Jesus asked him to come home with them, and said his
mother and his sisters were grieved at his long absence,
and would be wild with delight to see his face again?
Who ever gives a thought to the sisters of Jesus
at all?—yet he had sisters; and memories
of them must have stolen into his mind often when
he was ill-treated among strangers; when he was homeless
and said he had not where to lay his head; when all
deserted him, even Peter, and he stood alone among
his enemies.
Christ did few miracles in Nazareth, and staid but
a little while. The people said, “This
the Son of God! Why, his father is nothing but
a carpenter. We know the family. We see
them every day. Are not his brothers named so
and so, and his sisters so and so, and is not his
mother the person they call Mary? This is absurd.”
He did not curse his home, but he shook its dust
from his feet and went away.
Capernaum lies close to the edge of the little sea,
in a small plain some five miles long and a mile or
two wide, which is mildly adorned with oleanders which
look all the better contrasted with the bald hills
and the howling deserts which surround them, but they
are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint
them. If one be calm and resolute he can look
upon their comeliness and live.
One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen
under our observation is the exceedingly small portion
of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing
plant of Christianity. The longest journey our
Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem—about
one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles.
The next longest was from here to Sidon—say
about sixty or seventy miles. Instead of being
wide apart—as American appreciation of
distances would naturally suggest—the places
made most particularly celebrated by the presence of
Christ are nearly all right here in full view, and
within cannon-shot of Capernaum. Leaving out
two or three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent
his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles
within a compass no larger than an ordinary county
in the United States. It is as much as I can
do to comprehend this stupefying fact. How it
wears a man out to have to read up a hundred pages
of history every two or three miles—for
verily the celebrated localities of Palestine occur
that close together. How wearily, how bewilderingly
they swarm about your path!
In due time we reached the ancient village of Magdala.
Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly
Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly,
and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy—just
the style of cities that have adorned the country since
Adam’s time, as all writers have labored hard
to prove, and have succeeded. The streets of
Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide,
and reeking with uncleanliness. The houses are
