Surprises, travelling and digging

See below for an actual PHOTO in today's blog. Yes, no kidding!

Yesterday, Saturday, I had a couple bouts of weakness verging on nausea as we were travelling around the southern Galilee by bus. Thankfully neither of them amounted to much, or detracted from the joy I'm experiencing on this trip and through this work.

It's a perfect combination of elements, maybe not for everyone but certainly for me. Hard physical work that challenges the body and gives it a good workout. Multi-faceted learning about cultures, peoples, and practices buried deep in the past. Expanding links with the Christian community, including both the brothers and sisters working on this Concordia team and those who built this North-East Church and worshipped in it centuries ago. And, most powerfully of all, a meditative and deepening connection with Christ himself.

I experienced this in a pretty concentrated way yesterday when we visited the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth and observed and listened in on a Mass in progress in a small chapel on the main floor, which is built right atop the ruins of a Crusader-era church. This modern church was masterfully designed, integrating ancient elements into its own spacious and beautiful layout; the consonance of the architecture both old and new was undoubtedly part of what moved me so much. More than that though, the liturgy too was a vehicle for faith, as its rhythms and intonations--even in some eastern-European language I didn't recognize--associated me, a mere bystander, with the community that was actually taking part. Maybe it was the combination of all of those elements--the modern church and its worshippers, doing the same kinds of things there in that place where other people had worshipped centuries ago--that built up to a spiritual peak, but at any rate I was deeply moved for just a bit there, and brought to spontaneous and unexpected prayer. Powerful stuff.

What I'm wondering about now, though, is whether that kind of experience is surprising and unexpected, or not. I can argue it both ways. On the one hand, it's not surprising at all. Here we are in Christ's homeland, after all, seeing the places he saw and mirroring in our own experience most of the elements of daily life that he too was familiar with (climate, topography, vegetation, sights, sounds, etc.). Many people come to Israel expecting and hoping for a deeper spiritual connection with Christ precisely because of these parallels.

On the other hand, though, it does surprise me a little bit to feel more connected to him here than I usually do at home, because I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he is equally present there as here. The title of a recent book by Eugene Peterson and Marva Dawn springs to mind: "Christ Plays in a Thousand Places." The phrase is drawn from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, if memory serves, but regardless its source its sentiment is so true. Christ isn't present here in Israel any more than he is in Canada; Edmonton is just as much "his city" as is Jerusalem. We can all rely on his helping presence at all times, wherever we are--because he's not confined to any particular place or time anymore, but reigns as Lord of all creation, head of the Church and ever-present companion to all of its members until that day finally comes when at last we will see him face to face. I wrote a paper on a topic something like this at seminary, and the comfort of this insight has stuck with me ever since. So no, in this sense it really doesn't make sense to me at all that I--or anyone else--should feel any closer to Christ here than sitting at the kitchen table back home. Know what I mean?

Maybe the reason for this surprising state of affairs is related to something we heard about in a special lecture one night last week. Jonathan Reed, professor of religion at LaVerne University in California and avid integrator of archaeology and the New Testament, gave a talk on "Marble in Israel"--which was a whole lot more stimulating than it sounds! His interest was not so much what marble actually is in geological terms but rather what it is in social terms: namely, any sort of polished and decorative rock that strikes those who see it as being "foreign" or "imported." In these terms, marble ain't just marble, but also granite, alabaster, and several other types of stones as well. All of these, Reed said, communicated to their ancient viewers strong messages about culture, wealth, and power. Buildings clad in them shouted out "Rome!" even though, in geological terms, there was nothing intrinsic to the stone itself that meant anything like that at all.

Do you see where I'm going with this? There's nothing intrinsically different to any of these stones here in Israel--marble, granite, basalt, or limestone--that make them any more closely linked to Jesus than any of the stones back in Canada. Rock is rock and dirt is dirt, and if it comes down to it, we've got much bigger lakes and mountains in Canada than anybody born here in Israel can even dream about. But somehow these particular rocks and dirt, mountains and lakes communicate "Jesus" to us who know him, much more clearly than those we encounter anywhere else. It's not the elements themselves, but the connotations they bear, that give them their special (and in this case spiritual) power.

So Jesus isn't "actually" any more present here than he is at home, no. But because it was these rocks and hills and waters that he lived among, not those at home, we more readily think about him and perceive his presence here than we do at home.

Anyway, very quickly, here's where we went yesterday--the places that prompted all this heavy thinking. First we spent about two hours walking about Bet Shean, which was Hippos' nearest sister-city within the Decapolis, about 40 km south and a bit west of here. It was a much more ancient city than Hippos though, going back at least 3000 years B.C. and including, in its oldest section, at least 15 levels of civilization, one atop the other. Best of all, it's the largest archaeological site in Israel, occupying 120 acres (if I remember right) and including three major intersecting streets from the Roman and Byzantine eras that are still complete with most of their paving and columns. Spectacular! Apart from Pompeii, which is of course preserved in its entirety exactly as it was when Vesuvius buried it in 79 AD, this is the biggest and most splendid ancient city I've ever seen. Even though it's probably a little too far south to have been one of the places that Jesus visited, it sure did help us understand the kind of world he and his companions and followers lived in.

