396. Among the Holy Hills

Among the Holy Hills

Luk_4:16 : ’93He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up.’94

What a splendid sleep I had last night in a Catholic convent, my first sleep within doors since leaving Jerusalem; and all of us as kindly treated as though we had been the Pope and his college of cardinals passing that way. Last evening the genial Sisterhood of the convent ordered a hundred bright-eyed Arab children brought out to sing for me, and it was glorious! This morning I come out on the steps of the convent and look upon the most beautiful village of all Palestine, its houses of white limestone. Guess its name! Nazareth, historical Nazareth, one of the trinity of places that all Christian travelers must see or feel that they have not seen Palestine, namely, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth. Babyhood, boyhood, manhood of him for whom I believe there are fifty million people who would now, if it were required, march out and die, whether under ax or down in the floods or straight through the fire.

Grand old village is Nazareth, even putting aside its sacred associations. First of all, it is clean; and that can be said of few of the Oriental villages. Its neighboring town of Nablous is the filthiest town I ever saw, although its chief industry is the manufacture of soap. They export all of it. Nazareth was perhaps unusually clean the morning I speak of, for, as we rode into the village the afternoon before, the showers which had put our mackintoshes to the test had poured floods through all the alleys under command of the clouds, those thorough street commissioners. Beside that, Nazareth has been the scene of battles passing it from the Israelite to Mohammedan and from Mohammedan to Christian, the most wonderful of the battles being that in which twenty-five thousand Turks were beaten by twenty-one hundred French, Napoleon Bonaparte commanding. That greatest of Frenchmen walking these very streets through which Jesus walked for nearly thirty years; the morals of the two, the antipodes: the snows of Russia and the plagues of Egypt appropriately following the one, the doxologies of earth and the hallelujahs of heaven appropriately following the other. And then this town is so beautifully situated in a great green bowl, the sides of the bowl, the surrounding fifteen hills. The God of nature, who is the God of the Bible, evidently scooped out this valley for privacy and separation from all the world during three most important decades, the thirty years of Christ’92s boyhood and youth, for of the thirty-three years of Christ’92s stay on earth, he spent thirty of them in this town in getting ready’97a startling rebuke to those who have no patience with the long years of preparation necessary when they enter on any special mission for the Church or the world. The trouble is with most young men that they want to launch their ship from the dry-dock before it is ready, and hence so many sink in the first cyclone. Stay in the store as a subordinate until you are thoroughly equipped. Be a good employee in your trade until you are qualified to be an employer. Be content with Nazareth until you are ready for the buffetings of Jerusalem. You may get so gloriously equipped in the thirty years that you can do more in three years than most men can accomplish in a prolonged lifetime. These little suggestions I am apt to put into my sermon, hoping to help people for this world, while I am chiefly anxious to have them prepare for the next world.

