Nowhere to lay his head
In chapter 8 of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has just given a large body of teaching (commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount) to an even larger crowd, and has performed a series of healing miracles. Still surrounded by crowds, Jesus decides to cross Lake Galilee, from his native Galilee to the Decapolis region. Before getting away, though, a scribe approaches and says, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go” (Matthew 8:19).
Scribes, as the name suggests, wrote things. In particular, they wrote copies of Torah, the Jewish law, so that it could be available to more Jews, in synagogues usually. These people were devoted to Torah, and would often attach themselves to a teacher, whose memory – and interpretation – of Torah would resource and inform the scribing. And so, this particular scribe having seen, and especially heard Jesus, now wants to be his disciple. He wants to attach himself to Jesus the teacher.
And he has made a formal approach too. First, he calls Jesus ‘teacher’ (or ‘rabbi’). Second, he is interested in where Jesus is going, because he wants to go with him, to stay with him, live with him. That’s how it worked. A rabbi’s disciples followed everywhere. They were live-in students. Look at the example in John 1:38, where Andrew and another prospective disciple ask Jesus, “Rabbi... where are you staying?” This was because they essentially wanted to move in with him.
And to this scribe, also seeking to move in with Jesus, he replies, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). This exchange is often taken as a test of the scribe’s resolve or commitment, and an illustration of the cost of discipleship to Jesus. This is not a comfortable, easy or even prestigious lifestyle. In fact, it seems many or even most rabbis were not wealthy, and had to eke out a meagre living in trades such as carpentry, as Jesus may have, at least at some point; the great rabbi Hillel worked as a day labourer. This was not a glamourous career.
A further angle to consider from this episode is that discipleship is a journey, and that following Jesus has no end point – in this life, anyway. There is no time at which Jesus will say to his disciple – as other rabbis would – ‘I have taught you all I know; you are on your own now.’ Discipleship to Jesus is constant and continuous.
But, illustrations aside, there is a literal meaning here to Jesus’ words, and it is often glossed over: it is possible that Jesus really did have nowhere to lay his head. At least at some stages in his life, Jesus was homeless, of no fixed abode.
No crib
The tradition tells us that the first of these stages was at the beginning of Jesus’ (earthly) life. Jesus was born homeless. Of course, this was not the actual beginning. We recognise Jesus Christ as the pre-existent Word, who was with God and who was God, in the beginning (John 1:1). And Paul, perhaps quoting an early Christian hymn, charts Christ’s journey from the height of Godhead to the depths of a poor, frail, human existence. He lost everything.
Something I think most people fail to appreciate about homelessness is the stress, the mental health impact it can have. Think of it: someone may have had their own home, a family, a job; any of the things many of us take for granted. And, sometimes very suddenly, they lost everything. What a shock to the system.
Yet, the Incarnation demonstrates a solidarity, an identification with this experience of great and traumatic loss: of status; of safety and security; of wealth and power; even of identity and the sense of close connection to family.
At Christmas, we sing of the poverty into which Jesus was born: “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed…”. Luke’s account of the story supplies the image of the holy family in a stable, and the baby in the manger, because “there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). The inn mentioned here is not the same kind of establishment Jesus talks about in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:34). In fact, at Christmas, it may not be an inn of any sort. The text may refer, instead, to the absence of a guestroom. Kenneth E. Bailey has described the kind of building that may be in question here: a common single-storey, open plan house, with living accommodation at one end, and a lower part at the other end occupied by the family’s animals, like sheep, cattle, a donkey, perhaps. In between would have been a feeding trough, the manger, in easy reach for the family to replenish, and for the animals to feed from. It may be that Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem – his ancestral home – and were taken in by some distant relation who would not see them on the street, but had no guestroom to offer. Thus, in cramped conditions, when the baby was born, he was placed in the manger, with its soft, warm fodder as bedding.
Whatever the case, whether we read the traditional stable because there was no room at the inn, or the perhaps more accurate lack of guestroom at a domestic property, Jesus was born homeless, according to Luke. Far from his family home, in uncomfortable conditions.
