Jesus Christ was homeless. It is a striking feature of his documented life, not least because it's so infrequently that anyone remarks on it. This man, supposedly the Son of God, had no home, no fixed address, nowhere to go to every evening. He commented on it once, comparing himself to the animals who at least had somewhere to go to sleep, but otherwise this very odd fact goes unmentioned, and there's something about it that we don't really like to think about today.

We know that he returned briefly to the town where he was raised, but even then there is no mention of him visiting his home. Indeed, he seems to have had no particular propensity to live in any particular place; he had many friends, as far as we can tell, but there doesn't seem to have been any regular pattern of visiting them, and for the most part he seems to have associated with people he'd never met before.

And this is not all. He had twelve companions, and it seems from the record that they accompanied him a great deal of the time. So now we have thirteen homeless people who have to find somewhere to sleep each night. Furthermore, this group represented a fairly significant spiritual force even during Jesus' lifetime. Can you imagine a similar thing in the modern world -- a speaker that everyone wants to hear, accompanied by twelve companions, and no arrangements for where these people are going to sleep?

As we've remarked before, the practice of the last three Steps can lead us to conclude that in a very fundamental way we are homeless -- that we don't belong in any particular place, because we belong everywhere. Perhaps that's why Jesus chose to be homeless. In his ceaseless wanderings, he was modeling for us the fact that we are at home nowhere and everywhere -- and that wherever we are, God as we understand God is there as well.