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“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

This question comes from the lips of Nathanael, a man whom Jesus Himself would commend for being a straight talker (John 1:46-47). Today Nazareth is a predominantly Muslim city of nearly 80,000 people in northern Israel. Modern Nazareth also has a large Christian population and the city benefits from tourism centered around the New Testament testimony of ancient Nazareth as the hometown of Jesus. If you are familiar with Scripture and remember the town’s name, you most likely think of Nazareth in the context of the oft-repeated designation of our Lord as “Jesus of Nazareth.”

Today, Nathanael’s incredulity at the origins of the Messiah seems out of place. After all, 80,000 people is well more than double the entire population of Weakley County, yet in its day, Nazareth was a tiny village- neither David’s birthplace (Bethlehem) or the home of God’s temple (Jerusalem). Nathanael raises an honest question, “How could someone so great and so important come from such a small, forgotten place?”

I admit I hold a great affection for small places. I have lived in four towns in my four decades of life- all in West Tennessee and each with less than 3,000 residents. While I have been blessed to travel to some of the largest cities in the world and enjoyed those visits, I have returned here again and again. I will be the first to confess small places are not perfect- in fact, they hold the same challenges as cities even if harder to recognize. Small towns can serve as strongholds of hypocrisy, islands of poverty, dens of crime, and homes to violence. Hard times hit small places hard- when factories close, when younger generations move away, when addictions arrive to fill the emptiness and loneliness of hurting people.

Despite the struggles, I believe there is value in the intimacy of such a life.

To know the names of the people you meet each day at the store and in the bank- to love them as your parents loved their parents as your grandparents loved their grandparents. To shop local because you know the family’s youngest daughter got braces last week or because their uncle passed suddenly and you want to help with expenses. For an old man to remind you of what a great athlete your daddy was or to thank you for your grandfather’s service in the war. To be told you come from good stock or to be praised for overcoming a tough upbringing. To hear the same stories again and again, and although you were born fifty years after the fact, you feel like you saw the drought, the winning shot, or the great fire. To see hardworking people slip a few bills into a young father’s hand when he was short at the store- careful not to let his children see that he had come to the end of his money but not to the end of the month. To know those church ladies armed with worn Bibles and well-used casserole dishes who always whispered to the young teachers each August, “If you have any children in your class who need anything, you just let me know.”

No place is perfect. Even in small places, we face challenges to fund and feed and fix, and we often disagree on how best to do that. We have many differences in how we think, worship, vote, and live, yet we should not be surprised that the Man who taught us to love God and to love our neighbor came from a place where He would have known His neighbors by name.

When we are committed to loving God and serving where He has planted us, good things will continue to come from the least likely places.