Galilee, Jesus’ Home Base

          The Bible records that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  This is a town that is about an hour south of Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people.  Jerusalem itself is about halfway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River valley.  If you ever want to find it on a map, find the Jordan, follow it to where it intersects with the Dead Sea, that go west.  Jerusalem is perpendicular to the line of the Jordan.

          Why is this important?  History is said to be shaped by the geography in which it takes place.  And this includes the formation of the gospels.  We need to understand that around Jerusalem was the ‘heartland’ of the Jewish people.  It sits upon the remnants of what was the inheritance of Judah among the Twelve tribes.  It is ruled on behalf of the Romans by a ‘client king’, known to us as Herod from the gospels.

          It was in this territory where Jesus was welcomed by John the Baptizer.  John was baptizing at the Jordan River, welcoming people from the Judean countryside and from Jerusalem itself.  This same territory.  This is where Jesus is baptized by water and the Spirit, the water from John and the Spirit from God.

          From here, Jesus is sent by the Spirit into the desert.  He probably went south, toward the Negev.  As one travels further south through the land that makes up the modern nation of Israel, the more desert-like are the conditions.  Now, in Mark, this time is summed up very quickly. “…he was in the desert forty days being tempted by Satan.  He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.”

          From here, we have no clear sense of where Jesus was until John the Baptizer was arrested.  In that moment, Jesus went north.  To travel in the Promised Land at the time of Jesus, in the southern regions was desert.  This desert extended west to Egypt across the Negev and east across the nation of Jordan into Saudi Arabia.  Coming up from the Negev is the Judean countryside, an area that is ‘feast or famine’.  When the rain is sufficient, it is a bounty.  When not, it is an extension of the desert.  It rises into the hill country, with Jerusalem at the head of those hills.

          Keep going north, one enters the hill country of Samaria.  It was said that armies seeking each other in this territory could literally march past each other around opposite sides of one of the hills.  This area was politically and culturally separated from the area of Jerusalem.  The Samaritans and the Jews were at odds with one another, sharing the same religion, but convinced the other was ‘doing it wrong’. 

          When it led to strife, it is compared to the Civil War in the US, where there was such hatred between north and south, between children of the same nation.

          The gospel records Jesus making specific excursions into Samaria, but when John was arrested, when the politics around Jerusalem got a little warm for those connected to John, Jesus went even further north.  There is no clear highway through Samaria, but rather alongside.  One could go up the coast or up the Jordan Valley.  The Valley seems to be the preferred route.  That took one to the Sea of Galilee, the northern terminus of the Jordan, and into the Jezreel Valley, far enough north with that much more rain that it was swamp laden.

          This is where Jesus grew up, in a little town called Nazareth.  He knew the space, spoke with that accent.  Mark records that Jesus recruited his first disciples from among the fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, preached and did miracles at the synagogue in Capernaum-on the shore of that Sea.  This area was connected to Judea as a place of ‘proper’ Jews according to the leadership in Jerusalem.  It was also under a different political authority, although the people would still travel to Jerusalem for the festivals as that was the center of Jewish worship at the time.

          For Jesus, it was his home.  It never carried the threats to his health and safety that Jerusalem did.  He was out of reach of the political and religious authorities.  So after John’s arrest, it was a natural place for him to go until he was ready for his own challenge to Jerusalem. 

          It is where Jesus will develop his ministry and his base of followers.