Jesus’ Silent Years, Volume 4: Homecoming – epub

The stories of romance, grief, and violence dance to the drumbeat of destiny. They fill in a few gaps of what might have been.

Home has been famously defined as the place people have to take you, when no one else will. Some homecomings are less than what they’re cracked up to be. One of Jesus’ friends comes home to a dead wife, an enemy comes home to hell, another friend to her “mother issues,” and a fourth friend to a more cohesive, kindly sense of self. Jesus comes home to his rightful place as Messiah. Like him, we only find home as we journey with friends, listening to the Spirit, with one eye on our true home.

Homecoming, volume four, takes Jesus back to Israel from Egypt in his late twenties. We walk with him, and his friends, through the desert. We witness the slow healing of one friend, Slow, who’s been fractured into many parts by childhood sexual abuse. We see the ambivalence of Barabbas (aka Rabbus), teetering on the brink of following Jesus or giving into his desire for revenge. Jesus learns to trust God for water out of hard rock. We learn by story how God seeds us, weeds us, tenders us into adulthood, each in our own way.