Jesus (5 page)

The GPS seemed largely uninterested in taking us in the right direction. Though George is an excellent driver (i.e., better than me) and we expertly navigated our way out of Jerusalem, we quickly found ourselves lost. At first it had seemed a straightforward journey. All we had to do was find Highway 90, which snaked north, alongside the west bank of the Jordan River, and follow it to the Sea of Galilee. But it soon became clear that we were far from any highway, stuck in the middle of an arid countryside of rolling hills dotted with small gray-green bushes.

George's patience dwindled as the roads narrowed. Who could blame him? At one point, the GPS said, “Turn right,” and we pulled onto a deeply rutted dirt road.

“Uh!” he said. “Where
are
we?”

I examined the map. “Shilo,” I said.

“Yeah, right!” said George, evidently doubtful that we were near one of the great cities of the Old Testament where the Ark of the Covenant rested for many years.

“Where do we want to go?” he said. “I'll plug it into the GPS.”

We wanted to go north to Galilee and along the River Jordan, so I searched the map for a location on the way. “Gilgal,” I said.

“Oh, come on!” said George. Another famous Old Testament town, one that figures prominently in the life of Saul—he was made king there, among other things.

But it was true. I was constantly surprised how the storied names of biblical locales popped up in the most familiar of circumstances: on a simple map, on a graffitied street sign, or in everyday conversations. “The traffic to Bethlehem was
terrible
last night!” said a Jesuit over dinner one night. Which still didn't beat “Gehenna is lovely.”

As our GPS kept insisting on right turns, I examined the map. George slowly steered the car down the faux road. Presently an Israeli guard station appeared. A young, dark-haired man with a thin beard and a rifle slung over his shoulder walked menacingly toward our car. (Later I discovered that Shilo is a Jewish settlement, which explained the rifle.)

“Okay, Navigator,” said George. “Ask the guy with the gun.”

The guy with the gun spoke zero English, and my Hebrew consisted of five phrases:
Thank you, You're welcome, Hello, Good-bye
, and
Peace
—the last three of which are the same. So I said, “Jordan River?”

He squinted his eyes, unslung his rifle, and jabbed the point of the barrel into his left forearm. “Dead! Dead! Dead!” he said.
Uh oh.

“Then . . . left!” he said and grinned. It dawned on me what he meant. Follow the road to where it dead-ends. Then turn left. His apparent death threat was instead a helpful driving instruction.

“Toda!
” I said.

He saluted, and I returned to the car.

“Good job,” said George. “I'm glad he didn't shoot us.”

In a few minutes we were zipping up Highway 90 through the Jordan Valley. In another hour we reached the Sea of Galilee.

We spied it first through the trees, as we drove through the city of Tiberias. The cornflower-blue waters and the pink rocks on the opposite shore seemed the most beautiful thing my eyes had ever seen. And I thought,
Jesus saw this!
Not through the window of a rented car, but he had seen it. From years of reading Bibles illustrated with crummy black-and-white photographs of the Sea of Galilee, I immediately recognized the surrounding hills, which in the hazy summer light looked like folded pink cloth.

We continued up the west side of the sea, heading north toward the Franciscan hostel on the Mount of Beatitudes. As the number of buildings between the highway and the water lessened, the view became clearer. I couldn't take my eyes off of it.

“Jesus saw this,” I said.

“Yeah,” said George. “Pretty great, huh?”

When I saw the sign that said “Capernaum,” I almost laughed for joy. The town where Jesus made his home during his ministry in Galilee. The town where Peter lived. The site of many of the miracle stories. The place that I had
most
wanted to see. But we weren't going straightaway to Capernaum (or, as the sign read,
Kfar Nahum
, which, translated into English, would be “village of Nahum” or perhaps “Nahumsville”). First we needed to find the Mount of Beatitudes hostel.

“Well,” I said, pointing up a gently sloping hillside, “that must be it.”

We both peered up a hill blanketed with dried grass and capped with an impressive gray church. After a few unsuccessful tries, we made it up the side of the mountain and spied a small sign pointing to the monastery.

