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CHAPTER XVI The Other Side
"I watched the sun sink into the western mountains.
How odd, I thought, that you can almost see this great source of vision-searing light turn to gold before your very eyes; you can even watch it move . . . I loved sunsets. They always give a satisfying, final touch to a good day, and a redeeming patina to a terrible one. What happened between sunset and sunset seems almost inconsequential. A nourishing philosophy! I felt content.
By the time we made our way back to Galilee, yet another mass of people huddled close to Jesus. Sometimes they seemed to appear out of nowhere, from behind the rocks, from behind the brush, up the wadis. It was amazing. I have seen great crowds before, especially in the Temple at Jerusalem, and once I attended a contest of sport in a Roman arena. But I have never seen anything like the crowds that followed Jesus. For the most part, they were quiet, many sick and infirm. They had come to be healed. Yet Jesus did not heal everyone. I always thought that strange for one so compassionate. But Jesus did unnatural things naturally. He never made the case for doing extraordinary things outside the current and flow of the ordinary. Thus, he did not go to all the leper colonies and empty them of disfigured tenants. He did not visit all the homes of the infirm and do the same. But he did heal many, enough to make for these huge crowds.
Though we had not had a particularly difficult day, Jesus seemed exhausted. He had stopped smiling, his positive, upbeat expression, wan and spent. He appeared desirous to relieve himself of the crowd. A girl-child came to him holding a bouquet of wild flowers in her small, porcelain hand. Jesus, though weary, stopped, took the flowers and kissed the little girl on her head, but kept moving along his way. We reached the waterfront where, tied to their moorings, a small flotilla of boats jostled among the wavelets. The boats themselves were substantial; they could easily hold fifteen to twenty men. Masts stood in each with a single yardarm near the top to which a sail might be fastened. Into one of these, Jesus climbed and the rest of us followed. Seeing our purpose, the other boats began to fill as well. "What course, Master?" from Peter. Jesus seated himself on the bench and slumped against the stern of the boat. He arranged a few items for his comfort, a coil of rope and a small cushion for a pillow, upon which he laid his head, closed his eyes and responded quietly, "The other side." In an instant, he slept. Peter, James and the other fishermen among us raised the sail that filled with breezy winds, as did the rest of the boats, and we were off to the "other side," wherever that meant. I don't think any of us really knew--somewhere, I guess. Perhaps Tiberias. Maybe just an evening sail, but if I knew Simon Peter, he had fishing and deep water on his mind. Yet how could we seriously fish with all of the other boats so close by? As we scudded away from shore, I looked at Jesus asleep in the stern among the nets and coils of rope. In a few moments, the shoreline was a distant blur. Sleeping there on the aft thwart, he did not look like anyone other than a very tired, very ordinary man. We had all grown used to that. His body, like ours, demanded rest when it was tired. The amazing things he said and did astounded us, but most of the time Jesus was just one of us. He was our undisputed mentor and leader, no doubt of that, but it was difficult throughout the day to sustain the impression that he was extraordinary. He ate and drank with the rest of us, sat around campfires at night and swapped stories with the rest of us. He spoke our language, coarse and distinctly male. Often we spoke of athletes and gladiators, of their feats and prowess. While none of us actually were heroes of sport, we were men--talking and acting as men talk and act. We laughed, joked and with customary male humor, insulted one another; and Jesus, far from reserved and withdrawn, was always a vigorous and integral part of that. We had grown close to one another, our sense of camaraderie intense. At times, we were confused as to how to act around him. It was a strange mix of the desire to honor him or just to accept him as one of us. At this moment as he lay asleep, it was the latter. We saw him as a very tired man, and we took him as he was. That felt right for the moment.
The Sea of Galilee is one of the most unusual bodies of fresh water known to men. Thirteen miles long, seven miles wide, about 150 feet deep in its deepest quarter; its waters sweet and teeming with fish, it is surrounded by mountains, high on the west, lower on the east. At greater than six hundred feet lower than the level of the great oceans, it is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth. Snow-capped Mt. Hermon to the north in the distance. From the cold heights of these mountains, frigid oceans of air spill down to the warm waters generating sudden, intense storms. The fishermen among us knew all about these storms and had endured dozens of them in their professional lifetimes. There was nothing about this sea or the vessels that ploughed it that Simon Peter, in particular, did not know about. Of all the fishermen, he was the most experienced, the most respected for his familiarity with deep water. If a storm came, it would not catch this man by surprise. The storms of Galilee are legendary. No one ventures into the deep water unaware of them. No one challenges Galilee without some measure of anxiety about the storms. Except for Jesus who said simply, "the other side," and went to sleep.
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