Picturing Jesus' Ministry

I thought I would make a quick post on some of my initial impressions of Galilee. After our first night in Tel Aviv last Tuesday, we left for Galilee on Wednesday. We went up through Caesarea, Mt. Carmel, Megiddo, the Jezreel Valley, and eventually to a lovely kibbutz on the south of Galilee at a place called Maagan. There we swam in the Sea of Galilee (Clint Ussher, Ian Swyers, and Danielle Evans swam way out to a buoy in a "Hey, I could actually die doing this" kind of way). We noticed a sign forbidding swimming in the sea at our location after we all got out.

Then on Thursday we sailed on the Sea of Galilee from Tiberias to the boat museum, then to the Beatitudes, Feeding of the 5000, and Feed my sheep sites. Finally we came to Capernaum to the site where Peter and Jesus may actually have lived. I enjoyed the ride on the sea very much and the Capernaum site was very meaningful to me, although I was a bit out of it from jet lag and there was the monstrous spider church over it and things were much too hurried for me there. I would have rather meditated there than at some of the other churches.

Then we went to Cana where two of our company began their wedding on videotape. They'll finish it in about 8 weeks. I don't know how many times Wilbur emphasized that they weren't married yet. It was a "you can't have sex" reminder he made about ten times. Cana was our first primarily Arab city.

Nazareth followed and I, being paranoid, was a little uneasy walking through the markets to the church of Joseph and another big church the Roman Catholic church has built. These are located over caves where Jesus may have lived and Joseph may have had a "carpentry" or stone work shop.

Finally, we came back to the Jordan River where I baptized, rededicated, and helped rededicate several people. That was a neat experience.

None of that, however, is what I started out to write. I started to write my impressions of Jesus ministry in the light of these forays.

The first thing that struck me is that the Sea of Galilee isn't as big as I had pictured it. In fact the distances in general are nothing like I pictured them. Perhaps in terms of how the distances seemed to them they were similar. We Americans travel so much and so far that the distances of the ancients seem puny. Yet in Jesus' day I'm sure these "small" distances to me were much bigger.

The Sea of Galilee is only 13 miles across. You can actually see the other side and the Golan Heights from the southernmost tip of it (and of course you can bomb the other side as well, as has been done in the past). I had pictured something much more along the lines of Lake Okeechobee in Florida.

Also my reading indicates that the villages would have been very small. Nazareth might have had 500 people and Capernaum 1000. You can still get a little feel for Capernaum because it is a ruin but Nazareth is hopeless. I hardly gained any feel for Jesus from going there personally.

The plain at the edge of the Sea of Galilee yields to the rather high hills of Upper Galilee. Unless you found a good path, travelling from Nazareth to Cana some five or six miles north would be a chore. Jesus stayed away from the large Greek cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias.

In my devotional Thursday night I remarked on how insignificant a place Jesus came to. What a small group of people he ministered to in a backwater part of Antipas' peculiarly divided domain. It was like he gave us a little snippet of what ministering is all about. Before he died for the world, he ministered to a little group of peasant villagers trying to survive the building programs and thus taxation of Herod Antipas. They farmed enough to live on, but he demanded much more. These were the poor to whom Jesus spoke good news.

Well, I think I'll go to bed now. It's the museum tomorrow (this time for real)...