Holy Land Pilgrimage Day 1

Cana, Nazareth and Mount Tabor with 116 playmates determined to have a good time. It was very interesting to think through the implications of Jesus being a Northerner from this rough terrain, a land of figs rather than grapes.
The profound gap between Jesus’ Galilean mores, and that of the Southern establishment in Judaea falls into sharp relief.

The things that don’t change, like the landscape, are making more of an impression on me than the formulaic holy place/ souvenir stuff. So is thinking about the scale of the society that lies behind the gospels. In a village of about 200 (as Nazareth was) it is more than understandable that people reacted to his proclamation of Isaiah 61 in Luke 4 as they did, by running him out of town. These were people who had lived in a tiny village (by our standards) with his family for thirty years; they had presumably heard his words to death, if not clipped him round the ear in their time, some of them. So the point has to be something about the depth of Incarnation in a small society where evrybody knew everyone else’s business, and improbability of it being transfirgured on a mountain top.