Having stayed in countless religious houses and monasteries, I expected an unlovely building with closet-size rooms furnished with the following items: a narrow metal bed with a lumpy mattress, a rickety wooden chair, a tiny desk, and, if we were lucky, a small sink with a leaky faucet. We were lodging in a Franciscan hostel, run by an order known for their love of simplicity, so the poverty was bound to be extreme.

We pulled into the driveway, and a handsome four-story sandstone building loomed on our right. To our left was a white marble building, by all appearances brand-new, with a large fountain in front. I wondered what it was. Clearly that building was too elegant to be part of the Franciscan holdings. Stretching out before us, at the far end of the property, the Sea of Galilee sparkled.

When we emerged from the car, the heat hit me like an anvil. A very humid anvil. It must have been five thousand degrees. A sprightly woman in a white habit bounded down the stairs of the sandstone building.

“
Bienvenue, mes pères!
” she said with a smile. “I am Sister Télesfora,” the kind sister with whom I had corresponded. After a mercifully brief conversation in the stunning heat, we started to drag our bags toward the sandstone building.

“Oh no, Fathers,” she said. “You aren't in
this
building.”

That's the worst thing you can hear when visiting a religious community. The translation is: we don't have room for you in the main house, so we're going to put you somewhere far worse. As a novice working in Kingston, Jamaica, I had heard those words and was escorted to a room with a (functioning) wasps' nest on the ceiling. During my time in East Africa I had heard those words on a visit to a religious community in northern Uganda and was led to a mud hut where fat bugs crashed angrily against my mosquito netting throughout the night. As a Jesuit who has taken a vow of poverty, one makes do, but one is also occasionally disappointed.

Sister Télesfora pointed across the driveway. “You're staying
there
.” I peered at the glorious white edifice gleaming in the blinding sunlight.

“Really?” I said. “What is it?”

“Our new hotel,” she said with a smile. George looked at me, goggle-eyed. We lugged our suitcases past the fountain and into an air-conditioned lobby furnished with overstuffed white leather couches. From behind a
luxe
wooden desk, a woman purred, “Welcome. Your names?”

Surely this was a mistake. Weren't we staying in a simple Franciscan hostel? But in a few seconds she handed us our card keys. As George and I wheeled our bags down the carpeted hallway, I almost laughed. When I saw my room I
did
laugh: two comfortable beds, a pristine bathroom, a TV, and, through the huge windows, a panoramic view of the Sea of Galilee.

After George and I compared rooms we met up with our host. “Sister,” I said. “These rooms are . . .
incredible
.”

“What did you expect?” she asked.

“Well, you're Franciscans,” I said, “so I expected something . . . simpler.”

“Father,
we
are Franciscans,” she said. “Our
guests
are not!”

Later that afternoon, overwhelmed with emotion, I instinctively opened up the Gospels to the passage in Mark where Jesus had first called the fishermen along the shores of Galilee. “Follow me,” he said, and he said it right here. At that moment the Gospels felt more grounded, more tangible, more real than ever before. I looked out at the pale blue sea, barely able to believe what I was seeing.

A tiny red cupola in the distance looked familiar. Then I remembered it from the back cover of Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's
The Holy Land
. What was it? I fished my book out of my luggage. The caption read: “The Greek Orthodox Church at Capernahum, on the Sea of Galilee, with the Golan heights in the background.”

Capernaum! I'm not embarrassed to say that I wept upon realizing that I was looking at Jesus's hometown, perhaps from one of the vantage points from which he once saw it. There it was, right on the water. Of course it would be by the shoreline—that's why Peter the fisherman made his home there. Or rather, here.

Jesus was here
, I kept thinking.
Jesus was here.

T
HE DAILY BREAKFASTS AT
the Franciscan hostel deserve comment. They were gargantuan. Each morning George and I walked from our hotel to the modest monastery building where the sisters and their staff covered two long tables with local delicacies: dates, figs, olives, fruits of all sorts, cereals for the Americans, yogurts, cheeses, toast, croissants, pastries, cookies, biscuits, coffees, teas, and juices, as well as meats, including a mysterious ham. Since there was no lunch, George and I consumed breakfasts meant to last us until dinner.