All Christ’92s boyhood was spent in this village and its surroundings. There is the very well called ’93The Fountain of the Virgin,’94 to which by his mother’92s side he trotted along holding her hand. No doubt about it; it is the only well in the village, and it has been the only well for three thousand years. This morning we visit it, and the mothers have their children with them now as then. The work of drawing water in all ages in those countries has been women’92s work. Scores of them are waiting for their turn at it, three great and everlasting springs rolling out into that well their barrels, their hogsheads of water in floods gloriously abundant. The well is surrounded by olive groves and wide spaces in which people talk, and children, wearing charms on their heads as protection against the ’93evil eye,’94 are playing, and women with their strings of coin on either side of their face, and in skirts of blue and scarlet and white and green move on with water-jars on their heads. Mary, I suppose, almost always took Jesus the boy with her, for she had no one she could leave him with, being in humble circumstances and having no attendants. I do not believe there was one of the surrounding fifteen hills that the boy Christ did not range from bottom to top, or one cavern in their sides he did not explore, nor one species of bird flying across the tops that he could not call by name, nor one of all the species of fauna on those steeps that he had not recognized. You see it all through his sermons. If a man becomes a public speaker, in his orations or discourses you discover his early whereabouts. What a boy sees between seven and seventeen always sticks to him. When the Apostle Peter preaches, you see the fishing nets with which he had from his earliest days been familiar. And when Amos delivers his prophecy you hear in it the bleating of the herds which he had in boyhood attended. And in our Lord’92s sermons and conversations you see all the phases of village life, and the mountainous life surrounding it. They raised their own chickens in Nazareth, and in after time he cries: ’93O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! how often would I have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings!’94 He had seen his mother open the family wardrobe at the close of summer and the moth-millers flying out, having destroyed the garments, and in after years he says: ’93Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth doth corrupt.’94 In childhood he had seen a mile of flowers, white as the snow or red as the flame or blue as the sea or green as the tree-tops, and no wonder in his manhood sermon he said: ’93Consider the lilies.’94 While one day on a high point where now stands the tomb of Neby Ismail, he had seen winging past him, so near as almost to flurry his hair, the partridge and the hoopoe and the thrush and the osprey and the crane and the raven, and no wonder afterward in his manhood sermon he said: ’93Behold the fowls of the air.’94 In Nazareth, and on the road to it, there are a great many camels. I see them now in memory making their slow way up the zigzag road from the plain of Esdraelon to Nazareth. Familiar was Christ with their appearance, also with that small insect the gnat, which he had seen his mother strain out from a cup of water or pail of milk; and no wonder he brings afterward the large quadruped and the small insect into his sermon and, while seeing the Pharisees careful about small sins and reckless about large ones, cries: ’93Woe unto you blind guides which strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.’94

He had in boyhood seen the shepherds get their flocks mixed up, and to one not familiar with the habits of shepherds and their flocks, hopelessly mixed up. And a sheep-stealer appears on the scene and dishonestly demands some of those sheep, when he owns not one of them. ’93Well,’94 say the two honest shepherds, ’93we will soon settle this matter,’94 and one shepherd goes out in one direction and the other shepherd goes out in the other direction, and the sheep-stealer in another direction, and each one calls, and the flocks of each of the honest shepherds rush to their owner, while the sheep-stealer calls, and calls again, but gets not one of the flock. No wonder that Christ years after, preaching on a great occasion and illustrating his own shepherd-like qualities, says: ’93When he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him for they know his voice, and the stranger they will not follow, for they know not the voice of the stranger.’94 The sides of these hills are terraced for grapes. The boy Christ had often stood with great round eyes watching the trimming of the grape-vines. Clip, goes the knife, and off falls a branch. The child Christ says to the farmer: ’93What do you do that for?’94 ’93Oh,’94 says the farmer, ’93that is a dead branch, and it is doing nothing and is only in the way, so I cut it off.’94 Then the farmer with his sharp knife prunes from a living branch this and that tendril and the other tendril. ’93But,’94 says the child Christ, ’93these twigs that you cut off now are not dead; what do you do that for?’94 ’93Oh,’94 says the farmer, ’93we prune off these that the main branch may have more of the sap and so be more fruitful.’94 No wonder in after years Christ said in his sermon: ’93I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman; every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away, and every branch that beareth fruit he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.’94

No one who had not been a country boy would have said that.

Streaks of nature all through Christ’92s sermons and conversations! When a pigeon descended upon Christ’92s head at his baptism in the Jordan it was not the first pigeon he had seen. And then he has such wide sweep of discourse, as you may imagine from one who has stood on the hills that overlook Nazareth. As far as I understand, Christ visited the Mediterranean Sea only once, but any clear morning he could run up on a hill near Nazareth and look off to the west and see the Mediterranean; while there in the north is snowy Mount Lebanon, clad as in white robe of ascension; and yonder on the east and southeast Mount Gilboa, Mount Tabor and Mount Gilead; and yonder in the south is the plain of Esdraelon, over which we rode yesterday on our way to Nazareth. Those mountains of his boyhood in his memory, do you wonder that Christ, when he wanted a good pulpit, made it out of a mountain’97’94seeing the multitudes he went up into the mountain.’94 And when he wanted especial communion with God, he took James and John and Peter into ’93a mountain apart.’94

