CAESEREA

I had forgotten (don’t ask me how) that going on holiday with Paul would result in him making up songs about me. I was serenaded this morning by almost every song he could think of (plus, weirdly, La Isla Bonita by Madonna) with certain words replaced with my name. It’s an affectionate thing. He also struggles to remember all the words to the next lines, so he fills them in with whistling, which if anything, I find even funnier.

We went North today, to Caesarea. Like Joppa, it’s by the sea, and has a rich history stretching back to the third century BC. Here, Herod the Great built an enormous harbour and turned the settlement into an important city. Here, Cornelius had the vision to go and see Peter on the roof, and here, Paul faced Festus, who would eventually send the apostle onwards across the sea to Rome to face Caesar. He would not come back.

We stood in the ruins of the great hall, where Paul would almost certainly have appealed before the governor. The sea smashed into the rocks behind us, throwing spray into the air - it was quite a moment. Then, out on the the spit of land where a great lighthouse once burned to light the way home, we watched the sea again throwing itself against the harbour wall in protest.

The great harbour is long gone of course. What Herod had built, crumbled into the ocean, and the ruined city left behind has been built upon by Byzantines, by Arabs, by Crusaders, and by more recent settlers. What remains is the shell of a place, long changed and long gone. Stark, broken pillars jut into the salty air, rough stones and rocks form the outlines of the halls, the public baths, the taverns and the seafront gardens. There are fragments of Byzantine mosaic, and rough hewn arches and holes for candles. And there, relentlessly surging and crashing, unchanged by the years, is the ocean, throwing spray into the air and foaming with white horses.

“This is where Paul left then,” I said, thoughtfully.

“Yep, the last time he was in Israel,” replied Paul (my friend, not the apostle). I peered out to sea as though watching for a small ship with fluttering sails and the sound of oars and sailors. Paul, the ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’ must have looked back on Caesarea and seen the great temple, the harbour walls, the amphitheatre, the lighthouse, the hippodrome perhaps, gradually becoming smaller and smaller, along with the contoured land behind it, with its palms and olive trees. That, would have been his last sight of his homeland, the land of promise. And all for the cause of the Gospel.

There were clouds building up over the Mediterranean. Israel is a land of such extremes: it can be very different weather in different parts of the nation, and it can change very quickly. Up there, we were about an hour further north than Joppa and Tel Aviv. The tall palm trees were suddenly silhouetted against some very dark skies indeed.

Paul immediately retrieved his trusty umbrella from his rucksack, and I slipped into my foldaway macintosh, threading my arms and my rucksack into it. Heavy, thundery spots fell and spattered the ground as the sea roared. And yet, that short sharp shower was nothing, a piffling, trifling nothing, compared to what would await us on our next stop...

But for now, that had been Caesarea - Herod’s place of ancient comings and goings, where travellers could rest, where Paul’s destiny became clear to him, and where today, my friend Paul and I soaked in the atmosphere of the old city port by  the endless foaming sea.