Yours truly, at Bet Shean

From Bet Shean we went to Sepphoris (in Hebrew, Zippori), which is just 6 km north of Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. While he and his parents were living there, Sepphoris was in the process of being rebuilt as a splendid new capital city for Herod Antipas after the death of his father, Herod the Great, in 4 B.C. Hmmm. The fact that the Gospels describe Joseph as a "teknon" (basically a "construction worker") suggests to many that perhaps the practical reason the family moved north from Egypt after Herod's death was so that Joseph could find steady work building this city. Or maybe he helped fill a vacuum in smaller places around Sepphoris itself, when other tradespeople were siphoned off to work on that great project. At any rate, it's hard not to think of some close association between Jesus and Sepphoris, both chronologically and geographically. Again, the city and the village are so close you can easily see the one from the other.

On its own terms too, Sepphoris was great. Its synagogue includes a very famous set of mosaics, so important they're preserved under a new building erected over the ancietn ruins. I was so intrigued with them that I bought a book about them in the gift-shop later. And there are two other splendid sets of mosaics in Sepphoris too, most famously the set that depicts a whole series of scenes associated with the god Dionysius, the god of wine and regeneration who seems to have been regarded as Sepphoris' special patron. These mosaics carpet the floor of a very large triclinium, a "dining-room" for special guests where lengthy and sometimes-raucous entertainments were held. The various panels include something like 1.5 million tessarae (tiny blocks of stone), in 23 colours. Some stones are so small they can scarcely be distinguished from more than a metre away, and all of them are so artistically arranged that one thinks more of a fine-quality oil painting than a bunch of inset stones. Amazing.

The other set of mosaics is in "the Nile House" which is actually an enormous public building with Egypt-themed mosaics in every room, each one more impressive than the last. The craftsmen even had enough of a sense of humour to show, in one panel, a mouse escaping from a predator cougar by running out of the picture--leaving just its back legs and tail visible inside the frame!

After seeing those two cities, Beth Shean and Sepphoris, we rounded out the day by stopping at Nazareth as I described above. Although the modern city has grown to become the biggest city in Galilee, in Jesus' day it was nothing more than a tiny handful of houses--maybe 20 families at most. So our interest in going there wasn't archaeological (there's nothing there!) but rather spiritual, to connect with the events that happened there rather than the buildings or particular places in which they took place. As I said above, it was a great experience all around.

And now today we got back to work on our own dig, Hippos. The downside to today's work is that we lost two guys, Jim Gimbel and Gene Balding, who were re-assigned to help start work in a new square. We missed them a lot! However, we got off to a good start anyway. After last week's grunt-work, levelling off an extra-large square (6m x 6m) down to the depth of about a metre, it was exhilarating to start work on our "deep probe" in the same area. We started this probe by outlining a metre-wide trench running from east to west near the north edge of the square, and excavating the plaster floor that we had dug down to, all the way across the square, last week. The plaster was about 20 cm thick in most places, and hard to chop and scrape through with our turreahs. Once through it though, we shifted to a different mode of work, no longer just hauling away our buckets of fill-dirt for disposal but now sifting each bucket-full to make sure nothing significant was missed. The reason? Anything below the plaster floor had been "sealed" at that level since whenever the floor was made--which makes the objects found below this floor especially valuable in dating that level. Cool! Even though we didn't find anything significant in this area yet, we remain hopeful we will, when we get to spend more time on it tomorrow and in days to come.

The other and even cooler thing we found is a "new" wall--actually an older wall than any we've dealt with in this whole church complex so far. Its top course of stones lay just beneath the plaster floor, running north-south and built of large, well-dressed stones lined up perfectly straight and true. Best of all, its northernmost stone extends beneath (and perpendicular to) the lowest stones in the wall that defines the outer edge of the church-complex. Do you follow? What this means is that this "new" wall is older than the wall of the church-complex, and thus belongs to an earlier structure, atop which the church was built!

Is it maybe one of the walls of a Roman temple? We don't yet know--but it might be, and just that prospect itself energized our whole team as soon as it became clear what we had found. This was exactly what Dr. Schuler was looking for when he decided to have us make this "deep probe" in this area, and here we found it almost immediately on the first day of the work. Super!

And that's probably enough--or more than enough!--for now. We were again blessed with morning clouds that lasted until about 9:30, shielding us from the worst of the heat until late in our work-day. Our 8:00 breakfast was good too: as on most Sundays, the highlight was cold French Toast, in addition to the usual fare of cold eggs, cucumbers and tomatoes, olives, and bread. And the lake was as refreshing as always during my quick dip and clothes-washing, right after lunch. So again, it was a very good day all around.