We began with a boat ride across the Sea of Galilee. The water was as smooth as glass, and the overcast weather kept the sun at bay without obscuring the wonderful views. It was a strange experience to be floating there, it was easy to imagine Jesus and the disciples in another boat, well, easy until the sound system started playing contemporary praise music and the honking of a car horn drifted across the water. In my imagined Holy Land the Sea of Galilee was either calm and sunny or dramatically stormy. This overcast stillness didn't fit, it seemed almost too mundane, too real, too.......normal. The hillsides around this part of Galilee are green all year round. That somehow felt wrong, I wanted dry and dusty, gentle rainfall was not what I imagined.
After visiting the remains of a fishing boat that dated back to 1st century, we drove up to the Mount of Beatitudes to see the Catholic shrine there. Once again this was not the scene from my picture bible. Even though this was the off season for tourism, the area was still crowded with Pilgrims. We saw people from, Brazil, Africa, Romania and South America there, all with their own ideas of what appropriate worship at such a holy site should look like. I remember sitting in the chapel and reflecting on Jesus sermon, Blessed are........ Blessings spoken into lives of oppression and brokenness, poor people scraping an existence under the harsh regime of Roman occupation. What Jesus means when he uses the word 'blessed' looks very different to the listeners of his time than to my contemporary western Christianity.
At Tabga we visited the church built over the traditional location of the feeding of the 5000. The church features a famous Byzantine Mosaic of loaves and fishes that I wanted to see and photograph. When we walked in however the Romanian tour group were having a worship service. Their priest's voice sang chant that filled that sacred space with an intimacy that I did not want to interrupt with a camera flash. This was not what I imagined, but in this case the simple piety of their song was so much better than any photo I could have taken.
Capernaum and Bethsaida were our next stops. Capernaum was also full of pilgrims. We saw the church that was built on top of the church that was built on top of St. Peter's house , and also the ruins of the synagogue built on top of the synagogue where Jesus spoke and worshipped. With so many layers of history, Capernaum was difficult to picture.
The ruins of Bethsaida were even more incomplete than Capernaum, but, because nothing had been built over the top, it was somehow easier for me to imagine. We read the passage of Jesus healing the blind man from Mark 8:22-26. Jesus prays for the man and asks him what he sees, his response is 'I see people walking around, they look like trees' (verse 24). I wonder if the man thought to himself 'So this is seeing?! It is not what I imagined' Jesus prays for the man a second time and his sight is fully restored. I think that is my prayer for this trip, that I might see Israel and Jordan more fully, that I can cast aside my preconceptions of my Imagined Holy Land and see what Jesus wants me to see. To see not only the land that way, but my fellow pilgrims and myself as well.
Our final stop for the day was at Kursi. We saw the ruins of a Byzantine church built over the traditional site where Jesus cast the demons out of the possessed man and into the pigs, Mark 5:1-20. Once again the site was very different to what I had imagined. It was more green, less of a stark dramatic cliff, it seemed such a normal place to be the scene of something so extraordinary. Maybe that is my struggle, I wanted mystic experiences in wondrous imagined places, instead I am getting rain showers and jet lag.
The Holy Land is not what I imagined, the reality is so much more complex, and mundane. Beautiful, and ordinary.......
......just like my faith,
Written by Peter Johns
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