SEA OF TIBERIAS

Tiberias, the seaside town

The second thing on my list of things I would regret if I hadn’t done them this week, was to visit, and perhaps to sail on, the Sea of Galilee.

That whole area is the backdrop for so many stories - feeding the 5,000, miraculous catches of fish, the storm, the walking on the water, the breakfast by the sea. In my mind that place has always looked a certain way, carried a certain freshness, and held a special significance.

And so it was we found ourselves North again, driving through the green valleys, past the glittering minarets and crumbling villages, through the olive groves and fields to Nazareth, and then beyond, to the little town of Tiberias, on the the Western side of the Lake.

Tiberias reminded me, almost instantly of a typical seaside town. It might be the way the road wound down from the hills and through the sunlit high street; it could have been the brilliant blue of the lake behind it, or the welcoming sight of seagulls swooping over its white-tipped waves - were it not for the tall palms and the low-rise buildings that line the shore, Tiberias could have been any happy little coastal town in England! The effect of course is that before you’ve even parked and got out of the car, you feel right at home.

It’s a beautiful place, the Sea of Galilee. On the far side, about eight miles away, the mountains were catching the morning sunlight in that way that artists like - as though you’d have great fun painting the shading. Tiny boats bobbed about on the water, almost out of pure delight it seemed, and away to the South, the sun sparkled like jewels, and silhouetted the rocks where fishermen were loading up. It could have been exactly the same for two thousand years.

We had a restroom break. What I mean by that is that Paul found the loos and I got lost. It’s a common thing this week. Eventually he found me, and waved at me at the other end of a shady street by St Peter’s Catholic Church.

“I’ve got us a boat ride!” he beamed behind his sunglasses. I gave him a thumbs up, and started imagining being out on the lake, perhaps being given the guided tour by a sea-captain with a loud-hailer, reading the Bible, lazily peering over the side and taking lots of happy photographs. I’ve been on boat trips before - they’re always a holiday highlight, and I imagined that this would be the same.

“Thirty minutes, two hundred shekels,” said a man who looked like he was selling ice-cream. Paul eventually haggled him down to 40 for 150, at which point he gave him a firm handshake and said okay. And that was the point when I realised, with a gulp, that it wasn’t an organised boat trip; we were actually hiring a boat from a man behind a desk with a clipboard and a parasol.

I promise you, it was choppier than it looks

I very nervously said okay. The man gave a gesture to someone on the jetty below, and we saw for the first time, a fleet of tiny, rusting boats with outboard motors. They looked like they’d come from the action films of the 1970s - and had either seen not enough, or far too much action. I gave a second gulp. A third and a fourth were on the way.

Paul and I had been chatting earlier about the story where Jesus calms the storm. That happened on this bit of water. A storm whips up out of nowhere while Jesus (asleep) and the disciples make their way across. The disciples are terrified and wake Jesus up. He rebukes the wind and the waves; the storm calms down, then he rebukes them for not having enough faith.

“What do you think, Matt, they were supposed to do?” asked Paul, “Wake Jesus up sooner? Calm the storm themselves? It’s an interesting one, isn’t it?”

My mind was on it as we climbed awkwardly into the boat. It was also occurring to me that only half my life-jacket had any buoyancy as the inside had been ripped out some time ago; the left half of it would be as inflatable as a tuxedo. The engine started, we puffed out from the jetty and within moments, we were out, on the actual Sea of Galilee.

I immediately understood why the disciples might have been terrified. Our forty minutes on the water took place on a sunny day, with a pleasant breeze and some very modern safety precautions. And I was petrified.

Men of faith and courage make faces like this

The choppy water rocked us from side to side when the boat was parallel to the waves. When we powered into the oncoming waves, it threw us up and down, and submerged the bow in a dramatic fountain of spray. I was gripping on to the tiny boat with white knuckles, and all the while the engine was coughing behind us.

The lake was a rich green colour, swirling and rising and falling around us, rolling the boat about almost uncontrollably between mountains and sea, splash, mountains and sea. I was starting to regret wanting to do it.

In a storm, in a wooden fishing boat, with the wind and waves against them, it must have been terrible. I think I’d have woken Jesus up right away - or perhaps, I too would have tried to save myself in my own way, just as I was clasping the side of the boat on a warm afternoon. But that of course, is the point, isnt it? Where is your faith? Where is it?

After a while, we got used to the undulating waves, and we started to enjoy the lake a bit more. It really is a beautiful place, and I was right to have it in my list of top two things I couldn’t go home without doing.

Paul looped around and pushed the outboard motor to its limit while I grabbed a Bible and read out some of the stories. Somehow, that made the experience feel a lot better - the words, words that have been there since Sunday School, were more alive than ever: there was Jesus, up the mountainside, just maybe like that one over there, praying and watching in the fourth watch of the night. There were the disciples, frightened of the storm and then frightened again as a ghost-like figure came walking over the waves as though they were hills. There was Jesus, best of all, cooking fish just a hundred yards away on the beach, the columns of smoke rising from the fire into the early morning sky. On the air, the sound of pure astonished laughter as the net pulled heavy, dripping from the lake and bulging with wriggling fish.

We spent a bit of time by the lake, taking photos and thinking and watching, before we headed out for our next stop. There is something indefinably pure about Galilee: far from the hills of Nazareth or the waiting trials of Jerusalem; hours from the Dead Sea, which, by comparison could easily have been on another planet.

“That was awesome,” I said as we left. Paul agreed.