Abstract
About 6,512 miles from the church where I serve in the southern United States stands a ruined city that lies on the northern shore of great big lake—a lake so big that one might even call it a sea. Now this city (or what’s left of it) is pretty small—the area of whole thing is no more than 13 acres. Most of all that remains of Capernaum is a waist-high maze of dark grey basalt rocks all laid out in a jumbled grid of foundations. Foundations of walls and doorways and courtyards and narrow, curvy little streets.
Nowadays there is a network of aluminum catwalks stretched all over the ruins of that little city, so even though you can’t walk down through those little streets or into those little homes and courtyards, you can peer into them from above. You can study them from a birds-eye view; imagining which room was which, who lived there, what their lives must have been like. Theirs were such close quarters—and in a world so very different from this world from ours.
Standing above the city, and up aways from the shore of the lake, there stands a building that the archaeologists have identified as a synagogue dating somewhere between the second and fifth centuries. The synagogue is made of white limestone, so it’s newer that what lies beneath it—a set of older darker basalt stones like those that make up the rest of the city. (Those older stones, the archaeologists say, may very well have been a synagogue too, and the same one in which Jesus himself preached.) About ninety meters from that synagogue, there’s an extraordinary and sacred place. A landmark that attests to Jesus’s ministry on earth. To see it today, you’ll begin by entering a great big spaceship-shaped church built on large concrete pillars suspended over what looks only like more ruins. And that’s where things get interesting.
You see, that spaceship-shaped church has a glass floor. And if, while worshipping in that church, you look down, you’ll see that it’s built on top of an older church—an octagonal-shaped Byzantine church from the fifth century. If you look further down, you’ll see that the fifth-century Byzantine church was built on top of a fourth-century church, which in turn, was built on top of another worship space—this one dating from the first century. This first-century “church” (although that term wouldn’t be used until some time later) was itself a renovation and an expansion of a very simple and otherwise unremarkable home. A home that figured quite prominently however in our reading today from Mark’s gospel. A home that, in all likelihood, belonged to the apostle Peter!
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We read in the first chapter of Mark that, as soon as they left the synagogue, that Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew. There, Jesus—according to Mark’s gospel—performs his first healing miracle, by healing Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever. And what follows is something extraordinary, for tending to Peter’s fevered mother-in-law is only the beginning for Jesus. What’s more, that little stone basalt house will next serve as an epicenter for the healing and miracle working power of the holy Son of God to be unleashed among man.
Right there, ‘around the door’, we read, the whole city gathered. Around the door came all who were sick. Around the door, came all who were possessed by demons. Around the door, he cured many who were sick with various diseases. Around the door, he cast out many demons but wouldn’t allow them to speak. Right there, around the door of that little stone house, Jesus performs ostensibly more miracles in three verses, than he does in the entirety of John’s Gospel.
Did you know that if you go—today—to that spaceship-shaped church that rises above the ruined city of Capernaum (nowadays it’s called St. Peter’s), and you peer down through its glass floor, past the ruins of the fifth-century church below, past the ruins of the fourth-century church below it, and amid the first-century renovations of a simple fisherman’s home, did you know that it’s still there? And you don’t need be an archaeologist, or an architect, or an engineer to make it out either. Right there, among all those stones, you can see it. . .the simple doorway. It’s still there. The very spot where Jesus himself cured and healed and set free all comers; unmistakably there before your eyes, the very spot where Jesus changed that town forever. A landmark reminding all of us downstream from it that the Jesus story is real.
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As a seminarian, I won a scholarship to visit the Holy Land. The benefactors of that scholarship made their gift with the express hope that those who walked in the footsteps of Jesus would never read the Gospels in the same way again. That the story of Jesus would become more real and more tactile than before. For me, and for a time, it worked. Seeing with my own eyes the stuff of history—the artifacts and topoi of the stories that underpin my life of faith inspired me and caused me to believe in Jesus differently. To know and recall the Jesus of history—not just the Christ of faith.
Even so, the day-to-day life of Christian faith and vocation in the modern world is far removed from the dusty, basalt rock streets of ancient Capernaum. Far removed from stories about fevers and healings and demons. For me—and perhaps for you too—the Christian vernacular prefers abstraction over the gritty. Nowadays, we find it overly easy to rely on metaphor, images, and tropes to articulating the substance of faith, and matters of religious experience. Without really thinking about it, our ability to give —and as Peter himself would ultimately commend—a reason for the hope that is within us, is too often reliant on religious jargon and encumbered by pious church-speak. To put it another way, fashionable theology far too often is untethered from (and even ambivalent toward) the historicity of the Jesus story and all of the grit of those stone basalt streets. And that’s a shame.
But the doorway to Peter’s house stands to remedy that. This story and the dusty threshold in Capernaum are reminders attesting that the story of Jesus is true. Those were real people, real places, and real miracles. The story of Jesus isn’t just an abstraction. That stuff really happened. So, amid the complexities and flourish of the Christian story today, we can remember that those old stones are still there. And around the door, even we can gather to behold the man, Jesus, who stands there in it. And we needn’t travel 6512 miles to see Him.