Eighteen years of silence. Why the ordinary years in Nazareth weren’t a gap in the story but the most necessary thing that could have happened.
“And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.” Luke 2:39-40, Geneva Bible
He goes home.
To Nazareth, which was nobody’s idea of a destination. A small city in Galilee, the kind of place people left when they had somewhere better to go. He goes home with his parents and the ordinary years begin.
This is where most tellings of the story get uncomfortable. Eighteen years of silence between the boy who came home and the man who walked to the Jordan. No miracles recorded. No teachings preserved. No indication that anything was happening at all.
The tradition treats this silence as a gap. Something to explain, or move past quickly toward the content that matters.
We are going to stay here. Because this silence is not a gap.
It is the most necessary thing that could have happened.
The Workshop
The wood has grain that runs one way and not another. You learn this the way you learn everything real, by working against it once, feeling the resistance, and understanding through your hands what no instruction could have given you.
He learns this.
He learns the weight of a beam across his shoulders on the way to a work site. He learns which neighbors pay on time and which require a second visit. He learns the smell of sawdust in heat, and the particular quality of light in the workshop at the end of a day when the work has been good.
He learns what it is to be tired. What it is to be hungry. What it is to want something and wait for it and not be certain it will come.
None of this is exceptional. That is precisely the point.
The consciousness that chose this incarnation, that we watched descend into form in the last episode, that arrived announced by stars and visited by kings, is now indistinguishable from anyone else in Nazareth. The neighbors know his name. They know his father’s trade. They have opinions about his family.
He is, to all appearances, one of them.
The forgetting is complete.
And the forgetting is working exactly as it was designed to work.
The Temple
There is one window.
“Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast.” Luke 2:41-42, Geneva Bible
Twelve years old. A journey to Jerusalem, the feast, and then the return, except he isn’t with them. Three days before they find him.
“And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” Luke 2:46-47, Geneva Bible
This is the window. One moment where what lies beneath the forgetting becomes briefly visible, not to him, perhaps, not fully, but to the people around him who find themselves astonished without quite knowing why.
His mother’s words when they find him carry everything: Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.
And his answer, the answer of a twelve year old boy to his parents, lands with a weight completely disproportionate to the words themselves:
How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?
Something is visible here that is not usually visible. A coherence operating beneath the surface of the ordinary years that the ordinary years have not extinguished. The forgetting is real and it is thorough and it is doing its work, and it has not reached all the way down.
This is what Stage 3 contains that Stage 3 itself cannot see. The curriculum of limitation running at the surface. And beneath it, patient, unhurried, the thing that chose to forget, waiting for the moment the forgetting has done what it came to do.
He is not performing. He is not secretly aware of what he is. He is a twelve year old boy who asked questions of the doctors in the temple and found that he knew things he did not know he knew.
The window opens for three days. Then it closes.
“And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.” Luke 2:51, Geneva Bible
Subject unto them. The window closes and the ordinary years resume. The workshop, the grain of the wood, the neighbors, the weight of the beam. Nazareth.
Eighteen Years
He goes back.
Not reluctantly, the text suggests. Not straining against the limitation. Subject unto them. Present in the life that is his life, fully in it, not hovering above it waiting for something more important to begin.
This is the hardest thing the series will ask you to receive.
That the eighteen years are not the prelude to the story. They are not the empty space before the real content arrives. They are the curriculum in its most essential form, consciousness learning what it chose to learn, from the inside, without the comfort of remembering why it chose it.
The depth of what will happen at the Jordan River is being built here. In the sawdust. In the weight of tired limbs at the end of a working day. In the years of being known as the carpenter’s son and nothing more.
You cannot arrive at a genuine awakening without a genuine forgetting. The Jordan cannot open what was never closed. The voice that will say thou art my beloved Son cannot restore what was never lost.
The forgetting is the design. Not despite what came before and after. Because of it.
Every moment of ordinary human limitation being genuinely felt, genuinely lived, genuinely forgotten into, is the Jordan getting deeper. Is the awakening becoming possible in the only way it can become possible?
Through having been, for eighteen years, indistinguishable from anyone else in Nazareth.
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” Luke 2:52, Geneva Bible
His mother kept all these sayings in her heart.
She kept them because there was nowhere else to keep them. No institution to receive them. No lineage to pass them through. No office that would recognize what she had watched her son become and un-become and become again in the ordinary years.
She kept them in her heart.
@ Lee Greene