BEING HUMAN

Day 19, 19 December 2024, the 1030th day of the full-scale war.

In our third winter of war, as missiles strike towns that international news had never mentioned before, Nathanael’s ancient scoff about whether anything good could come out of Nazareth finds a modern echo in how religious institutions dismiss the places where people suffer. While global church bodies debate the appropriate level of concern, and the appropriate word, conflict or situation, and while the Patriarch of Moscow and evangelical leaders there bless missiles for an empire, I keep confronting a disturbing question. Why do the centers of religious life so consistently miss divine action at the margins? Does institutional Christianity, like ancient Jerusalem, still reject an authentic divine presence while claiming to serve it?

“And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, ‘He shall be called a Nazarene’” (Matthew 2:23, NKJV).

That designation marked Jesus with more than geographical marginality, since it challenged the whole pattern of religious power. Nazareth offered nothing to ecclesiastical ambition: no temple prestige, no theological heritage, no institutional authority. And God chose that nothing place to nurture a divine everything. For thirty years, wisdom incarnate grew up where the religious experts never thought to look, and the Word made flesh learned human speech on streets that historians of religion judged unworthy of record.

The contrast between Nazareth and Jerusalem presents a pattern that still haunts institutional religion. Nazareth, overlooked and despised and considered spiritually insignificant, faithfully nurtured the divine presence. Jerusalem, with its temple and its priesthood and its theological certainties, orchestrated the rejection of that presence. The very institution that claimed to house God became the site of His betrayal. Today’s grand cathedrals and church hierarchies, confident in their own spiritual significance, risk repeating that blindness.

The pattern finds a stark reflection in our present reality. While religious institutions align themselves with political powers, and while ecclesiastical authorities either sanctify violence or deliberately ignore it, divine presence may be growing stronger in the places they overlook, and even in the places they condemn. As Nazareth nurtured Jesus, communities deemed insignificant by ecclesiastical arithmetic may be preserving an authentic faith, and the churches suffering under missile attack may understand divine presence better than those blessing the missiles or looking away from them.

Perhaps God’s redemptive work still unfolds precisely where institutional religion is not looking. Every community written off as expendable may be a modern Nazareth, nurturing a truth that religious power cannot see, or will not.

Divine purposes still mature in hiddenness, beyond the radar of institutions. As Jesus spent thirty years in Nazareth before engaging with the religious system in Jerusalem, transformative faith often grows its roots where religious and theological and educational power has not thought to look. Today’s institutions, like the temple establishment of that time, may be missing God’s real work while maintaining their rituals and their certainties and their policies.

Perhaps a true divine presence, like the incarnation itself, still prefers margins to centers, still chooses insignificance over importance, and still works through the very people that religious power overlooks or rejects. In the countless Nazareths of Ukraine and the Middle East, in places that institutions consider expendable, authentic faith may be growing stronger than in all our ecclesial centers combined. Forgive me my perspective. But who would care about Nazareth? Who in Jerusalem would want to listen to the people of Nazareth? Because can anything globally good come out of Nazareth?

Prince of Peace, who chose the nothing of Nazareth over the everything of Jerusalem, help us recognize an authentic divine presence beyond institutional frameworks. When hierarchies bless violence or ignore it, and when institutions justify an empire, give us Nazareth eyes to see Your real work. Transform our institutional obsession with significance into an appreciation for the places and the people that religious power overlooks. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Lord of the margins and of those who live there. Amen.