Flight of the Liberator
And Jesus may have gone even further from home. In a tradition preserved only in Matthew’s gospel, we read of the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt. Joseph has been warned in a dream to take the infant Jesus and Mary to Egypt because Herod seeks to kill the child (Matthew 2:13-15).
There are notable parallels with the infancy narrative of Moses in Exodus chapters 1 and 2. Both Jesus and Moses are in danger of death as babies – borne out by the infanticide recorded in Matthew 2:16 and Exodus 1:15-22. Both are hidden until the danger has abated. And both become great liberators of God’s people. Yet, how fragile, how delicately balanced it had all been.
The parallels were surely not lost on Matthew. In fact, since he is the only Evangelist to relay this episode, it is possible that its truth lies not primarily in its historicity, but rather in the power of the image of Jesus as a new, and greater, Moses.
Of course, the Moses story, the Exodus event, is only occasioned by the flight of another family to Egypt: the children of Israel, Jacob and sons, who faced starvation in Canaan.
In Jesus and in the Israelites, we see refugees. These were people whose lives were in danger in their own land, so they sought refuge in another country. And this is the story of so many today. It is difficult for us in the West to appreciate the gravity of their situation. Millions have had to flee their land, their homes, because to remain risks violence, imprisonment or death.
Let’s remember, then, that Jesus might have more in common with the refugee than with those who choose to welcome the refugee – or not, as the case may be. And let’s remember too, that just as Moses’ or Jesus’ infant mortality could have had catastrophic consequences for history, we may never know the saving impact refugees may have. How many doctors have fled violence and oppression in their homeland, and saved lives in our NHS? And who knows what wonderful prospects may lie ahead of a child who arrives on our shores, fleeing a deadly fate?
The world is saved and transformed because Jesus was welcomed as a refugee.
Sofa surfing
And so we return to the adult Jesus, with nowhere to lay his head. It seems his attitude and practice toward accommodation was quite relaxed. We can gather that his lifestyle was that of an itinerant teacher, who went to a lot of people’s houses for dinner. It also appears that he was a lodger with some, especially with some of the women with whom he associated. Mary and Martha took him in (Luke 10:38), and we see at his death a congregation of women who may also have given Jesus board for the night (Matthew 27:55-56).
Jesus seems to have been what today we might call a ‘sofa surfer’ – moving from one friend’s couch to another, as he has no place of his own. On the positive side, this shows the kindness of friends to one in need. On the down side, it can put a strain on relations, the needy friend can outstay his or her welcome, or drain already scarce resources in the household. Perhaps worst of all, though, in today’s Britain sofa surfers are not always classed as homeless by local authorities – meaning that statistics for homelessness may be skewed, and individuals may not qualify for the help they need – because they ostensibly have a roof over their head, precarious though it may be. This is perhaps ‘vulnerably housed’ at its most vulnerable.
But Jesus identifies with the sofa surfers too. He appears to have lived that life to an extent, and he also commended it to his disciples. When sending out the Twelve on their ‘field training’, he told them firstly to travel light (Matthew 10:9-10), and then to find someone worthy to stay with in whichever town they enter (Matthew 10:11).
On the other side of this coin, the writer to the Hebrews encouraged his readers to “show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2). Perhaps there is here a reference to Lot’s hospitality toward two angels visiting Sodom, in Genesis 19. And Sodom’s greatest sin was apparently their lack of hospitality (in fact, the opposite of hospitality) to God’s messengers, and thus an unreceptiveness to his message. This would certainly make more sense of Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:15, that towns who fail to welcome the disciples are in for a worse fate than Sodom and Gomorrah.
Hospitality is important to Jesus. In particular, hospitality to the most vulnerable. Perhaps he lived the way he did to create opportunities for others to practice hospitality.
Fasting in the wilderness
Maybe Jesus also chose the nomadic path as a discipline, to free himself from attachment to material things, like a house. In our culture, home ownership seems to be a benchmark. Yet Jesus may never have owned, perhaps not even rented, a home.
And we can see this discipline of detachment being exercised at the start of Jesus’ public life. He took himself out – or, the Holy Spirit did – to the wilderness, the desert. Here, he spent forty days, fasting. The period of forty days, or years, is significant. It is seen as a suitable period of preparation or a number for completeness. It is also, though, the number of years the people of Israel spent in the wilderness.
