THE BEAUTY BEYOND THE RUBBLE

The real (and obviously massive and
completely unmissable) Basilica of the
Annunciation

I felt badly about having leapt to the conclusion that the church I’d seen, shining on the top of the hill had to have been the one we were looking for. Paul was alright about it; he found it funny. And at least, as he put it, we had guaranteed our 10,000 steps for the day.

And then some! According to my phone we did 16,000 including 44 storeys! It had been good cardio after all.

As we descended towards the real Church of the Annunciation (which, by the way, can be mistaken for no other building in the whole of Christendom when you see it) we once again felt the droplets of rain in the air that preclude a shower here. We togged up.

Fast forward about one minute and thirty five seconds and I’m crouched in someone’s doorway watching detritus float by in a torrent of rainwater, while the heavens are open and a month’s rainfall is pounding the streets. Paul, who is ahead of me, hasn’t realised I’ve taken shelter yet and is still trying to find me in the pouring rain. I can’t hear him because the rain is as loud as hammers.

It rained hard and straight for about thirty minutes.

When all the streams join as one river

“If the cars start to move, then we’re really in trouble,” said Paul eventually, who had found me by now, and was drying off in the doorway. The river surged down the street, a raging torrent of water, carrying bits of someone’s upturned wheelie bin with it. Steep hill, steep rain: the water gushed past like the Thames at high tide.

The cars didn’t move. After a while, we braved it and found ourselves picking our way through the street-rivers of Nazareth, and down to the Church of the Annunciation, the place where the Angel Gabriel did his Annunciating, and Mary, being Catholicy and amazing and super pious like every teenager, sort of went along with it and unwittingly created Christmas.

In lots of ways, Nazareth is where the Christmas story begins then. And certainly, that season seems to have infiltrated the city. We saw half-dismantled Christmas trees today, giant wooden structures with baubles and bows, looking immensely out of place. On the front of the Regus and Microsoft building (in the busy street that must be the city centre), flashing lights still wished us all a ‘Merry Xmas’. I must admit, I’m not entirely sure which Xmas they mean.

Inside the cloisters of annunciation

‘Can anything good come from Nazareth?’ asked Nathaniel once, when being introduced to Jesus for the first time. We all, since Sunday school, cried ‘yes!’ - but I feel as though today, I’ve understood that question a lot better. There’s nothing special about it - other than it being the place where Jesus grew up. It’s his hometown, his neck of the woods, his place and his people. But that’s the only thing that makes this special.

Without the backstory of Jesus, Nazareth is a wasteland: a dump, a rubbish tip, surging and sprawling between the graceful countryside and the rolling hills. 

But, undoubtedly, he was here. He did step onto these streets and climb those hills. We (Paul and I) liked to think that maybe he once went on the same trek we did, once and climbed to the top to look at the hills we saw. Perhaps Jesus took in those views and watched those trees, and saw himself, the beauty and the mess so intermingled: if anyone identifies with the forgotten, the lowly, the difficult, and the broken world, searching for the beauty beyond the rubble, then surely it has to be him: surely it has to be Jesus of Nazareth.