In the Galilee

Part of the beautiful mosaic floor at Tabgha

On Friday in the Tel Aviv airport I caught up with my co-leader Jane Larsen-Wigger and the twenty pastors from the Louisville area who are traveling with us. We are now at Pilgerhaus beside the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday we did not travel far—the first day we visited Tabgha, the place of the seven springs (Heptapagon), where a Byzantine church was built commemorating Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread. This church was destroyed, possibly  by the Persian invasion in 614 C.E., or possibly by the Muslims who came later in the century. After that it was forgotten until the 1930s, when the mosaic floor was found by archaeologists. A new church was built on the site in the 1980s, incorporating the ancient floors. 

At the Primacy of Peter

The modern church in Capernaum

Looking down at ancient house, house church, and octagonal church

We also visited the church of the Primacy of Peter which is nearby, then drove to Capernaum, the town Jesus moved to from Nazareth as a adult. The house of Jesus’ disciple Peter is close to the sea. It became a worship site: first a “house church” was built from his home, then over this in later centuries another, octagonal Byzantine church was built. Like the Tabgha church, it were destroyed and forgotten until the twentieth century, when a flying saucer-shaped church was built on pillars over the whole thing, so that visitors can still go underneath, and look down through glass windows inside, to see the ancient ruins. Nearby is a large fifth-century synagogue, probably built in the same place where the synagogue would have been in the first century.

What is striking in Capernaum is the proximity of Peter’s home (and later the church) to the synagogue, reminding us that the earliest Christians were Jews, and that for them as well as for Gentile Christians, early Christianity were not so much a different religion as a sect within Judaism.

Capernaum synagogue

I’ve been to Capernaum many times, and I told the group that it is one of my favorite places. Capernaum reminds me of the concreteness of Jesus’ life—he wasn’t a figure in a fairy tale in some non-existent place, but a historical person who walked and ate and slept and worked and tried to do his best with the vocation and circumstances he was given, just as we do. There were four Jewish towns in the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee—going from south to north they were Magdala (south of Tabgha), Capernaum (north of Tabgha), Bethsaida (further north, where the Jordan River flows into the lake), and Chorazin (in the hills behind Capernaum). It was a very small area that could easily be walked. Jesus expressed frustration with three out of four of these towns because they didn’t listen to him as he thought they should (Matt 11:21-23). It’s a relief to know he could feel frustrated and thwarted as we do.

The group by the Sea of Galilee (minus one)

Yet connecting this minute beginning with what I saw in western Turkey three weeks ago, eight or nine Roman cities in which churches were established and grew in a land relatively far away, and what I will see in Greece next month, Athens and Thessaloniki—a city in northern Greece, true Europe, which became the recipient of the earliest letter of Paul—I am inspired to think Jesus’ efforts bore fruit far beyond what it must have seemed was possible on the day he became frustrated with Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum.

The group is keeping another blog at: www.louhlp2012.blogspot.com.