If it’s Tuesday, We Must be Northbound

Dearest Rachel –

It’s always a scramble for us to get out of our first hotel in Israel, as you remember.  Not only is it our best accommodations of the trip (not to condemn the other locations, but how do you top a suite overlooking the Mediterranean?  This is as close as we get to a vacation resort, which, as I said the other day, is not what the trip is even supposed to be), but we’re still trying to recover from the flights and the time changes.  It doesn’t help that the time from when breakfast opens up to when we have to be completely packed up and on the bus is barely an hour. 

In order to get to breakfast and back in time to properly pack up, I had to do something that I hadn’t done in ages – set my alarm, and actually need it.  Even so, it was a near run thing to get down to the lobby in time for departure.  I’m sure you would have appreciated it; you always wanted to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of each place we would stay.  At the same time, when you’re running about, trying to get everything together in order to go, there’s not a lot of enjoyment to get out of a place; you’re too busy doing stuff to pay attention to what’s around you.

We’re not the last ones to make it down; we encounter several others on our way down on the elevator (and a few that couldn’t fit in our car).  But most of the others seem to already be in the lobby, having come straight up from breakfast. 

We have a large enough group on this tour to require two buses, broken down between the flight groups.  Yael turns out to be the guide on our bus, and she starts out by pointing out the usual facts and figures about the size of Israel, in terms of area and population.  She seems subdued in comparison to our last time here, but let’s admit that a lot of awful things have happened since we were here last.  As far as I understand it, there’s not an Israeli who hasn’t lost someone close to them through and since October seventh – and not just in the sense of ‘every countryman is my brother.’  It’s a small country, after all.

Well, not all that small; despite being some forty kilometers north of Tel Aviv, there’s still a traffic jam headed south to the city; everyone who lives here is headed off to work. Fortunately, we’re headed north, toward Caesarea Maratima.

Yael reminds us that, while the city of Caesarea Maratima doesn’t get a lot of mention in scripture (save for the book of Acts), it was an important seat of government under Roman rule.  Built up from a tiny fishing village into a royal retreat by Herod the Great, it eventually became the provincial capital of Judea by the time his grandson, Herod Agrippa, died onstage at the amphitheater here.

By comparison, our next stop at Tel Megiddo is mentioned in both testaments, as well as ancient writings from Egypt, Assyria and others.  And, of course, there’s the fact that it overlooks the valley where the great and final battle is supposed to be fought that will mark the end of all days.

These days It’s hard to think of a single battle being decisive on a global scale.  It’s also strange to think of a battle involving actual armies of people, now that we have drones and bombs that can do all the fighting from a safe distance.  The only folks who truly suffer are those that live in the places where these drone and bombs get sent; everyone else involved is hardly affected.  The idea that individuals will march to their collective deaths, either drowning in six feet of blood or supplying the blood to drown their comrades, is an alien concept at this point.  But if God says it will happen that way, who am I to demand answers about the how and why?

After stopping for lunch (which I hadn’t planned for, but which I really should know most people still need to eat), we drove past Nazareth on to Sepphoris, the remains of a Roman city that was in the process of being rebuilt during Jesus’ time – and, Joseph being in the construction business, he would very likely have done a lot of work here, taking his Son along to teach Him the trade.

After we make our way fairly quickly through Sepphoris (because we only have so much light to sightsee in, and it’s starting to run out already), there’s some discussion between the guide and the pastors as to whether or not to stop at Mount Precipice, the supposed site where the people of Nazareth gathered to throw Jesus off for making His claims to divinity.  In fairness to them, they had been told from the day the tablets were handed down from Sinai that the Lord was one; for a human – especially one they all knew perfectly well – to claim that He was one with God would assuredly constitute blasphemy.  However, the fact that He somehow escaped them would suggest the hand of God was with Him.

At the same time, this particular mountain seems awfully far away from the city proper where He made such an outrageous claim.  It would seem like a long way to go for a crime of passion such as this; if they carried Him this far, it would have given them time to consider what Rome might do about such an unsanctioned execution, and let Him go.  But that’s not what the Bible says happened; He is described as having escaped somewhat mysteriously, almost miraculously, so this seems an unlikely place for this to happen.

Still, once you get an idea like this being the location, it’s hard to change people’s minds. In any case, it’s such a brief moment in His life that it’s all but impossible to find evidence one way or another as to where it happened.

And this is the sort of busy day we can expect to be dealing with for the next week or so. At this point, I’m already grateful that we’re here during the late autumn, when we only have so many hours of sunlight; I don’t know if this is a sustainable pace for me.

With that being said, honey, I’d appreciate it if you could keep an eye on me, and wish me luck… because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it.