May 19, 2008 – Caesaria

Driving north from Tel Aviv in the morning, we had Morning Prayer on the bus, led by Kim and the Scripture lesson Acts 10:24-48 described as “Peter at Cornelius’ House”. It’s an appropriate passage, as Peter is going from Joppa to Caesaria, just like us. And when Peter gets to Caesaria, he preaches to a group of Gentiles and while this is happening the Holy Spirit came to all who heard the message, even the Gentiles and they were baptized as well. For Peter, a Jew, this was a lesson for him that Christ’s message is for the whole world.

Arriving in Caesaria, we go a Roman theatre, built by Herod the Great in the Hesmonium period, just before the birth of Christ. Herod, a Jew, was also a Roman citizen, closely aligned with Rome. We learn that the threatre is a place where people go to learn how to be good Roman citizens. Rome conquered the Greeks and took Hellinism to themselves which embraced two basic concepts – the search for pleasure and the search for beauty. This describes much of today’s secular world and a cynic might say that Hellenism has won the day, as compared to Hebrew thinking which simply states “The Lord is my shepherd.”

What is of historical significance to Christians is that the Apostle Paul would surely have been in this very theatre, pleading his case with the Roman governors of the day to plead his case with Caesar in Rome, as the Jewish leadership wanted to kill him. So we went to the very place and stood where Paul would have stood.

Acts 23, 24, 25 & 26 describe Paul’s trials before Felix, Festus and Agrippa. Pastor Duke spoke powerfully at the place of the former harbour at Caesaria about the “no boundaries” approach Paul took in his teaching and Duke encouraged us to take that thinking with us in our lives as Christians in not holding ourselves back in our communities, our Churches and in our families