Everything is near, it seems, in the Holy Land: you can travel from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Jordan River in a single afternoon. You can travel from the Golan to Masada in a day. It would seem a single, compact, cohesive tapestry. But it is not.
There were ragged edges to the Holy Land in Jesus’ day. (There still are, of course.) There was a right side of things, and a wrong side of things. Jesus seemed to bridge them continually.
I thought of this when visiting Mount Gerizim recently. In John 4, we find Jesus at the side of Jacob’s well near the ancient city of Sychar – what is today Nablus, probably, just at the foot of the mountain. There he meets a woman of Samaria – a woman from the “wrong side” of things. John explains helpfully: “Jews in those days wouldn’t be caught dead talking to Samaritans” (v.9, The Message).
The Samaritans had their own language, their own script, their own history and tradition. (They still do!) They had their own Torah. They had their own rabbis, synagogue, and system of sacrifice – and they had nothing to do with Jerusalem. Jerusalem, of course, was the “right side” of things, presumably.
But Jesus broke right through.
“Wrong side” and “right side,” Gerizim and Jerusalem, it turns out, don’t matter as much as one might have thought. “The time is coming – it has, in fact, come – when what you’re called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter,” Jesus told the woman from the wrong side of things. “It’s who you are and the way you live that count before God…. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration” (vv.23, 24, The Message).
I thought of this again when visiting the land of the Gerasenes, on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. The Gerasenes lived on the eastern side – “the other side” – of the sea. It seemed the wrong side of things to many Jews living on the western shores. It was more pagan, more Greek, less predictable, less familiar.
Here were the cities of the Decapolis, more Greek and Roman than Judean. Here was Caesarea Philippi, a Roman city built upon a site dedicated to Pan, the ancient Greek god of the wild. And here was the land of the Gerasenes (or “Gadarenes” or “Gergesenes”) – a people, definitely, on the wrong side of things. They raised pigs; they lived different. Their politics were questionable. And Jesus, it seems, liked to visit among them. “Let us go across to the other side,” he proposed from time to time (Mark 4:35; cf. 6:45; Matthew 8:18; Mt. 14:22; Luke 8:22; John 6:1, etc.).
We visited the remains of a Gerasene city called Kursi, where it is thought Jesus met the demoniac. The poor fellow lived among the tombs, howling frightfully, completely untamed – until Jesus stepped into his life. Mark 5 relates this remarkable story – full of craziness, a legion of demons, an immense herd of pigs, and an extraordinary splash of heavenly power. It is the kind of thing that happens, sometimes, on “the other side.”
Jesus was always bridging into situations like these. He was born in a stable, not a palace. He was raised in a hamlet called Nazareth. (“Nazareth? You’ve got to be kidding…,” John 1:46, The Message). He made friends among sinners (Matthew 9:10). He chose fishermen and tax collectors as followers and colleagues (Matthew 10:2-4). He pressed always to “the other side”: service to the poor, outreach to the sick and the hopeless, mercy for the outcast and the abandoned. He planted his cross among thieves, on the garbage heap outside the walls of respectable Jerusalem (Matthew 27:38, Hebrews 13:12). And on Easter morning, he chose Mary Magdalene – a reformed prostitute – as his earliest ambassador (John 20:1ff.).
I thought of this yet again when I returned to Minneapolis, following our recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land. How much I prefer, I thought to myself, the near side of things, the “right side.” It is my comfort zone. I prefer predictable, non-threatening sorts of things: no howling demoniacs, if you please. If I had lived in Jesus’ day, I suppose, I might have liked to live in Jerusalem, in a comfortable little bungalow near the Temple.
But Jesus presses always to “the other side” – even today. Again and again, if we listen carefully, he will propose:
“If you will follow me, follow with abandon. If you will be my disciple, enter with both feet. Sinners still need friends. The lost still need finding. Millions upon millions have yet to meet me, or hear what I have done for them or experience my love.
“Come,” he will say. “Let us go across to the other side.”