One day, we journeyed to Kursi, the traditional site of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac. In that story, Jesus drives a “legion” of demons from a possessed man into a nearby herd of pigs, which immediately rush into the sea and drown.
¹
Over breakfast the next day George said, “This ham is delicious. Do you think it's from one of the Gerasene pigs?”

Today our destination, however, was Nazareth. Fortified with enough food for the rest of the day (if not the rest of the week), we took our supplies to the car: several bottles of water, our Avis map, the Murphy-O'Connor guidebook, smartphones, cameras, and a Bible. Back in the States, George and I had promised ourselves that we would begin each day with a prayer and a reading from Scripture that corresponded with our destination. Today we read the story of the Annunciation, Mary's dramatic encounter with the Angel Gabriel, in our car, its air conditioner humming.

We had an easy time reaching Nazareth—just an hour or so from Capernaum. En route we passed a small sign for the town of Nain, where Jesus raised from the dead the only son of a widow from that town.
²
It was harder to find our way to the center of Nazareth, as the signs dwindled inside the city limits. Also, any directional signs bearing pictograms of a church (a black triangle topped with a cross) were usually defaced with black spray paint.

In Jesus's day Nazareth was a backwater town, with perhaps only two to four hundred residents, what one scholar called an “insignificant hamlet.”
³
Its less than impressive status gave rise to the Apostle Nathanael's sarcastic retort when he learned where the Messiah was from: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
⁴

But though the town is not mentioned in the Old Testament, it may have enjoyed something of a religious reputation in Jesus's day. Some residents in Nazareth were “Nazoreans,” a clan who claimed to be descendants of King David. Some scholars surmise that both words come from the Hebrew
netzer
, meaning “shoot of.” Thus, the townsfolk may have considered themselves “offshoots of Jesse,” David's father. Nazareth itself means “village of the shoot.”
⁵
So it was an insignificant, even laughable, place to outsiders, but perhaps to those living there, a holy place, associated with the coming of the Messiah.

Today Nazareth is a bustling, hilly city. Homes and shops and churches and mosques are jammed next to one another, and small cars buzz through the narrow streets at alarming speeds.

Now populated by a mix of Muslims and Christians, the town is dominated by the gray cupola of the Basilica of the Annunciation, which stands atop a steep hill. Completed in 1969, the basilica is vast. Inside the upper church, a high ceiling is supported by crisscrossing concrete pillars; on the walls are colorful depictions of Mary donated by some two dozen nations, a testimony to the widespread appeal of Jesus's mother. The current church is built on the ruins of several older churches, the most ancient dating from around the fourth century.

Today the lower church is centered on a small limestone grotto that was crowded with tourists on the day we visited. This is the Grotto of the Annunciation, the limestone cave where the Angel Gabriel is said to have appeared to Mary, to announce the birth of Jesus.

On a small altar in the grotto is a unique inscription to which Father Doan had alerted us before we left Jerusalem. It's hard to see unless you look carefully, for the altar is behind an iron grille. Many artistic representations of the Annunciation include one of two phrases: either
Ave Maria
, “Hail, Mary,” from the angel's first words to Mary in the Gospel of Luke, or
Verbum caro factum est
, “The Word was made flesh,” from John's Gospel. Here at the site, however, the inscription reads:
Verbum caro hic factum est
, “The Word was made flesh
here.
”

I gripped the cold iron grille and prayed, wondering if the words to Mary, so familiar to Christians, were first uttered here. Or somewhere very near here.

Despite the important fact that Jesus lived for some thirty years in Nazareth and is frequently referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth,” what is celebrated in the main church in Nazareth is not his young adulthood, or his career as a carpenter here, or even his later preaching in the town synagogue (something that would get him kicked out of town), but something else: his mother, and how she discovers that she will give birth.

Perhaps the people behind the naming of the basilica understood that as important as these other incidents in Jesus's life were, something else was equally important: the strange circumstances of his birth. Our pilgrimage into the life of Jesus, then, begins with a look at his mother. And with the story of her encounter with the divine.