esus walked and walked! He was on the move. Jesus took risks on the road and did things that others wouldn’t do. He interacted with people whom he was supposed to ignore and hate. As he walked he explored the world around him and related to all kinds of people. Jesus learned as he walked.

Jesus called his disciples to walk with him. “Come, follow me. “Come, learn with me.” The disciples learned many of the lessons of the kingdom on the way through the fields, along the path, on the slopes of mountains. By answering Jesus’ call to “come and follow” we commit to walking with Him, to learn as his disciples did. We commit to move to explore and relate with the world around us.

“Like Jesus we need to move in ways that allow for
unexpected experiences and encounters to occur in our lives.”

Many of the interactions that Jesus had only happened because he was on the move, walking and talking with people he met—the Samaritan woman, Zacchaeus, the Roman Centurion, the blind, lepers, the unclean. Like Jesus we need to move in ways that allow for unexpected experiences and encounters to occur in our lives. We need to move in ways that are not always the most comfortable, the most direct route to where we are going. By moving in life we allow for the Holy Spirit to move in our lives.

While you don’t need to go far, you can take journeys alone or in a group that will change the way you understand Jesus, the world, the kingdom, the good news, and yourself. For the participants in Yella 2008, a program organized by Mennonite Church Eastern Canada and Mennonite Central Committee Ontario for a group of 22 young adults, moving meant interacting with Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the midst of conflict in Israel/Palestine. It also meant volunteering and learning through First-Century Nazareth Village. And it meant walking The Jesus Trail to explore the political, cultural, and religious context that Jesus grew up and ministered in.

Allan Reesor-McDowell, coordinator and co-leader of the Yella program.

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atthew 9:35 states that Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the Kingdom. In Mark 6:7-12, Jesus sent his disciples out on foot in pairs, instructing them to take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts. He wanted them to travel light, rely on the hospitality of a diversity of neighbors, and spread the good news throughout the land.

Since Jesus and his followers were not of the class of wealthy Roman diplomats and military leaders, but largely lower-class fishermen and subsistence farmers, they traveled by foot. Walking between the towns they hiked along fields and valleys, up mountains and cliffs, and through risky areas of political instability. Jesus’ travels extended at least 50 miles east to west and 150 miles north to south through present-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

“Jesus was born…when the Romans
were creating a network of land and sea routes
used for transportation and communication.”

On the journey, Jesus and his disciples carried a staff for protection against wild animals and thieves lurking in rugged hill country and insecure border regions. The main ancient land route that passed close to Nazareth is called the Via Maris, connecting with Damascus to the east. This route served as one of the major thoroughfares through first-century Palestine between the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Jesus was born during the period of the Roman Empire’s expansion throughout the Mediterranean region, when the Romans were creating a network of land and sea routes used for transportation and communication. This road system was a network of over 63,000 miles of paved roads, connecting centers of government, culture, and power stretching from present-day Spain to Iran.

Less than four miles from the small village of Nazareth (pop. 200-400 in the first century) was Sepphoris, one of Herod Antipas’ capitals. It boasted a population of 30,000 including many of the social and religious elite, and had the reputation as the ornament of the Galilee. Although scripture does not mention Sepphoris by name, it is likely that Jesus was aware of its existence, possibly as a “city on a hill cannot be hidden,” easily visible from the ridges of Nazareth.

As Jesus and his followers walked and talked, his movement spread and grew. When we walk with Jesus we begin to realize that the Kingdom of God is not tied to specific places or people, but is an invitation that is open to all. Walking with Jesus, it is possible to imagine anew the beauty of a world without borders, restriction of movement, or division.

David Landis, Cofounder of the Jesus Trail.

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esus taught on his feet. His disciples (learners) never used a classroom, taking notes. No syllabi, schedules, quizzes, textbooks, or papers. No grades, degrees, tuition, or grants. They walked to learn, following Jesus from one village to another, up the ravines, over the rocky ridges dotted with grazing sheep, through vineyards with small watch towers, along small fields with growing grain. They would arrive in another village where friends and distant relatives would offer food and a cool drink. They rested in the shade, discussing the journey, the world, the future. They could also see that Jesus sometimes grew tired, but still ministered to the sick, encouraged the desperate, challenged the arrogant. To walk with Jesus was to learn about the kingdom of God, and the word spread.

Disciples of Jesus can do the same today. Not only is it possible to walk to and from the villages of the gospels, but some insights about Jesus and the kingdom can only be learned walking with Jesus.

“There is no classroom on earth
that offers what Nazareth Village does
in terms of making the world of Jesus understandable.”

With the development of the “Jesus Trail” that begins in Nazareth and links Jesus’ hometown by foot to the nearby city of Sepphoris and on to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth Village becomes part of a larger part of the Gospel story. The learner is connected with Jesus’ world, not by air-conditioned tourist bus, but by a dusty path. Like the disciples, you sweat under the intense sun, rest in the shade, stumble on the stones, and meet strangers and locals doing the same. You can actually behold the lilies of the field, the fowls of the air. You can feel discipleship with your feet.

Dr. Linford Stutzman is leader of Eastern Mennonite University’s (Virginia) Cross-cultural Study Program in the Middle East.

Photos by David Landis, The Jesus Trail, www.jesustrail.com.

here is something about the (reconstructed) first-century synagogue in Nazareth that raises strong feelings. The evangelists are drawn there, as are so many after them, to the memory of Jesus in his hometown synagogue, so it is especially interesting that Matthew, Mark, and Luke waste so little time in moving Jesus away again from Nazareth. For them Nazareth as a place of origins does not seem to be a place of ministry. Not like Capernaum (Lk. 4:23)! So what is the significance of Nazareth, with its storied synagogue, and what difference does Jesus’ geographic relocation make to his memory?

