The modern city of Nazareth is the largest Arab city in the State of Israel. There are approximately 40,000 ethnic Arabs living there, 70% Muslim and 30% Christian. The city is in the north of Israel, not far from the Sea of Galilee.

As we know from the gospels, it was the town Jesus grew up in.

In those days, there were only about 400 people living there. At that time, there was no Muslim religion; nor, for that matter, any Christians. Almost everyone was Jewish. In a town of that size (slightly more than half the population of our own school), everyone would know everyone else.

We are told in today’s gospel that Jesus “returned” to Nazareth. He had been away. How long, we are not sure. Months perhaps, maybe even years. But this was to be the last visit he would make to his childhood home.

At first, as we are told, his neighbors welcomed him back with high praise. Yet, a few verses later, those same townsfolks tried to kill Jesus by throwing him off of a cliff. He walked away, never to return.

There are those who ask today “What would it be like if Jesus were to come back?” First of all, who’s to say he hasn’t? Secondly, when he does come back it might not be as dramatic as some people think. He could return, as the poet T.S. Eliot says, “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

In any case, Jesus would not recognize his hometown. It’s completely changed. And most likely, no one would recognize him. It’s been nearly 2,000 years since the last time he was there.

The phrase “you can’t go home again” comes from a novel of that title published in 1940 by the American novelist Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe died in 1938, so he literally could not go home again.

As one character in the novel remarks, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… back home to a young [person’s] dreams of glory and of fame… back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.. “

As one gets older and the past is farther away that the future, one develops a kind of nostalgia about idealized time that was never quite what actually was. We remember what we want to remember and we forget what we don’t want to remember. Trying to relive memories is never quite as satisfying as they were the first time we experienced them.

I have lived in many places and have gone back to some of those places. (Some I have no intention of ever going back to). But in every case where I have returned, things are not the same as when I first lived there. It’s something of a disappointment. It’s also something of a regret that I did not fully appreciate the time I did live there.

These are “the good old days” we will remember in times to come. We would do well not to dwell overlong on what might happen in the future or what we think happened in the past. Those thoughts have their place, but they ought not crowd out the reality of here and now. This is the only time we have. After all, we can’t go home again.

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