The Hope

In a single file line that would make any kindergarten teacher proud, we wound our way through the narrow streets of Nazareth. Right here in the middle of souvenir shops, shoe stores and “super-pharms”, we arrived at a most extraordinary place. She has not seen many visitors in her few years of being discovered, but we come appreciative all the same.

We are standing (… on holy ground… one of Meir’s favorite songs)… yes… holy. And ancient. We have found ourselves in a first century synagogue in the hometown of Jesus. This room to me, brims to overflowing with the possibilities, ancient, current, and for the future. But it also holds a great sadness. Jesus revealed more to them about who He was than to any other community, yet when it came down to it, they moved to kill Him. He simply passed through them, shaking the dust of this place from His feet, never returning.

I stood and sang the song of Mary. For this would have been the town the angel, Gabriel, came to visit her.

“My soul magnifies the Lord
My spirit rejoices in God my Savior
For my soul magnifies the Lord.”

Pastor then had two very unusual requests. First, he asked me to sing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” (He hasn’t asked me to sing this in over ten years).
After that, he asked if I would sing, “Castle on a Cloud” from Les Miserable. Obedient but confused, we were amazed at how the words fit right into that morning. Pastor figured Jesus made some people mad here, why couldn’t we? (but I don’t think anyone was mad.)

Pastor stood and spoke to us from Luke 4:17:

You can know for sure that He was in this room. Jesus was a man of the Book. He was handed the scroll of Isaiah and read.

“ The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,[j]
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.”

Is there any better news! It’s that rainbow... That castle! What every heart hungers for!

The eyes of all were upon Him. And then He says,

“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” This is the day the rainbow met the ground. The day the castle came to the ground. When the power really comes, we will reject it. No prophet is accepted in his own country.


“So all those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath...” They tried to kill Him for His claims, but “passing through the midst” He went His way.

I know the earth is speaking of it: The time of fruitfulness is here. There are more people alive today than all of the people who ever lived added together. We are bursting! Like the grapes we saw in Safed yesterday, the vine is heavy. We are approaching the second harvest, Sukkot.
This was His hometown. What could be found fault in Jesus said? Except in the person. He never has looked to the religious, proud and prosperous. Look through the fog and hear what he's saying.

After this, He never came back. He never got to come home. We'd like to think we are different. The same thing will happen to us. We will be offended. To keep from this: love thy law. Keep yourselves low. So much religion is consumed in pride. That very concept takes us from the heart of God.

Who is the most evil person in this city? This mercy is ready for them! Yet, they may never receive it. What do you have that you haven't received? And what do you do that is not for the glory of God?

You are only offended when you think you are too good. It wasn't the right time, He walked through them. We will have to walk through rejection, the feeling of not good enough, the sense of being a failure. I don't feel I am the same person because I have stepped into the year of the Lord’s favor.

It doesn't matter what you feel, it matters that you are with Him. Thrown out of Capernaum, we’ll go to Jerusalem... We’ll stay with him. May the Lord help our hearts to be “un-offendable”!

He is true, everyone else is a liar. As your leader, I will probably be the one to offend you. Together, we walk and knock the rough edges off of each other. There is no move of God done without a human personality. I will not lose sight of revelation. I will not forget. If we are going to walk together, we have to stay together.

Instead of blaming God, what if we cooperated with him? Two spiritual ways to learn: by affliction or by the fire of His presence as you wait upon Him. I am sensing the fire of His presence I am waiting... As fiery as this way is, it is preferred over the pressing of circumstances.

An injury is different than surgical cut. The healing is different between a ripping and a surgical cut. Hold still and allow God to perform what is necessary.

We returned to the bus and went to our next stop: Nazareth Village. When you drive around Nazareth it is a fairly modern city. I read somewhere that it is considered the Arab capital of Israel. Next to this hustle and bustle, is a small plot of land where a group of dedicated people have established a moment frozen in time. Through research and hard work, they have recreated Nazareth as it was in the time of Jesus. Their goal is to give an accurate perspective to many of the references made in the Scripture.

Our guide, Mahj, introduced himself.
He had a very clear American accent, so, of course, we had more questions. He is from Israel but has been studying as a college student in Arizona. From his first words, I leaned over to my grandmother, and told her he reminded me so much of my cousin, her grandson, Andrew. The way he spoke, his gestures… even the way he looked. Crazy!


We walked through the different sites in the village. Jesus had to have been with us walking around outside in 105 degree weather! Of course, we ran into our old friend, the shepherd with the clear blue eyes. So of course several of the young ladies got their picture taken.


Of course, when we got to the winepress, Will jumped up to give us his best Gideon impression. Our guide was thoroughly surprised when we all started shouting calling out to Will, “O Mighty Man of Valor!”.

