Matthew 13:1-2
13:1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.
13:2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach.
……………………
At some point, and especially when a teacher of the law came to him and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus had to bitterly complain to him that you do not know what you are asking, because the "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
The Gospel of Matthew tells us the story that Jesus preached the Gospel in Nazareth, on the Sabbath day, when he went into the synagogue, as was his custom, announcing it to the congregation there, after reading the book of the prophet Isaiah that the prophecies of Isaiah about the Messiah came into fulfillment in him, in Jesus.
As it is written in the Gospel:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The people there who knew him and his family, asked that “isn’t this carpenter Joseph’s son?”
They got agitated and aggravated and drove him out of the town, trying to grab him and to throw him down from the nearby cliff in order to kill him for the assumed blasphemy.
He also had to sigh almost quite bitterly that “Truly I tell you,” he said, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown.”
We do not know with scientific certainty the historic accuracy of this story, because according to the archeological findings the very town of Nazareth did not exist until the 2nd century AD. It was never mentioned either in any contemporary sources.
Although the settlement could have later received its name from its sectarian Jewish population, from the Nazarenes, as even Jesus was officially titled by the Roman high court as Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum.
One phenomenon is perceivable from the Gospel that after a certain point of time Jesus began to spend more and more time or almost all his time in the cities and towns around the Lake Kinneret, in Chorazin, Bethsaida and especially Capernaum.
Although Apostle Peter and Andrew, his brother, hailed from Bethsaida originally, but Peter married his wife from Capernaum and after the wedding he settled in Capernaum, so this latter became technically the Gospel movement center.
John and his brother James the older, and Matthew the tax collector lived there too.
The other reason why Peter and his brother moved there from Bethsaida, because Capernaum gave them tax break as fishermen.
The two towns were only 5 miles away from each other but strangely they belonged to two different countries at that time as Bethsaida was the Golan area jurisdiction of Herod Philip, while the Capernaum in Galilee belonged to Herod Antipas. Many times Jesus stayed at Peter’s house in Capernaum, and he spent there even more time after he had healed his mother-in-law from a drastic fever.
However it also happened that Jesus withdrew to Bethsaida as being in the jurisdiction of Philip, when he heard of the murder of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas, and would not have sought again the territories of the latter so soon after leaving them.
Still at least for the first period of his ministry, the coastal city of Capernaum became his home town instead of Nazareth, and he started to proclaim the Gospel in the synagogue in Capernaum, and he began to heal its sick, and the town became the very scene of many of his miracles.
Nonetheless, after a good night sleep, we can suppose that he slept, because usually he kept vigil on hilltops among the mountains, mostly outside in the open air in the nature under the starry skies of God, just like on the Mount of the Olives he did.
So he left the house. Which is occasionally a good thing, leaving behind one of the most artificially created structure on Earth, our built home or shelter. Our comfort zone, as well.
He left and had been sitting in the front of the sea for a while. The real sea like the Mediterranean Sea or even the Oceans, might be a more grandiose experience, however this was not a big sea, comparing to the salt waters that cover the greater part of the earth's surface, but a lake, though its official name is the Sea of Galilee, or Lake Tiberias or Lake Kinneret.
Not like the salty Dead Sea, this is a freshwater lake in the land of Israel and the lowest freshwater lake on Earth.
Its maximum depth is approximately 43 m, thus, though it is a lake, the wind is capable to create dangerous storms on its surface.
One of them was stopped by Jesus, when he said, I command you to stop.
So, Jesus had been sitting in front of the Sea of Galilee for a good while, and it looked like that he was doing nothing. Poor Jesus was just sitting there on the northwest shore of the Sea. Calling him poor is not an oxymoron, because the Jewish sect he belonged too, the Nazarenes, they had two nicknames. The first one was simply, The Way. The other one was The Poor, just like The Beggars was the name of a confederacy of Calvinist Dutch nobles in the Netherlands, who from 1566 opposed the hereditary Roman Catholic Spanish rule in their country.
So, Poor Jesus was accused by his adversaries with non-sense and fabricated issues. The worst of them was that Jesus is helped by the Chief Demons to do witchcraft.
The milder accusations against him were like he committed excessive wine drinking, excessive eating, he socialized to often with obvious sinners like tax collectors, women of entertainment, also that he did not have an agreeable job as his father, who was a carpenter.
They accused him of being lazy, because instead of building houses or furniture or wooden tools, he spends too much time with roaming around the country with similar vagabond-ish fellows, wasting time on prayer and on silly contemplation.
However, praying during the whole night on a hilltop is a prayer, sitting in front of the sea, meditating on the view of the sea might be a fruitful contemplation.
Meanwhile You can talk to God, as it is a connection to the King of the Universe, in whose hands we are all, together with the stars, the sun, the moon, the people and all creatures. God holds in his hands the conditions of life and death, prosperity or devastation, flood causing storm or fertility giving rain, crop raising sunshine, or desert making scorching beams.
Without the Blessings of God we can not live, without Thanksgiving it is not worth to live. Without prayer we can not keep the connection to God, without contemplation on his works like the skies, the seas, the earth we can not improve in knowledge, in wisdom and in charity.
We could work and do also our chores 16 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 and a quarter days a year, but God in the Scriptures emphasizedly says, that you shall not do that.
Just as it described in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, where and when Jesus “came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said.
But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed--or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
The Gospel story does not mean that we have to be idle, doing nothing 24/7, especially in the times when our help is really needed. Quite the opposite is true.
However, we have to take time for rest and renewal called the Sabbath of the week, the Sabbath of the years, and the Sabbath Jubilees of the half centuries.
Also we must take our time to pray and contemplate everyday in order that God bless the work of our hands, the fields we cultivate, the houses of our families and the community where we live, with health and prosperity, peace and longevity.
Also, by the Holy Spirit, we must create opportunities, feasts, holidays and festivals to show and demonstrate our gratitude for the Providence of God, by heartfelt actions of giving thanks to the Creator of all lives, who is our Redeemer from sin and our Liberator from evil as well.
May our Blessings on His Name be well received in Heaven.
AMEN
