The Twenty-Fourth Year (A.D. 18)
Autor: Carlos Fernando Rocha | Publicado: 2012-02-03T16:32:00-03:00



This was Jesus’ first year of comparative freedom from family 
responsibility. James was very successful in managing the home with 
Jesus’ help in counsel and finances.

The week following the Passover of this year a young man from Alexandria
 came down to Nazareth to arrange for a meeting, later in the year, 
between Jesus and a group of Alexandrian Jews at some point on the 
Palestinian coast. This conference was set for the middle of June, and 
Jesus went over to Caesarea to meet with five prominent Jews of 
Alexandria, who besought him to establish himself in their city as a 
religious teacher, offering as an inducement to begin with, the position
 of assistant to the chazan in their chief synagogue. 

The spokesmen for this committee explained to Jesus that Alexandria was 
destined to become the headquarters of Jewish culture for the entire 
world; that the Hellenistic trend of Jewish affairs had virtually 
outdistanced the Babylonian school of thought. They reminded Jesus of 
the ominous rumblings of rebellion in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine
 and assured him that any uprising of the Palestinian Jews would be 
equivalent to national suicide, that the iron hand of Rome would crush 
the rebellion in three months, and that Jerusalem would be destroyed and
 the temple demolished, that not one stone would be left upon another.

Jesus listened to all they had to say, thanked them for their 
confidence, and, in declining to go to Alexandria, in substance said, “My hour has not yet come.”
 They were nonplused by his apparent indifference to the honor they had 
sought to confer upon him. Before taking leave of Jesus, they presented 
him with a purse in token of the esteem of his Alexandrian friends and 
in compensation for the time and expense of coming over to Caesarea to 
confer with them. But he likewise refused the money, saying: “The
 house of Joseph has never received alms, and we cannot eat another’s 
bread as long as I have strong arms and my brothers can labor.”

His friends from Egypt set sail for home, and in subsequent years, when 
they heard rumors of the Capernaum boatbuilder who was creating such a 
commotion in Palestine, few of them surmised that he was the babe of 
Bethlehem grown up and the same strange-acting Galilean who had so 
unceremoniously declined the invitation to become a great teacher in 
Alexandria.

Jesus returned to Nazareth. The remainder of this year was the most 
uneventful six months of his whole career. He enjoyed this temporary 
respite from the usual program of problems to solve and difficulties to 
surmount. He communed much with his Father in heaven and made tremendous
 progress in the mastery of his human mind.

But human affairs on the worlds of time and space do not run smoothly 
for long. In December James had a private talk with Jesus, explaining 
that he was much in love with Esta, a young woman of Nazareth, and that 
they would sometime like to be married if it could be arranged. He 
called attention to the fact that Joseph would soon be eighteen years 
old, and that it would be a good experience for him to have a chance to 
serve as the acting head of the family. Jesus gave consent for James’s 
marriage two years later, provided he had, during the intervening time, 
properly trained Joseph to assume direction of the home.

And now things began to happen — marriage was in the air. James’s 
success in gaining Jesus’ assent to his marriage emboldened Miriam to 
approach her brother-father with her plans. Jacob, the younger stone 
mason, onetime self-appointed champion of Jesus, now business associate 
of James and Joseph, had long sought to gain Miriam’s hand in marriage. 
After Miriam had laid her plans before Jesus, he directed that Jacob 
should come to him making formal request for her and promised his 
blessing for the marriage just as soon as she felt that Martha was 
competent to assume her duties as eldest daughter.

When at home, he continued to teach the evening school three times a 
week, read the Scriptures often in the synagogue on the Sabbath, visited
 with his mother, taught the children, and in general conducted himself 
as a worthy and respected citizen of Nazareth in the commonwealth of 
Israel.

TO BE CONTINUED...


The Twenty-Fifth Year (A.D. 19)
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