Oh, this country boy of Nazareth, come forth to atone for the sins of the world, and to correct the follies of the world, and to stamp out the cruelties of the world, and to illumine the darkness of the world, and to transfigure the hemispheres! So it has been the mission of the country boys in all ages to transform and inspire and rescue. They come into our merchandise and our court-rooms and our healing art and our studios and our theology. They lived in Nazareth before they entered Jerusalem. And but for that annual influx our cities would have enervated and sickened and slain the race. Late hours and hurtful apparel and overtaxed digestive organs and crowding environments of city life would have halted the world; but the valleys and mountains of Nazareth have given fresh supply of health and moral invigoration to Jerusalem, and the country saves the town. From the hills of New Hampshire and the hills of Virginia and the hills of Georgia come into our national eloquence the Websters and the Clays and the Henry W. Gradys. From the plain homes of Massachusetts and Maryland come into our national charities, the George Peabodys and the William Corcorans. From the cabins of the lonely country regions come into our national destinies the Andrew Jacksons and the Abraham Lincolns. From plowboy’92s furrow and village counter and blacksmith’92s forge come most of our city giants. Nearly all the Messiahs in all departments dwelt in Nazareth before they came to Jerusalem.

I send this day thanks from these cities mostly made prosperous by country boys, to the farmhouse and the prairie and the mountain cabin and the obscure homesteads of north and south and east and west; to the father and mother in plain homespun, if they be still alive, or the hillocks under which they sleep the long sleep. Thanks from Jerusalem to Nazareth. But alas! that the city should so often treat the country boys as of old the one from Nazareth was treated at Jerusalem! Slain not by hammers and spikes, but by instruments just as cruel. On every street of every city the crucifixion goes on. Every year of our history shows its ten thousand of the slain. Oh, how we grind them up! Under what wheels, in what mills and for what an awful grist! Let the city take better care of these boys and young men arriving from the country. They are worth saving. Boys as grand as the one who, with his elder brother, climbed into a church tower and, not knowing their danger, went outside on some timbers, when one of those timbers broke and the boys fell, and the older boy caught on a beam and the younger clutched the foot of the older; the older could not climb up with the younger hanging to his feet, so the younger said: ’93John, I am going to let go; you can climb out into safety, but you can’92t climb up with me holding fast; I am going to let go; kiss mother for me and tell her not to feel badly; good-by!’94 and he let go and was so hard dashed upon the ground he was not recognizable. Plenty of such brave boys coming up from Nazareth! Let Jerusalem be careful how it treats them! A gentleman long ago entered a school in Germany, and he bowed very low before the boys, and the teacher said: ’93Why do you do that?’94 ’93Oh,’94 said the visitor, ’93I do not know what mighty man may yet be developed among them.’94 At that instant the eyes of one of. the boys flashed fire. Who was it? Martin Luther. A lad on his way to school passed a doorstep on which sat a lame and invalid child. The passing boy said to him: ’93Why don’92t you go to school?’94 ’93Oh, I am lame and I can’92t walk to school!’94 ’93Get on my back,’94 said the well boy, ’93and I will carry you to school.’94 And so he did that day and for many days until the invalid was fairly started on the road to an education. Who was the well boy that did that kindness? I don’92t know. Who was the invalid he carried? It was Robert Hall, the rapt pulpit orator of all Christendom. Better give to the boys who come up from Nazareth to Jerusalem a crown instead of a cross.

