Dashing through biblical history

Sea of Galilee, 6 December 2010

Along with being a day of much bus travel we also spanned several different eras of biblical history.

Qumran in the rain held a sort of primitive mystery – the caves in the rocks still clearly visible and the first of the rain making it possible to image the flash floods that cascade down the hillsides meaning that the caves are now closed off to visitors. The preservation of the site was amazing – I was glad to have spotted the parts we did in the citadel in Amman as there is barely any of the scrolls on display here. The existence must have been quite ascetic – even if there were women here as they think now (having found their bones). The landscape is steep (yet again) and vast and except for the coach loads of tourists quite silent and I can imagine that it is very dry even with the Dead Sea just a few hundred metres away. The caves have been adapted over time but so much of the story of Qumran has been found that the place seems somehow alive with the era. I particularly liked the displays of what the collection of dinner bowls and plates looked like.

The place of the desert in the Christian story is really significant – the place of wilderness, the place of retreat, the place of stripping bare before God, the place of finding sustenance even in the most inhospitable of spaces, a place for silence – one of the desert fathers tells the story of a pilgrim having made the long journey out from Jerusalem asking coming to ask the father for just one word – they being men and women of few words – the abbas word to him was "flee". The pilgrim protested but look at where I am where else is there to flee – you must flee this said the abba putting his finger to his lips.

The other thing I noticed looking out into the desert wilderness was the notion of their being many streams in the desert – the ground has little ability to absorb and moisture so when it rains it literally runs in streams down the surface of the slopes in the wadis below. Often in our minds when we think of streams in the desert we see one single stream, but here there are many many streams crisscrossing their way down the hill. So too with the spiritual life – the probably won't be one big stream but times of rain will eventually come bringing multiple streams – the only evidence of them in the dry times in the tress growing along the stream line down towards the bottom of the valley. A voice cries out "In the wilderness prepare the way of the lord, make straight in the desert the highways for our God" Of course this has been taken rather too literally and there is much construction of new apartheid highways taking place nearby…the desert must also be a place of resistance as well as a place of renewal.

Jericho Tell is closed because of the dangers of the dig and its lack of maintenance – there's such disparity between the different sites and which ones are valued and which ones not. But we ate lunch in a town that has been inhabited continuously for 10000 years which isn't a bad innings!

One of the tricky things here is the multiplicity of places each claiming that things happened – Andrew our course leader uses this great phrases – this is where the church remembers as we drove into the Galilee region where every stone might tell a story it has been a useful phrase to remember.

Jordan River here looks slightly wider and with a bit more water – we couldn't approach the river where we had on the Jordan side as it's a military zone on the Israeli side – but they have very conveniently made a location further up the Jordan before it flows into the Sea of Galilee where groups can come and be immersed in the Jordan river. As mentioned on facebook – it was amusing to find the place looks incredibly Australian with the beginnings of an algal bloom on the water and Eucalyptus trees along the banks making the experience slightly surreal – it felt like being at home rather than half way around the world. I t also struck me that as part of the baptism service we ask people to resist evil – that line has never jumped out at me quite so much as it did here today.