The
following meditation was written by Doug Hood’s son,
Nathanael Hood, MA, New
York University
“Now
when Jesus heard that John was arrested, he went to Galilee.
He left Nazareth
and settled in Capernaum,
which lies alongside the sea in the area of Zebulun
and Naphtali.”
(Matthew 4:12-13, CEB)
Short
of the Resurrection, think of Jesus’ greatest, most well-known miracles and
there’s a good chance they happened in Capernaum, a tiny fishing village of
about fifteen-hundred people on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was
so small and insignificant that its inhabitants never even bothered building a
wall—invading armies would pass it by, deeming it too unimportant to occupy;
even the Romans ignored it during their ruthless suppression of the Jewish
people during the First Jewish–Roman War (AD 66–73).
Archaeologists speculate that it was cramped and dirty, with several families
living together in the same one-story building with no plumbing or drainage.
Yet it was this nowhere village, only about 40 miles away from his traditional
home in Nazareth, that became Jesus’ de facto base of operations during his
three-year ministry. The Gospel of Matthew even refers to it in its ninth
chapter as “his own city.”
It
was in Capernaum that Jesus found his first four disciples: the fishermen Peter
and Andrew and Zebedee’s two sons, James and John. (Later, Jesus would recruit
Matthew, one of the local tax collectors, as another member of the Twelve.) It
was in its little synagogue that Jesus astonished the people with the authority
of his teaching and cast out an impure spirit possessing one of the worshippers
(Mark 1: 21-27). It was along these dusty streets that Jesus healed the
centurion’s paralyzed servant (Matthew 8:5-13), an astonishing act of
compassion for a gentile living in his country as part of an occupying colonial
force. It was in one of these packed, smelly houses that four friends lifted up
a mud and thatch roof to lower their lame companion for Jesus’ healing (Mark 2:
1-5). It was on these nearby shores of Galilee that Jesus broke five barley
loaves and two fish and fed the five thousand, leaving behind twelve baskets of
leftovers (John 6:13). And it was on a nearby hillside where Jesus preached the
greatest sermon ever known, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).
And
yet, it was also the place that Jesus cursed and condemned for its unbelief.
“And you, Capernaum,” Jesus raged, “will you be honored by being raised up to
heaven? No, you will be thrown down to the place of the dead. After all, if the
miracles that were done among you had been done in Sodom, it would still be
here today.” (Matthew 11:23) One of the only recorded times in any of the
scriptures of Jesus getting angry, and it was towards the city he called home
for years. It wasn’t that the villagers denied the miraculous things Jesus
did—their community was too full of those he’d healed for them to claim that
kind of ignorance. Instead, they refused to see these signs and wonders as
evidence of Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, the Son of God. “Their vision of
the kingdom,” Tom Wright writes, “was all about revolution…violence to defeat
violence. A holy war against unholy warriors. Love your neighbor, hate your
enemy.”i He was simply the wrong kind of redeemer.
We
as believers, much like the people of ancient Capernaum, have our own ideas
concerning God into which we cram all our expectations and prejudices. We use
Jesus as a crutch for our own political and morale agendas, wielding him more
like a weapon than surrendering before him as the Christ. In doing so, we
delude ourselves as powerfully as Capernaum did. We appreciate the miracles but
ignore the miracle-worker; we eat the barley loaves and fish but blow off the
provider; we appreciate the healing but stiff the doctor. As Christians, we
must shield ourselves from such arrogance or risk the same condemnation that
once echoed down to this little seaside village.
Joy,
____________________
Tom
Wright, Matthew for Everyone: Part One
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 133.
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