On this December morning in Palestine, on our way out from Nazareth, we saw just such a carpenter’92s shop as that in which Jesus worked to support his widowed mother, after he was old enough to do so. I looked in, and there were hammer and saw and plane and auger and vise and measuring-rule and chisel and drill and adze and wrench and bit and all the tools of carpentry. Think of it! He who smoothed the surface of the earth, shoving a plane. He who cleft the mountains by earthquake, pounding a chisel. He who opened the mammoth caves of the earth, turning an auger. He who wields the thunderbolt, striking with a hammer. He who scooped out the bed for the ocean, hollowing a ladle. He who flashes the morning on the earth, and makes the midnight heavens quiver with aurora, constructing a window. I cannot understand it, but I believe it. A skeptic said to an old clergyman: ’93I will not believe anything I cannot explain.’94 ’93Indeed!’94 said the clergyman. ’93You will not believe anything you cannot explain. Please to explain to me why some cows have horns, and others have no horns.’94 ’93No!’94 said the skeptic, ’93I did not mean exactly that. I mean that I will not believe anything I have not seen!’94 ’93Indeed!’94 said the clergyman. ’93You will not believe anything you have not seen. Have you a backbone?’94 ’93Yes,’94 said the skeptic. ’93How do you know?’94 said the clergyman, ’93have you ever seen it?’94 This mystery of Godhead and humanity interjoined I cannot understand and I cannot explain, but I believe it. I am glad there are so many things we cannot understand, for that leaves something for heaven. If we knew everything here, heaven would be a great indolence. What foolish people, those who are in perpetual fret because they cannot understand all that God says and does. A child in the first juvenile primer might as well burst into tears because it cannot understand conic sections. In this world we are only in the A-B-C class, and we cannot now understand the libraries of eternity which put to utmost test faculties archangelic. I would be ashamed of heaven if we do not know more there, with all our faculties intensified a million fold and at the center of the universe, than we do here with our dim faculties and clinging to the outside rim of the universe.

In about two hours we pass through Cana, the village of Palestine, where the mother of Christ and our Lord attended the wedding of a poor relative, having come over from Nazareth for that purpose. The mother of Christ’97for women are first to notice such things’97found that the provisions had fallen short and she told Christ; and he, to relieve the embarrassment of the housekeeper, who had invited more guests than the pantry warranted, became the butler of the occasion; and out of a cluster of a few sympathetic words squeezed a beverage of a hundred and twenty-six gallons of wine, in which was not one drop of intoxicant’97or it would have left that party as maudlin and drunk as the great centennial banquet, in New York, several years ago, left senators and governors and generals and merchant princes. The difference between the wine at the wedding in Cana and the wine at the banquet in New York being that the Lord made the one and the devil made the other.

We got off our horses and examined some of these water-jars at Cana, said to be the very ones that held the plain water that Christ turned into the purple bloom of an especial vintage. I measured them and found them eighteen inches from edge to edge and nineteen inches deep, and declined to accept their identity. But we realized the immensity of a supply of a hundred and twenty-six gallons of wine. What was that for? Probably one gallon would have been enough, for it was only an additional installment of what had already been provided, and it is probable that the housekeeper could not have guessed more than one gallon out of the way. But a hundred and twenty-six gallons! What will they do with the surplus? Ah, it was just like our Lord! Those young people were about to start in housekeeping, and their means were limited, and that big supply, whether kept in their pantry or sold, will be a mighty help. You see there was no strychnine or logwood or nux vomica in that beverage; and, as the Lord made it, it would keep. He makes seas that keep thousands of years, and certainly he could make a beverage that would keep four or five years. Among the arts and inventions of the future I hope there may be some one that can press the juices from the grape and so mingle them, without one drop of damning alcoholism, that it will keep for years. And the more of it you take the clearer will be the brain and the healthier the stomach. And here is a remarkable fact in my journey: I traveled through Italy and Greece and Egypt and Palestine and Syria and Turkey and how many intoxicated people do you think I saw in all those five great realms? Not one. We must in our Christianized lands have got hold of some kind of beverage that Christ did not make.

I am glad that Jesus was present at that wedding; and that December, while we were standing at Cana, that wedding came back. Night had fallen on the village and its surroundings. The bridegroom had put on his head a bright turban, and a garland of flowers, and his garments had been made fragrant with frankincense and camphor, an odor which the Oriental especially likes. Accompanied by groomsmen, and preceded by a band of musicians with flutes and drums and horns and by torches in full blaze, he starts for the bride’92s home. This river of fire is met by another river of fire, the torches of the bride and bridesmaids’97flambeau answering flambeau. The bride is in white robe, and her veil not only covers her face, but envelopes her body. Her trousseau is as elaborate as the resources of her father’92s house permitted. Her attendants are decked with all the ornaments they own or can borrow; but their own personal charms make tame the jewels, for those Oriental women eclipse in attractiveness all others, except those of our own land. The damask rose is in their cheek, and the diamond in the lustre of their eyes, and the blackness of the night in their long locks, and in their step is the gracefulness of the morning. At the first sight of the torches of the bridegroom and his attendants, the cry rings through the home of the bride: ’93They are in sight! Get ready! Behold, the bridegroom cometh! Go ye out to meet him!’94 As the two processions approach each other, the timbrels strike and the songs commingle, and then the two processions become one and march toward the bridegroom’92s house, and meet a third procession, which is made up of the friends of both the bride and bridegroom. Then all enter the house and the dance begins, and the door is shut. And all this Christ uses to illustrate the joy with which the ransomed of earth shall meet him, when he comes garlanded with clouds and robed as the morning and trumpeted by the thunders of the last day. Look! There he comes, down off the hills of heaven, the Bridegroom! And let us start out to hail him, for I hear the voices of the judgment day sounding: ’93Behold, the Bridegroom cometh! Go ye out to meet him!’94 And the disappointment of those who have declined the invitation to the Gospel wedding is presented under the figure of a door heavily closed. You hear it slam. Too late! The door is shut!

