From “Life of Christ” by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.
“The big cities are sometimes thought to contain all the wisdom, while the little towns are looked upon as backward and unprogressive. Christ chose the insignificant Bethlehem for the glory of His birth; the ridiculed Nazareth for His youth; but the glorious, cosmopolitan Jerusalem for the ignominy of His death. 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' is but the prelude to 'Can anything redemptive come from a man who dies on a cross?'
“Nazareth would be a place of humiliation for Him, a training ground for Golgotha. Nazareth was in Galilee, and the whole of Galilee was a despised region in the eyes of the more cultured people of Judea.
"Galilean speech was supposed to be crude and rude, so much so that when Peter denied Our Lord, the maidservant reminded him that his speech betrayed him; he had been with the Galilean. No one would ever look to Galilee, therefore, for a teacher; and yet the Light of the World was the Galilean.
“God chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the selfwise and proud.
“Nathanael merely gave expression to an evil prejudice probably as old as humanity itself; people and their power to teach are judged by the places whence they come.
“Worldly wisdom comes from where we expect it, in the best-sellers, the “standard brands” and the universities.
“Divine Wisdom comes from the unsuspected quarters, which the world hold in derision.
“The ignominy of Nazareth would hang about Him later on.
"His hearers would taunt: 'How is it, they said, that this untrained man has such learning?' (John 7:15)
“While this was a reluctant tribute to His learning, it was also a sneer at His “backwoods” village . . .
"How did He know? They did not suspect the true answer; namely, that in addition to the knowledge of His human intellect, He had a Wisdom that was not school taught, nor self-taught, nor even God-taught, in the sense in which the prophets were God-taught.
"He learned from His mother and the village synagogue; but the secrets of His knowledge must be found in His oneness with the Heavenly Father.”
Pp. 47-48.
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