The visitors from the East were already far away. They had taken a different road home, well clear of Jerusalem, and the house in Bethlehem had grown quiet again. Mary slept near the child. Joseph slept in a corner, tired from the day. It was an ordinary night, dark and still, like every winter night in that small town.

And then an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.

Joseph opened his eyes in the dark. There was no sound in the street, no horse, no soldier. But he knew that voice. Once before, months earlier, an angel had spoken to him in a dream and told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, and he had obeyed. Now the voice was saying something else: go, and go now.

He woke Mary gently.

— We have to leave tonight. God has warned me. Herod is going to look for the child.

Mary did not argue. She did not ask how they would manage, or how long they would be away, or what they would live on. She got up, wrapped her son in warm cloths, and began to gather the few things they owned. A blanket. Some bread. The waterskin. Joseph's tools, because a carpenter without his tools goes hungry anywhere in the world.

Before the first cockcrow, the door closed behind them.

Bethlehem fell away into the dark. They came down out of the hills heading south, keeping off the big roads, where there are too many people and too many questions. Mary rode the donkey with the child held against her. Joseph walked beside her, one hand on the halter and his eyes on the track.

After a few days the hills ended and the coastal plain began. And after the plain came the desert.

The desert between Israel and Egypt is wide and hard. It is a country of sand-coloured stones, dry scrub, and wells that are sometimes there and sometimes are not. By day the sun lay heavy on their backs. By night the cold came in under the blanket and nobody slept well. There were few places to stop and drink, and between one and the next you could walk a whole morning and see nothing but the horizon shivering with heat.

Mary sang under her breath to the child. They were old songs, the ones her own mother had sung, and the boy slept to the rocking of the donkey's walk. Joseph looked back now and then. There was never anyone behind them. He looked back all the same.

It was a very old journey, that one. Centuries before, Jacob and his sons had gone down into Egypt, running from a famine. Centuries later, Moses had brought the people out of Egypt and led them home through the wilderness. Now a carpenter, a young woman and a baby were going down again, without knowing that they were retracing the whole story of their people.

After many days on the road, they reached Egypt.

Egypt was another world. It had an enormous green river cutting through the sand, wheat fields as far as the eye could see, stone temples with statues taller than houses. The people spoke another language. They wrote with pictures. They ate food Mary had never seen.

But scattered through those cities there were also old Jewish communities: families who had been living in Egypt for generations, who kept the sabbath and prayed the same psalms. It was among them that the Holy Family found a place. Someone lent them a room. Someone found work for the carpenter. It was not their home, but they could live there.

And live there they did. For years Jesus grew up far from his own land. He took his first steps on foreign ground. He learned his first words hearing two languages at once. He played in the doorway of a workshop that was neither in Bethlehem nor in Nazareth, and Mary called him indoors when the sun began to go down.

They were a refugee family, like so many others. Nobody in Egypt knew who that child was.

Time went by, and in Judea King Herod died.

Then the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream once more, there in Egypt.

Joseph obeyed the same way he had obeyed the first time: without delay and without complaint. They packed their things, thanked their neighbours, and retraced the road backwards, crossing the desert again — this time with a boy who could walk on his own and who asked about everything.

Matthew, telling of that journey, remembered an old word of the prophet Hosea, written long before about the people of Israel and now coming true in a new way.

When they came near the border, Joseph heard the news. The man ruling Judea now was Archelaus, Herod's son, and he was as hard as his father. Joseph was afraid to go back to Bethlehem.

That same night he was warned in a dream again. Instead of going down into Judea, he took the northern road, up to the green hills of Galilee. And he went to live in a small town of no importance at all, where he and Mary had lived before: a village called Nazareth. So it came true, what had been spoken by the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

There Jesus grew up. There he learned Joseph's trade, the smell of wood, the weight of a mallet. There he spent nearly thirty years, in an ordinary house on an ordinary street, and the neighbours simply called him the carpenter's son.

The journey was over. The family was home.