But we must hasten on, for I do not mean to close my eyes tonight till I see, from a mountain top, Lake Galilee; on whose banks, next Sabbath, we will worship, and on whose waters the following morning we will take a sail. On and up we go in the severest climb of all Palestine, the ascent of the Mount of Beatitudes, on the top of which Christ preached that famous sermon on the Blesseds’97Blessed this and Blessed that. Up to their knees the horses plunge in mole-hills, and a surface that gives way at the first touch of the hoof; and again and again the tired beasts halt, as much as to say to the riders: ’93It is unjust for you to make us climb these steeps.’94 On and up over the mountain sides where in the later season hyacinths and daisies and phloxes and anemones kindle their beauty. On and up until on the rocks of black basalt we dismount, and climbing to the highest peak, look out on an enchantment of scenery that seems to be the Beatitudes themselves, arched into skies, and rounded into valleys, and silvered into waves. The view is like that of Tennessee and North Carolina from the top of Lookout Mountain, or like that of Vermont and New Hampshire from the top of Mount Washington. Hail, hills of Galilee! Hail, Lake Gennesaret, only four miles away! Yonder, clear and most conspicuous, is Safed, the very city to which Christ pointed for illustration in the sermon preached here, saying: ’93A city set on a hill cannot be hid.’94 There are rocks around me on this Mount of Beatitudes, enough to build the highest pulpit the world ever saw. Ay, it is the highest pulpit. It overlooks all time and all eternity. The Valley of Hattin, between here and Lake Galilee, is an amphitheatre, as if the natural contour of the earth had invited all nations to come and sit down and hear Christ preach a sermon, in which there were more startling novelties than were ever announced in all the sermons ever preached. To those who heard him on this very spot, his words must have seemed the contradiction of everything they had ever heard or read or experienced. The world’92s theory had been: ’93Blessed are the arrogant; Blessed are the supercilious; Blessed are the tearless; Blessed are they that have everything their own way; Blessed are the war eagles; Blessed are the persecutors; Blessed are the popular; Blessed are the Herods and the C’e6sars and the Ahabs.’94 No! No! says Christ, with a voice that rings over these rocks, and through yonder valley of Hattin, and down to the opaline lake on one side, and the sapphire Mediterranean on the other, and across Europe and around the earth both ways, till the globe shall yet be girded with the nine Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor, Blessed are the mournful, Blessed are the meek, Blessed are the hungry, Blessed are the merciful, Blessed are the pure, Blessed are the peacemakers, Blessed are the persecuted, Blessed are the unjustly reviled.

Do you see how the Holy Land and the Holy Book fit each other? God with his left hand built Palestine, and with his right wrote the Scriptures, the two hands of the same Being. And in proportion as Palestine is brought under close inspection, the Bible will be found more glorious and more true. Mightiest Book of the past! Mightiest Book of the future. Monarch of all literature!

The proudest works of genius shall decay.

And reason’92s brightest lustre fade away!

The sophist’92s art, the poet’92s boldest flight,

Shall sink in darkness, and conclude the night;

But faith triumphant over time shall stand,

Shall grasp the sacred Volume in her hand;

Back to its source the heavenly gift convey,

Then in the flood of glory melt away.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage