The Star and the Long Way Home

Before Jesus was born, in Nazareth, a little town up in the hills of Galilee, there was a carpenter called Joseph, and he was promised in marriage to a young woman called Mary. In those days a promise like that was almost as strong as a wedding. The two of them were already called husband and wife, even though they did not live in one house yet; and the promise could only be undone the way a marriage was undone. And before they came together, Mary was found to be expecting a baby. The child was from the Holy Spirit. And Joseph knew that the baby was not his. Joseph was a righteous man, a man who did what was right, and he did not want to put Mary to shame in front of the whole town. So he made up his mind to send her away quietly, without any fuss, and let her go. But while he was still turning it over in his mind, a messenger of the Lord came to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife. The child inside her is from the Holy Spirit. She is going to have a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus — because he is the one who will save his people from their sins.” All of this happened so that what the Lord had said long before, through the prophet Isaiah, would come true: *“Look — a virgin will be expecting a baby, and she will have a son, and they will call his name Immanuel.”* Immanuel means *God with us.* And Joseph woke up and did exactly what the messenger of the Lord had told him. He took Mary home to be his wife. But they did not come together as husband and wife until her son was born; and when the baby came, it was Joseph who gave him his name. He called him Jesus.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, King David’s little town, in the days when Herod was king. And some time after he was born, travellers arrived in Jerusalem from far away in the east. They were magicians — not people who did tricks, but learned men of the kind who served the kings of the east, who watched the stars by night and explained what dreams meant: the same kind of men who had stood in the palace of the king of Babylon in the days of Daniel. And they went about the city asking a question: “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east, and we have come to bow down to him.” Now the king in Jerusalem was Herod, and he was not king of the Jews by birth. The Romans had made him king. He had built palaces and strong fortresses, and he was rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem bigger and grander than it had ever been; and he had killed people in his own family to keep his throne. So when Herod heard that somebody had been *born* king of the Jews, he was badly shaken — and the whole of Jerusalem was shaken with him. He called together all the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he asked them where the Christ was going to be born — the Anointed One, the king God had promised to send. And they knew the answer straight away, from the prophet Micah: “In Bethlehem, in Judea. This is what the prophet wrote: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, you are not the least among the rulers of Judah, not at all — because out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’” Bethlehem was only about five miles south of Jerusalem, a couple of hours’ walk along the road through the hills. Then Herod sent for the magicians secretly, where nobody else would hear, and he asked them: “When did the star first appear? Tell me exactly.” And they told him the time, exactly. Then he sent them off to Bethlehem, and he said to them, “Go, and search carefully for the child. And when you have found him, come back and tell me, so that I can come and bow down to him too.”

So they listened to the king and set off. And look — the star they had seen in the east went on ahead of them, all the way, until it came and stood still over the place where the child was. And when they saw the star, they were glad with a great, great joy. They went into the house, and there was the child, with Mary his mother. And these grown men, who had come such a long way out of the east, fell down on the floor in front of a little child and bowed down to him. Then they opened their treasure boxes and gave him presents: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. Gold was the most precious metal anybody knew, the thing kings kept locked in their treasure rooms. Frankincense was a sweet-smelling gum that oozes out of the bark of a small, scrubby tree in the dry lands far to the south, and it was carried north on long strings of camels. When a lump of it was dropped on hot coals it melted and gave off a white smoke that smelled wonderful, and in the temple at Jerusalem it was burned to God with the offerings. Myrrh was another gum, from another tree in those same far-off lands. It smelled sweet and tasted bitter, and people mixed it into perfume and oil, and used it when they wrapped the body of somebody they loved who had died. All three cost a great deal of money. They were the kind of gifts people brought to a king. Then they were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod. So they went home to their own country by a different road.

When they had gone, a messenger of the Lord came to Joseph in a dream again, and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother, and run away to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child, to destroy him.” So Joseph got up in the dark, that same night, and took the child and his mother, and they went — out of the sleeping town and away down the road to the south, while it was still night. Egypt was a long way. It lay off to the south-west, along the dry road by the sea and across the edge of the desert. It was about a hundred miles just to reach the edge of it, and further still to the green land along the river Nile, where the towns and cities were. With a small child, on foot, that meant a week of walking, and more. But Egypt was outside Herod’s kingdom, where his soldiers could not follow; and there were many Jewish families living there in those days. So they lived in Egypt as strangers, and they stayed there until Herod died. And so what the Lord had said through the prophet Hosea came true: *“Out of Egypt I called my son.”*

When Herod saw that the magicians had tricked him and were not coming back, he was furious. And he sent soldiers to Bethlehem, and they killed all the boys in the town and in all the country around it who were two years old or younger — counting from the time the magicians had told him the star first appeared. Jesus was not there. Joseph had already taken him away toward Egypt. But in Bethlehem there was weeping, and the little boys were gone. Long, long before, Rachel, the wife Jacob loved, had died on that same road to Bethlehem when her second son was born, and she was buried beside it. And now what the Lord had spoken through the prophet Jeremiah came true: *“A voice was heard in Ramah — weeping, and loud crying. It is Rachel, weeping for her children; and she would not be comforted, because they are no more.”*

Then Herod died. And a messenger of the Lord came to Joseph in a dream, there in Egypt, and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and go back to the land of Israel. The ones who were trying to kill the child are dead.” So Joseph got up, and took the child and his mother, and they made the long journey back, out of Egypt and into the land of Israel. But then Joseph heard that Herod’s son Archelaus was king over Judea now, in his father’s place, and he was afraid to go there. And he was warned in another dream; so he turned away north instead, up into Galilee, and went back to Nazareth, the little town in the hills that he and Mary had come from in the first place. Nazareth was a small village on a hillside, a long way from Jerusalem and its kings. And so what the prophets had said came true, that he would be called a Nazorean; and for the rest of his life people knew him as Jesus of Nazareth. That is where he grew up: in the carpenter’s house, in a village nobody thought much of.

Every year, Joseph and Mary went up to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. It was the great feast of the spring, when the whole nation remembered the night God brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt, and it lasted a whole week. Every family ate a roast lamb together on the first night, with flat bread made without yeast and bitter green herbs, the way their people had eaten on the night they left Egypt. From Nazareth to Jerusalem was three or four days of walking, and nobody went alone. Whole villages set off together, a long, slow crowd of families and relatives and neighbors on the road, with the children somewhere in among them. When Jesus was twelve years old, they went up as they always did, and they stayed until the days of the feast were finished. Then everybody set off for home — but the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, and his parents did not know it. They thought he was somewhere in the crowd, with cousins or friends. So they walked a whole day’s journey, and only then did they start looking for him among their relatives and the people they knew. And they could not find him. So they turned round and went all the way back to Jerusalem, searching for him. And Jerusalem was a big city, a maze of narrow streets and steps and crowded houses. The temple stood on a great flat platform of stone on top of the hill, with wide courtyards all around it, and long covered porches along the walls, held up by rows of tall stone pillars. In the shade of those porches the teachers of the law sat and taught, and anybody who wanted to could come and sit and listen to them, and ask them questions. And after three days they found him. He was in the temple, sitting right in the middle of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And everybody who heard him was astonished at how much he understood, and at the answers he gave. When his parents saw him there, they were amazed. And his mother said to him, “Child, why have you done this to us? Look — your father and I have been searching and searching for you, and we have been sick with worry.” And he said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I had to be among my Father’s things?” And they did not understand what he meant. Then he went down with them and came home to Nazareth, and he did what they told him. And his mother kept all these words in her heart. And Jesus grew — in wisdom, and in height, and in favor with God and with people.