Sea of Galilee: Places of Faith and Miracles

The Sea of Galilee was the scene for almost all of Jesus’ public ministry. In the third part of his series on the recent Pilgrimage of the Peacemakers, Günther Simmermacher takes us on a tour of the region.

When you look around the area surrounding the Sea of Galilee today, you see what Jesus saw. And yet, in his time, things were quite different.

The harp-shaped lake — the term “sea” is rather ambitious — more or less looks the same as it did in Jesus’ time, when he knew it as the lake Gennesaret. The water is still wet, and it’s usually placid, though sometimes the winds come, with no Messiah there to calm them.

The pilgrim today sees the same mountains which Jesus knew: the Golan Heights, Mount Arbel, what we call today the Mount of Beatitudes.

From the waters one can still see the city of Tiberias, which in Jesus’ time was brand-new, having been built by Herod Antipas in the 20s AD. Jesus never went to the city named after the emperor of the occupation force, which was built on the grounds of graves and therefore to Jews ritually unclean.

But some things have changed. For one, there were a lot more trees there than one sees now.

When Jesus exercised his public ministry, he did most of it in a small area, no bigger than Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Dotted around the landscape there were seven cities — all but one of them are long gone as human settlements, including the three upon which Jesus prophesied woe: Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum.

The first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, former governor of Galilee and later turncoat for the Romans, bragged that all of them had at least 15000 inhabitants. Archaeology doesn’t bear out his claim; Josephus might have exaggerated a bit to boost his status as a former governor of the region.

Still, when Jesus walked in these parts, this was a bustling, urban region, located on the Via Maris, the busy trade route that led from Heliopolis in Egypt to Damascus.

That is why Jesus came here: because this was an active, dynamic place, and Capernaum was ideally located in the midst of these settlements. There was lots of traffic, among the locals and among those who traversed the Via Maris — and that meant many potential listeners to the Good News.

Capernaum (or Kafr-Nahum, as Jesus knew it) was a relatively well-off fishing town. Simon Peter most likely was not a backwater yokel with a boat and a net, but a successful businessman who had a house just a few metres away from the focal point of the city: the synagogue.

Peter’s house has been excavated and identified with absolute certainty; the foundation of the synagogue in which Jesus preached and healed still stands as well. The Southern Cross Pilgrimage of the Peacemakers in February saw both.

We also visited the ancient Magdala. The home of Mary Magdalene was known in the first century as Migdala Nunia, and was even wealthier than Capernaum. The city was famous for its fish processing — its name means “tower of fish” — and made lots of money from exporting cured fish and a popular fish sauce, even to Rome.

During construction for a guesthouse and church at Migdal a few years ago, the Legionaries of Christ, a Catholic order, found a first-century synagogue and other structures belonging to the long-lost city.

Synagogues were rare in those days, and not the places of liturgy we know them as today. The place for liturgy was the Temple in Jerusalem.

Before the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, synagogues were places of religious ceremonies, but also all-purpose community centres for civic affairs, public meetings, wedding feasts, education and day-care of children, and so on.

Small villages might not even have synagogue buildings, but hold their meetings in open spaces.

There is no evidence, for example, that the village of Nazareth had a synagogue building. It was too small in population to sustain such a thing. So when Luke’s gospel (4:16) tells us that Jesus “entered the synagogue on the Sabbath”, with unwelcome consequences, we may imagine that synagogue as an open area consigned for such gatherings as reading the Torah.

That synagogue at Migdal self-evidently is of great importance to Jews. But it also appeals to us Christians, since it is quite certain that Mary Magdalene knew that place. It may very well be that Jesus also preached there.

Matthew’s gospel tells us that “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the Good News of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23). It is implausible that Jesus did not preach in the synagogue of Magdala, a major regional centre.

The Magdala synagogue is the only synagogue from Jesus’ time found in Galilee, other than the foundation of that in Capernaum.

Artifacts that were discovered suggest that Jewish liturgies might have been celebrated there which were normally reserved for worship in the Temple. The implications of that could be enormous. Was this community doing their own thing? Did they perhaps even adapt their liturgical practices in response to the teachings of the Nazarene, the New Temple?

The Israeli Antiquities Authority took over the excavation of the synagogue, but the Legionaries got in a team of archaeologists from their native Mexico which has dug up parts of the old town.

The findings have been spectacular, revealing a town of wealth, confirming ancient writings. That is the town of Mary Magdalene, herself a woman of means who helped finance the enterprises of Jesus and his followers.

The Legionaries of Christ haven’t managed to complete their guesthouse, but they built a church there. Its interior is impressive, dominated by a huge altar in the shape of a fishing boat.

The exterior, however, is disagreeable. It has no cross, no statue, no belltower — nothing that might identify it as a church. Its looks like a public library. This is because the Israeli government prohibits churches from fixing on their new buildings anything that could mark it out as a Christian structure.

The church isn’t even called a church but is widely referred to by the rather deplorable euphemism “spirituality centre”.

Luckily, a good number of churches were built before the state of Israel was founded. The most magnificent of these is the church on the Mount of Beatitudes, an octagonal structure built in the 1930s by the prolific architect of Holy Land churches, Antonio Barluzzi (1884-1960).

Its most unusual feature is the location of the altar in the middle of the church.

A beautiful garden allows the pilgrim to reflect in prayerful silence on Our Lord’s ministry around the Sea of Galilee, which reveals itself in its full glory from the mount, and on the famous sermon.

Here one might imagine the scene of Jesus delivering his eight-point sermon to his audience, though it is more likely that he addressed them from the slopes. Scripture scholars also believe that the Sermon on the Mount is a summary of statements Jesus made over a period of time.

But this should not concern us too much. Our focus should be on the message. And, like many of us today, Jesus’ listeners were probably puzzled by some of these counterintuitive ideas.

“Whoah there, Rabbuni,” one of these listeners might have said, “what do you mean, ‘blessed are the meek?’ What good does meekness do me?” We might ask the same kind of questions today.

And Jesus surely would have explained what he meant, engaging in patient dialogue with the people.

For our group, the seventh beatitude had particular resonance: “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” That’s what we came as: Peacemakers.

As peacemakers we sought to learn about the unhappy situation in the Holy Land, about the experiences and fears that shape attitudes on both sides, and to pray for a just and peaceful solution to what at the moment looks like a stalemate.

The final beatitude blesses those “who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness”. This applies in a very real way to the Christians of the Holy Land, Palestinians who feel caught between the hammer and the anvil, with the oppression and injustice visited upon them by the state of Israel on the one hand, and the pressure of increasingly radical Islam on the other.

So it seemed scandalous that the overpriced gift shop on the Mount of Beatitudes, a Franciscan site, should have been leased out to vendors who sell T-shirts and other souvenir tat which pronounce Israeli propaganda, even misusing the gospel of Matthew to that end.

How hurtful must this priority of revenue over solidarity be to the Christians of the Holy Land? What would Jesus say?

The beatitudes are intended to encourage the poor and oppressed of their final victory. They are best read not in a bland or overly pious monotone but in an oratory voice of the kind we know from Martin Luther King Jr.

Sometimes we misread Jesus. Jesus must have been a passionate, charismatic and rousing orator. People came in their hundreds and thousands to hear him speak. If he had delivered his lines in a dull drone, these numbers might have been counted in a few dozen.

Being in the Holy Land helps us understand the content and context of his parables and his proclamations. The Jesuit author Fr James Martin, in his fine book Jesus: A Pilgrimage, tells of one revelation.

He was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee when he noticed that the surrounding landscape included rocky ground, fertile land and thorny plants — just the sort of terrain the sower in the parable contends with as he spreads his seeds.

“For the first time I realised that when Jesus was preaching, he may not have been describing abstract plots of land (as in ‘Try to imagine rocky ground’), but what his listeners were standing on. I could envision him pointing and saying, ‘Look at that ground over there’,” Fr Martin writes.

And that is a grace of a good pilgrimage to the Holy Land, especially when in the care of an expert guide, as we were: it is an opportunity to understand Jesus and his life, not as an abstract but as a lived experience.

That is why seeing the Holy Land is known as the Fifth Gospel: it tells us the story of Christ and the promise of salvation.

Next week: The land of Samaria

Günther Simmermacher is the author of The Holy Land Trek: A Pilgrim’s Guide, published by Southern Cross Books (order from www.holylandtrek.com). Join The Southern Cross on the Year of Mercy Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in October, led by Fr Larry Kaufmann CSsR. For details and llustrated itinerary see www.fowlertours.co.za/kaufmann