Jesus…of Nazareth

In the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Nazareth is clearly Jesus’ place of origin. “From Nazareth” grounds him geographically in Mark’s story (1:9) and defines him from first (1:24) to last (16:6) as one who shares intimately the human condition. This Jesus is as located as you and I. In Matthew, Nazareth is the occasion of prophetic fulfillment—Joseph moves his family to Nazareth so that “what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled...” (2:23; also 4:13-16 and 21:11). In Luke, Nazareth figures as the privileged location of the Lord’s favor, first with Mary (1:26) and then, more emphatically, with the child Jesus (2:40,51).

Jesus out of place

But if Nazareth is the place of Jesus’ childhood, it is just as clearly not the place of Jesus’ work. Jesus has already left Nazareth when he first appears in Mark 1:9 for instance. When he returns from the wilderness it is not to Nazareth that he goes but more ambiguously “into Galilee” (1:14-15). Jesus is called “the Nazarene” in the synagogue at Capernaum (1:24) on the road outside of Jericho (10:47) and in Jerusalem (14:67; 16:6) precisely because he is no longer in Nazareth! (Compare for instance what he is called when he returns home, Mk 6:2-3) Matthew is more interested than Mark in the reason for Jesus’ departure from Nazareth: as before Matthew finds in Jesus’ geographic relocation the fulfillment of scripture (4:12-16; cf. 2:13-15, 19-23). But it is only with Luke that Jesus’ departure finds full theological development (4:16-30).

For Luke, Jesus’ displacement from the Nazareth synagogue is programmatic—which is to say it anticipates quite literally Jesus’ special interest in the outsider. Jesus announces his intention to leave “his own country” in Luke because such is of the essence of his ministry. This is what it means to be a prophet that is acceptable/dektos to God. (By translating dektos as “accepted,” the NRSV seems to presume that Jesus has the acceptance of his home town in view; but the Greek word refers everywhere else in the New Testament (and indeed, only verses earlier, in Luke 4:19) to acceptance by God. Cf. Acts 10:35; II Cor. 6:2; Phil. 4:18.) Jesus leaves according to Luke because only in leaving the security of his own country, on the example of Elijah and Elisha, does he fulfill his call.

Jesus by the sea

The effect of his homecoming is abrupt: Jesus of Nazareth relocates to the sea. The tendency is to see in Jesus’ departure from Nazareth an embrace of itinerancy. Luke, at least, suggests a preaching tour of sorts “through cities and villages” (4:42-44) but the presence of the lake region is striking even here (4:31-37, 38-41; 5:1-11; etc). The lake and its surroundings are more pronounced in Matthew—where Jesus makes Capernaum his “own city” (9:1)—and especially in Mark, where the sea is soon the hub of Jesus’ Galilean ministry. In the fishing villages of the Kinneret he first assembles a following (1:16-20). By the sea he heals (1:21-28,29-31,32-34; 2:1-12), on both sides (5:1-20), on the sea he teaches (4:1-9, 35-41; 6:45-52) and from the sea he begins and ends his several tours of the surrounding territory to the north and east of the lake (5:1-21; 7:24-31; 8:27).

After he leaves Nazareth, Jesus is placed in the environs of the Kinneret more often than anywhere else, apart from Jerusalem. Jesus’ relocation invites all manner of historical speculation: Was it to take advantage of the regional trade networks that he moved from interior to lakeshore, or did he want to be nearer the relative safety of the border of Antipas’ Galilee? Did he find in the fishermen of the Kinneret a people with sufficient social network to sponsor his movement, or was it their physical mobility that proved attractive?

But Jesus’ relocation also makes different the textual memory of Jesus:

1. Jesus is remembered at the edge. The text of Mark in particular remembers Jesus at work in the political margins of Galilee, in a borderland defined more by interaction with “the other side,” to which Jesus goes repeatedly, than by reference to Sepphoris and Tiberias, which the Gospels, at least, studiously avoid. If we take seriously Jesus’ frequent and mostly routine crossings of the lake, we remember Jesus in a zone of contact where interaction with the “other” (especially in the region of the Decapolis) is never far away.

2. Jesus occupies this interface of west and east as miracle worker as much as wordsmith. This is not to suggest too much of a distinction. The crowds in Mark, at least, can call Jesus’ first exorcism a “new teaching” now with authority (Mk. 1:27). But the textual memory that places Jesus in the lake basin also makes ‘the miraculous’ a constitutive part of his identity. This is no surprise, perhaps, but in the borderland of the lake region the miraculous assumes particular political weight—it is what stirs the crowds, threatens the religious leaders and, in Mark, first brings Jesus to the attention of Galilee’s political ruler (6:14). To remember Jesus by the sea, therefore, is to remember a Jesus who crosses social and political boundaries not only in parables but perhaps even more in the act of touching the leper (1:41) and commissioning the demoniac (5:19).

3. From the perspective of the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus’ geographic practice embodies his announcement of an inclusive kingdom oriented toward the outcast. When he moves self-consciously from center to periphery, Jesus enacts the vision he shares with Isaiah of a kingdom extended to the poor and the captive, the blind, and the oppressed—precisely to those consigned to the social periphery. It is Jesus’ vision of this kingdom that calls him out of Nazareth, just as it finally calls him away from the sea to the city of Jerusalem. It is a vision which thrives in the interface of the lake region but just as surely begins in the synagogue in Nazareth.

Rene Baergen is a doctoral student at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto. During the spring of 2008 he spent time at Nazareth Village and the Upper Galilee region reflecting on the importance of local geography in understanding the life and teachings of Jesus.