies occupied the towns of the Decapolis; and, over all, the garrisons of Rome held the whole country in their grasp.

Amidst these surroundings the early years of Jesus were passed.  Outwardly the same as other children, He received from Mary and Saint Joseph the simple lessons which the Law prescribed; at His Mother's knee he learned to read the Scriptures, which only spoke of Him; but Mary new What He was, and though charged with the duty of instructing Him she never forgot that He must be the Object of her veneration.

Totus tuus ego sum 

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam