What struck me in this tour of Israel was the word incarnation.
The Gospel of John reads, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). It “became” sarx, the word for “flesh.” God became one of us. That is what we believe about Jesus. In this one man we see God.
That means a human with a body, skin, bones, blood, ears, toes and toenails, fingers, hair and eyes — with a color. He became one of us as a child, as a teen, as a young adult, as an adult. He became a body among other bodies. He had a mother and a father and brothers and sisters. Bodies among many bodies.
As we ventured from the north — all the way up to the tip of the Golan Heights overlooking Syria (a mostly bombed out community in fact) and all the way down to the southern end of the Dead Sea. From lush green grasses and yellow flowers and sunny skies and rolling, rocky hills. Bright sun and long blue skies. Our temperatures were mild — mornings cool enough to need a coat, days of sun hot enough to shed some long sleeves or jackets. A hat to keep my head from getting too much sun.
A lake filled with fish that could be caught and cooked over charcoal and de-boned and eaten. Water, wine, or beer to drink. The physicality of food and drink.
I thought of the disciples fishing, of sweating and smelling in ways that would disgust many moderns, except for those who know the odors of a locker room with sweaty football uniforms drying out. Jesus knew such smells, and was those smells.
Chorazin has a basalt synagogue. Dark volcanic rock. Rugged, pock marked, rough hewn. Capernaum has a limestone synagogue but it sits atop a basalt synagogue in Jesus’ time, which means he attended and spoke and created some disturbances in a dark-ish synagogue. The kind of rock that cools the airs inside.
From that synagogue Jesus could look to the right and see Tiberias, a city with some Roman bodies and some Roman ways of life. The kind of bodies and life he saw as a young man working in Sepphoris, where the rocks were smoother, the mosaics more refined, and the bodies also powerful.
To the left he looked into the Decapolis, darkish with some orange hued hills of rock. It looks rugged, not plush. The morning sun rises over those hills and then glows across the sea. A sea that can get unruly and dangerous for boats, one of which was found and reconstructed and is now housed in a museum for us to see. A boat that could manage the Sea of Galilee if one knew what one was doing.
That boat is near Magdala, where a synagogue has been uncovered, where some mikva’ot have been uncovered, and from which city one could walk up a valley and head south to Nazareth, a walk Jesus no doubt knew.
I like Galilee.
His walk to Jerusalem would have, at times, been a walk from the lush greens of Galilee along, to the right, the arid hills of Samaria and, to the left, some fertile land flanking the Jordan, and further to the right the arid hills leading into the deserted hills of Edom and then Moab. He would have at times walked by or stayed near Scythopolis, a large Roman city in the Decapolis, with its memory of Saul’s body. No one could not have been impressed by the grandeur of the design and aesthetics of that city. Physicality abounded.
By the time Jesus gets to the path up to Jerusalem he was more often than not in arid desert. Jordan flowed much wider than it does today, the roads and paths much higher.
Jerusalem was spectacular then as it is now, but even more then. A massive temple platform, “stones” so large one is estimated at 570 tons, a temple high enough and bright enough to show itself miles away (so Josephus). It was a climb, to begin with, from the Jordan valley up to Jerusalem. Hills and valleys and rock. The final steps, from the southern end, up to the temple steps requires some vigor. The pool of Siloam and the City of David are on a slope up to the temple. On the steps entering onto the temple platform one comprehends the vastness of that temple. From the east, one walks down Olivet through Gethesamne into the Kidron valley and then up into the temple. I wondered at times how often the ancient pilgrims’ quads felt as taxed as mine did.
Jerusalem’s physicality impresses. It’s where God chose to make his name known and from which God’s name has spread to the whole world.
There is a physicality about the Land that evoked for me the physicality of Jesus and his followers. This reflection is not romantic but about the ruggedness of the Christian confession that God became man and met us eye-level in Jesus. In a very specific place. In a Galilean. From the bowl of Nazareth, from whose higher locations one could spot hill-ish mountains through the hazes and sun and shadows.
God still speaks through the physicalities of you and me and us and our world.
That’s awesome Scot. Beautiful reflection. My visit there impacted my preaching every Sunday for over two years, and often still does, especially when teaching The Gospels course. For me, it was the Temple Mount that hit the most tangibly for some reason. I think I always had kind of a “flannel graph” or cartoon version of the biblical stories in my head, but my word…when you get the Temple Mount, all that goes out the window. It’s just so…BIG. Also: Israel was much more beautiful than I anticipated for sone reason.
This is a beautiful description! I’m sitting in Jerusalem now after coming from Nazareth, a city I have lived in for 10 years and love deeply. Thank you for visiting and for sharing your stories.