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Jesus was indigenous

 


"Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

Nathanael (John 1:46)

I love Christmas carols and have enjoyed singing some this Christmas season, though fewer than when I was in full time church ministry. Obviously as a Unitarian Christian some of the words I think are problematic, but one of the most problematic, said in many ways in different carols and liturgies this season is "he came down to earth from heaven."

This is something said again and again at Christmas time - that Jesus is "from heaven." That Jesus' real home is heaven, some otherworldly spiritual place that he temporarily left to live a brief existence some other place, an earthly place where he never really belonged to, because he really belonged in heaven. Heaven is his home. Heaven is where Jesus is from.

I disagree. Jesus is not from heaven. Jesus is indigenous. Jesus is from Nazareth, a small town, that even at the time it seems was a rather small, unimportant place. Maybe even a not very interesting place. Maybe a shit town like the popular book from a few years ago that joyfully described all the shit towns of Britain. Can anything good come from Nazareth? It's fascinating that even today it's still not seen as that important a pilgrimage destination. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, yes, but actual Nazareth? Do you need to bother? And yet what is pretty much the first thing we know about Jesus? That he was Jesus of Nazareth. That he was from Nazareth.

Jesus was from Nazareth, not heaven. He was of Nazareth. Why does this matter? Well, when we think of Jesus as from heaven we rather imagine the story is like The Prince and the Pauper. We imagine royalty pretending to be a poor man. We imagine a royal, important, supernatural person who is putting on the disguise of being an ordinary man from Nazareth. Jesus is not really Judean, not really Jewish, not really Palestinian, not really poor, not really a colonised person, he is a supernatural royal person putting on the disguise of being these things because he is really from heaven. He is really heavenly not earthly. 

This makes Christians think of themselves as following a king, a supernatural heavenly being who temporarily humbled himself into being a poor man. It makes us think, yes we should be kind to the poor, but we don't belong to them, and they don't belong to us. Because we belong to the royalty of the Christ King, who is much like other kings, and makes us think of ourselves as generally on the side of kings. On the side of emperors and the powerful.

But if we think of Jesus as from Nazareth, as really being indigenous, really belonging, really being of the particular place of the earth where he grew up, really being Jewish, really being poor, really being a colonised person - it rather changes things. We realise the most natural followers of Jesus, and the ones who are are going to understand his teaching most and be our teachers are going to be the poor, the oppressed, the colonised. It means there needs to be a priority for how the poor understand Jesus' teaching, how the oppressed understand the gospel, and that's the primary voices we will listen to to understand what it is to be Christian.

If Jesus is from Nazareth then people who are white, rich, or have social advantage will understand that Jesus was often not talking to them, and that they may have great difficulty understanding his teaching. If Jesus is from Nazareth then the rich will need to sit at the feet of the poor to get the gospel. It means the rich understanding that they're going to need to a lot of work of translation and a lot of work of transformation because they are following a poor man and it's going to take a lot of work to understand what that means. 

Jesus was really from Nazareth. He was really poor, not pretending to be poor as a royal heavenly being. And if we see our work as following a poor man who's priority was the liberation of the poor, then that will change the way we understand the Christian faith itself. 

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