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Capernaum

Certainly part of the benefit of visiting the Holy Land is a better understanding of the culture and practices that surrounded Jesus and his ministry. It many cases knowing “the rest of the story” can make all the difference. Jesus himself often took advantage of local customs and background to teach object lessons that would speak directly to local understanding.

I am going to give you two little bits of background information and then you will read a very short teaching of Jesus to illustrate this point.

1.   Archeologists believe that one of Capernaum’s primary industries was the manufacturing of large millstones for use all over the region. This natural black volcanic basalt is only found north of the Sea of Galilee and is many many times harder than the sandstone and limestone found everywhere else in Israel.

2.   For the Hebrew or eastern way of thinking the single image that represented chaos, disorder, and destruction was the image of water or “the deep” There are many passages in the Bible in which this metaphor occurs. water is described as a threat to the world, as a symbol of the destructive power of sin, as a way to describe the world or people without God, For the people of Capernaum, they lived beside such a body of water and there was an uneasy balance of making their living fishing but also understanding the danger of the Deep.

Do you have those two ideas fixed in your mind the way those listening to Jesus would have?

We don’t know exactly where Jesus spoke these words but it was somewhere in this area. Let’s imagine though, that he was standing right here next to this millstone as he warns his disciples about the importance of living as a righteous example to others. First Jesus points to the millstone and then he turns and points to the Sea of Galilee.

Mark 9:42

If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a huge millstone tied around his neck and to be thrown into the sea.