In no city did He make a long stay. Jesus was a wanderer, such a man as is called a vagabond by the pot-bellied and sedentary citizen rooted to his threshold. His life is an eternal journey. Before that other Jew who was condemned to immortality by one condemned to death, He is the true Wandering Jew. He was born on a journey. Still a baby at the breast, He was carried along the sun-parched road to Egypt; from Egypt He came back to the waters and greenness of Galilee. From Nazareth He often went to Jerusalem for the Passover. The voice of John called Him to the Jordan: an inner voice drove Him out into the desert; and after the forty days of hunger and the Temptation, He began His restless vagabond life from city to city, from village to village, from mountain to mountain, across Palestine. Most often we find Him in Galilee, in Capernaum, Chorazin, in Cana, in Magdala, in Tiberias, but often He crosses Samaria to sit down near the well of Sychar. We find Him from time to time in the Tetrarchy of Philip at Bethsaida, at Gadara, at Cæsarea, also at Gerasa in the Perea of Herod Antipas. In Judah He often stops at Bethany, a few miles away from Jerusalem, or at Jericho, but He did not shrink from journeying outside the limits of the old kingdom and from going down among the Gentiles. We find Him in Phœnicia, in the regions of Tyre and Sidon, and in Syria, if the transfiguration took place on the summit of Mt. Hermon. After the resurrection He appears in Emmaus, on the banks of His lake of Tiberias and finally at Bethany near Lazarus’ house, where He leaves His friends forever.
He is the traveler without rest, the wanderer with no home, the wayfarer for love’s sake, the voluntary exile in His own country; He says Himself that He has not a stone on which to lay His head, and it is true that He has no bed where He may lie down at night, nor a room that He can call His own. His real home is the road which takes Him along with His first friends in search of new friends. His bed is the furrow in a field, the bench of a boat, the shadow of an olive tree. Sometimes He sleeps in the houses of those who love Him, but only for short periods.
In the early days we find Him most often at Capernaum, His journeys began there and ended there. Matthew calls it “His city.” Situated on the caravan route which from Damascus crosses Iturea and goes towards the sea, Capernaum had become little by little a commercial center of some importance. Artisans, bargainers, brokers, and shopkeepers had come there to stay. Men of finance—as flies swarm on rotten pears—had come there; publicans, excise men and other fiscal tools. The little settlement, half-rustic, half a fishing village, had become a mixed and composite city where the society of the times—even to soldiers and prostitutes—was fully represented. And yet Capernaum, lying along the lake, freshened by the air from the near-by hills and by the breeze from the water, was not a prey to stagnation and decay like the Syrian cities and Jerusalem. There were still peasants who went out to their fields every day, and fishermen who every day went forth to their boats. Good, poor, simple, warm-hearted people who talked of other matters than money and gear. Among them a man could draw his breath freely.
On the Sabbath Jesus went to the Synagogue. Everybody had the right to enter there, to read aloud and also to expound what had been read. It was a plain house, a bare room where people went with their friends and brothers to reason together and dream of God.
Jesus stood up, had some one give Him one of the scrolls of the Scriptures (more often the Prophets than the Law) and recited in a tranquil voice two, three, four or more verses. Then He commenced to speak with a bold and forceful eloquence which put the Pharisees to confusion, touched sinners, won the poor, and enchanted women.
Suddenly the old text was transfigured, became transparent, belonged to their own times; it seemed a new truth, a discovery they had made, a discourse heard for the first time; the words withered by antiquity, dried up by repetition, took on life and color; a new sun gilded them one by one, syllable by syllable; fresh words coined at that moment, shining before their eyes like an unexpected revelation.
POOR PEOPLE
Nobody in Capernaum could remember having heard such a Rabbi. The Sabbaths when Jesus spoke, the Synagogue was full, the crowd overflowed out on the street, everybody was there who could come. The gardener comes, who for that day had left his spade, and no longer turned his water wheel to irrigate the green rows of his garden, and the smith, the good country smith, black with smoke and dust every day, but on the Sabbath washed, neatly dressed, his face still a little dusky, although scrubbed and rinsed in many waters like his hands, with his beard combed and anointed with cheap ointment (but still perfumed like a rich man’s beard), the smith all whose days are spent before the fire, sweaty and dirty except this day which is the Sabbath, when he comes to the Synagogue to hear the ancient word of the Ancient of Days, the God of his fathers. He comes devoutly, but he comes too because his family, his friends, his neighbors come there, and he finds them all together, and he comes also because the day is long (all that long holiday without any work, without any hammer in his hand, without the pincers) and in Capernaum there is nothing to do on Sabbaths except go to the Synagogue. The mason comes, he who has worked on this little house of the Synagogue and made it small because the Elders—good, God-fearing people, but inclined to be stingy—did not wish to spend too much. The mason still feels his arms a little numb and lame from his six days’ labor, no longer keeps track of the stones which he has laid in courses and the trowels full of mortar which he has thrown between the stones during the week. The mason puts on his new clothes to-day and sits down on the ground, he who on all other days stands upright, active, watchful so that the work may go well, and the employer be satisfied; the good mason too has come to the house which seems to him partly his own.
The fishermen have come too, the young and the old, both of them with faces tanned by the sun and with eyes half-shut from the constant glare of sunlight reflected by the water. (The old man is handsomer because of the contrast of his white hair and white beard with his weather-beaten and wrinkled face.) The fishermen have turned over their boats on the sand, have left them tied to a stake, have spread the nets on the roof and have come to the Synagogue, although they are not used to being within walls and perhaps continue to hear a confused murmur of water lapping about the bow.
The peasants of the neighboring countryside are here too, prosperous farmers who have put on a tunic as good as anybody’s, who are satisfied with the harvest almost ready for the scythe. They do not mean to forget God who brings the grain to a head and makes the grape-vine to blossom. There are shepherds come in to town that morning, shepherds and goat-herds with the smell of their flocks still on them, shepherds who live all the week in the mountain-pastures without seeing a soul, without exchanging a word, alone with their quiet animals peacefully grazing on the new grass.