Jesus’ exchanges with Satan (Matthew 4:1-11) reflect that story. The three scriptural rebuttals Jesus uses clarify the connection with the desert wanderings of God’s people Israel. Each verse quoted is from Deuteronomy. Let’s take them briefly, one at a time, in reverse order.
The third verse is Deuteronomy 6:13, and is about covenant faithfulness, about loyalty and devotion to God, alone. It’s about single-mindedness, focus. And sometimes that is best achieved by stripping away all the trappings of our way of life. Again, the writer to the Hebrews exhorts us to “lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles… looking to Jesus…” (Hebrews 12:1-2). This is a laying down not just of sin – we know sin is bad, and should be laid down, right? But the ‘weights’ are not sin. This is talking about laying down other things, that may be distracting our gaze from Jesus, hindering us in “the race”. And some of these weights – or burdens, we might call them – are very innocuous. We may even say they are good. Yet, even good things can sometimes get in the way. Maybe we need to simplify, de-clutter, unplug. To fast.
The second verse Jesus quotes has to do with testing God. This time, Jesus has not quoted the full verse, Deuteronomy 6:16, but just a part of it. The original says, “Do not put the LORD your God to test, as you tested him at Massah” (emphasis mine, highlighting the ‘missing’ text). This should immediately prompt us to ask, ‘What or where is Massah? What is the text talking about?’ The verse refers to an incident recorded in Exodus 17:1-7. Not long after their departure from Egypt, the people are without water in the desert. They begin to quarrel with Moses, demanding water. Moses asks them why they quarrel with him, and why they test the LORD. Then God tells Moses to go on ahead of the them, and to strike a rock at Horeb with his staff, and water will come out of the rock for the people to drink. And that is what happens. So the place gets the name ‘Massah’, which means ‘test’, and ‘Meribah’, which means ‘quarrel’. All this came about because of a question: Is God with us, or not? There was a deep thirst, a dryness, and just physical. There was a spiritual longing too, a sense of abandonment, of desolation.
In the middle ages, some of the saints experienced something similar. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. And he found that the answer was not to question God’s presence or goodness, but rather to throw oneself into the darkness, and trust God to catch us. And this trust opens a wellspring of God’s love into the soul. Once again, though, both material and spiritual desolation are stepping stones on the path to this rock of consolation.
And finally, the first verse Jesus uses is from Deuteronomy 8:3. It has to do with hunger and bread. And the reference is to God teaching his wandering people humility and dependence on him, through his commanding manna – their daily bread – to appear for them. The point is, it’s not the bread that sustains them; it’s the God who provides it. His grace and love created us, and sustains us. This is all grace. It is God’s goodness.
Fasting is not a rejection of God’s good provision, as we might be tempted to think. Rather, fasting enables us to adjust our focus from the gift to the Giver, and to seek God first, rather than his provision. We learn more of God and his goodness.
This discipline also helps us to learn that enough really is enough. So much poverty and want in our world is the result of wealth and greed. A key lesson for me, from the story of the manna, is that each person or household gathered what they needed, and it was enough. There was a daily provision from God of enough for everyone, and they each took what they needed. I believe God has always worked this way. He gives us our daily bread. He provides enough for all his children. But it’s up to us to share it. To take and use only what we need. In our consumer society, we are programmed to take what we want. And this results in a lot of waste, a surplus for some, and a dearth for others.
On the issue of homelessness, the increase of larger and less affordable housing only exacerbates the problem, as some simply cannot get a house. There is neither the space, the housing stock, nor the political will it seems, to house those who can’t afford to buy or even rent a home.
Fasting in the wilderness today may mean a radical re-think of: our consumer choices; our use or leisure time; where and how we live; the amount of waste we generate and what happens to it.
As God once asked his people:
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”
(Isaiah 58:6-7)
This kind of fasting, this voluntary poverty, also gives us the opportunity to understand and to identify with, in some small way, the experience of the poor, the vulnerably housed, the hungry and the homeless. In this, we can be a little closer to Jesus. And the world becomes a bit closer to heaven. Closer to home.
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