What a glorious idea: We stayed in one place for two nights! It was wonderful to wake up and not have to pack up and move on. The pace is packed on METS and the traveling to a new hotel each night is exhausting. But today we had the luxury of not packing up.Today was a day full of visiting places Jesus probably didn't visit. There are so many
competing "traditional" sites that one is never really sure where these things happened. For instance, we visited the place where Gabriel probably didn't announce God's plans to Mary (The church of the Annunciation), the rock where Jesus probably didn't feed the 5000 (The Church of Heptapegon), the beach where Jesus probably didn't cook fish while Peter swam to shore to meet him (The Church of the Primacy of Peter), and the hillside where Jesus probably didn't preach the Sermon on the Mount (The Mt. of Beatitudes).
If it sounds like I'm being sarcastic, well, I am. It is a little hard for me to get into this as a spiritual experience when we're constantly being reminded about the historical slipperiness of all these places. So the best we can do is say that Jesus probably did do these things in a place very similar to the ones we are visiting (and forget about the other two or three competing places for the moment). We did take time at each to read scripture stories and these moments of hearing God's Word read were refreshing and revitalizing.
Besides all of these places that Jesus probably didn't visit, we did take a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee (a body of water that most are pretty certain Jesus did spend time on!). The Sea is beautiful. It is surrounded by mountains and its shores are lush green. The green is a stark contrast to the southern deserts of Israel. An interesting moment took place on the boat ride.
The captain put the American National Anthem on the loud speakers and raised the American Flag as we set sail. None of us stood or showed much interest in this. I was a little befuddled about how to take this gesture of goodwill. After this rather lackluster show of patriotism, our Palestinian Christian guide gave us a bit of verbal abuse for now being more patriotic. It led to some good conversations about the role of the United States in this region and our own ambivalent feelings about it all. (The picture at right is of Steve, our leader from Rhodes College.)
One last place we visited this day was Gamla. This was earlier in the day (this particular blog post is not chronological). It was another city that held out in the Jewish Revolt against the Romans and is situated on the side of some formidable terrain. This too was a city that had a suicide pact. When the Romans finally breached the wall, they found everyone dead except Josephus (the leader of the rebels), who was taken hostage and eventually transported to Rome to write Jewish history.
We ended the day back at the Mt. of Beatitudes reading the Sermon on the Mount. It was a beautiful setting with the breeze blowing through the trees as we looked out over the deep blue Sea of Galilee. It was an appropriate way to end a day where we continued to learn more about the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis. It is a very complex situation. One of our lay people probably put it best when she said, "Someone is going to have to turn the other cheek for this conflict to come to an end." The response might be, "How many cheeks have already been turned?"
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