Visiting Israel

For many years, I resisted the temptation to visit Israel.  I do not know why.  As a young man, I wasn’t particularly interested in travel so that was doubtless part of it, but by no means all.  I was, perhaps, also reacting to the rather romantic view of the ‘Holy Land’ that many I knew who had been there seemed to have of it, talking always about going on pilgrimage rather than on holiday.  Whatever, my first visit was in 1998, coincidentally the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel.  I went only after some heavy arm twisting by two dear friends in my Church at Banchory.

Knowing Israel well themselves and having family there, they were convinced that any self-respecting Christian minister should visit there.  They were right and I was wrong.  Spectacularly wrong!  I had only been there a few days to realize what a difference being there made to everything.  Subsequently, I was to return many times and I now get withdrawal symptoms if I haven’t been for a while.

It is not that I think Jerusalem is a holy city in the way it was before the coming of Jesus - although I do think it is still a significant city.  Nor is it that Jerusalem and Israel still look as they did in Jesus’ time.  I am afraid that unless you have been there you won’t get it, but part of it is perspective: getting a feel for distance, geography, and landscape.

Galilee provides a very good example of what I mean.  I will never forget my reaction seeing the Sea of Galilee for the first time.  It was one of utter amazement at how small it was.  Rather like a large Scottish loch!  I had been brought up with the word Sea of Galilee in my mind and sub-consciously imagined a much bigger lake than it is and not one that you could drive around in a few hours!  It is in fact about 13 miles long and 7.5 miles wide with a circumference of about 32 miles.

Descriptions in the Bible of places using words such as cities, towns, villages, mountains, etc also took on a new meaning.  Capernaum is so small.  Jerusalem in the time of Jesus you could walk around in an afternoon.  I did so.  Even things like population came in to focus.  A place like Capernaum would have had only a population of 2,000 or so; Nazareth probably less.

Does it matter?  Well yes, I think it does.  We need reminding that the world of Jesus was a real and not a pretend one.  I recently read one scholar who, commenting on a passage in St John’s Gospel, said these sort of things happened in ‘John’s story world’.  Now I know what he means and this is a scholar who I know believes that Jesus was very much a real person.  Nevertheless, we can let the world of Jesus become something like a Narnia or Middle-earth, that is, an imaginary kingdom rather than a historical one.  This, I think, is how some scholars really do see the world of the Bible: something created by the Biblical writers themselves and not a real place. 

The trouble is only imaginary things can happen in imaginary worlds!