We walked up to the watch tower and laughed watching as the “shepherds” yelled at each other. The ones up the hill had been throwing rocks and the shepherd at the bottom yelled at them to stop because they were stirring the sheep up! It was probably more like the times of Jesus than even Nazareth Village had planned!

We stepped into one of the homes and met a beautiful young lady that was weaving a beautiful cloth. When she, Rebekah, asked, “Where are ya’ll from?” Will laughed and said, “Well, we can guess where you are from!” And she was from the South, from Virginia. On a brake from college she had come to volunteer here at Nazareth Village for the summer. She said she had learned so much. She was happy to talk to some people from home.

We stepped into the synagogue, very thankful… it was dark and cool. Maj shared with us about the scriptural references to Nazareth. He walked throughout the room as if he were preaching it to us.

Pastor spoke up and asked, if we could have prayer for Maj. He had mentioned earlier that he had felt a call to the ministry. So the men gathered around him in the synagogue and prayed for him. It was a beautiful moment. Maj received it and said, “Wow, I wasn’t expecting this.”


Heather and Elizabeth sang the priestly blessing here and for him. “The Lord bless you and keep you and may His face shine upon you and give you peace.”

We had a little bit of a drive from Nazareth to Akko. The traffic was pretty heavy. We got our chance to see an Israeli policeman in action. Many of you may not know that Meir’s other profession is law enforcement. So if we could have we would have added the blue light special to our bus, when he jumped out in traffic and schooled
a frightened driver on the rules of the road. Flashing his badge in their window. Apparently, (now we all know) it is illegal for a single driver in a compact car to use the car pooling/ public transportation lane. I asked Meir when he got back on the bus, if he had them with him would he have written a ticket and he said, “Of course!”

We pulled into the city of Akko, Acre, Acco, Akre, Ake, Antiochia Ptolemais… Why does it have so many names? Akko is the oldest, continuously inhabited city in Israel. Many battles were fought for control of Akko because of its strategic coastal placement. Some of the familiar names who ruled or attempted to rule include, but are not limited to: Solomon, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Saladin, Richard I of England, and Napoleon. We have Ottomans, English, Egyptians, Grecians, Romans, Phillistines, Hebrews, British, French, Arab, Israeli… the list goes on.

In the 12th century, the Crusaders built quite the fortress and hospital here. The battles in Jerusalem were gruesome and they established this place as a headquarters and port. A castle of sorts was built here… including moats. In 1775, Jezzar Pasha of the Ottoman Empire reinforced the walls the Crusaders had built. He did this just in time and was able to defeat Napoleon’s attempt to capture the city. In 1923, when the British came to rule in this area, they used the same structures for their prisons and ultimately executions.

This city of so much history became one of the greatest testaments to the sacrifices made for the establishment of the state of Israel. During the British Mandate, it was illegal for the Jewish people in the country to carry weapons. This did not include their Arab neighbors. How were they to defend themselves? Several young men, who dared to defend their families and their right for a homeland were arrested under this law. Many of them were sentenced to death… right here. In these rooms, we were now walking through. They looked out of these windows from their cells. They could see the ocean. It was a beautiful view… minus the barbed wire and the bars. They saw the freedom that was at hand, freedom they would pay the ultimate price for, yet never know.

One of the prisoners condemned to die wrote this to his commanding officers of the Irgun:

“When political negotiations prove futile, one must be prepared to fight for our homeland and our freedom. Without them the very existence of our nation is jeopardized, so fight we must with all possible means. This is the only way left to our people in their hour of decision: to stand on our rights, to be ready to fight, even if for some of us this way leads to the gallows. For it is a law of history that only with blood shall a country be redeemed.

I am writing this while awaiting the hangman. This is not a moment at which I can lie, and I swear that if I had to begin my life anew I would have chosen the exact same path, regardless of the consequences for myself

Your faithful soldier, Dov.”

Meir stood at the entrance and solemnly spoke to us about the importance of this place for him personally and for Israel. He told us that the British offered a chance for these prisoners to sign written confessions that would afford them life in prison rather than death by hanging. But as part of their confession they would have had to deny the thing their heart longed for the most- a Jewish homeland. They refused to sign. These young men in their teens and twenties, approached the gallows singing:

“As Shlomo Ben-Yosef approached the gallows, he began to sing the HaTikvah. The Jewish prisoners of Acre, including his two companions from the attack, arose and joined in the singing. After the hangman’s rope cut off the youth’s voice, the prisoners finished their national anthem without him. Shlomo Ben-Yosef was the first Hebrew executed by a foreign regime in the Land of Israel since the Roman occupation nearly two thousand years prior. On the wall of his cell was found a third message. “You cannot conquer the mountain without leaving graves behind.”.


When Meir brought Pastor and Barbara to Akko on their last trip, Meir had asked if we would sing the “Hatikvah”. We stepped into the room of the gallows and did our best to sing out in honor of those who died singing in this very room.

Hatikvah “The Hope”:

As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost:
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.