Shore of Galilee
By Lindsay Grandison MacArthur
“And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God, he stood by the lake of Gennesaret, And saw two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing their nets. And he entered into one of the ships, which was Simon's, and prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land. And he sat down, and taught the people out of the ship.”
Luke 5:1-3
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Scottish artist Lindsay Grandison MacArthur painted the Sea of Galilee many times, and in Shore of Galilee he chose its stillest hour. There is no storm here, no crowd, no boat straining under a net. There is only the water, the pale shore and a small grove of trees. It is the lake as it must have looked on a thousand ordinary days—those otherwise ordinary days where the Savior did much of His work. Howard W. Hunter reminded us that this was “the lake Jesus knew as a child and as a young man.” Nazareth lay only a few hours’ walk away. Before the lake was the setting of miracles, it was simply home ground, a place He knew by its light and its weather.
And what a place. The lowest freshwater lake on earth, the Sea of Galilee lies nearly 700 feet below sea level, and along its northwestern shore spreads the plain of Gennesaret, a garden of streams, wild trees, and flowers where farmers grew grapes, wheat, figs, and olives. Josephus wrote that “there is not a plant which its fertile soil refused to produce.” The rabbis called it “the Garden of God” and said that “Jehovah hath created seven seas, but the Sea of Gennesaret is His delight.” George Adam Smith, the Scottish theologian and geographer, wrote that “the lake feeds every sense of the body with life. Sweet water, full of fish, a surface of sparkling blue,” the Sea of Galilee “is at once food, drink and air, a rest to the eye, coolness in the heat, an escape from the crowd.”
Dean Frederic Farrar believed this beauty was no accident. Gennesaret, he wrote, means “garden of abundance,” and “it was doubtless a part of Christ’s divine plan that His ministry should begin amid scenes so beautiful, and that the good tidings, which revealed to mankind their loftiest hopes and purest pleasures, should be first proclaimed in a region of unusual loveliness.” Even if every house on its banks should vanish, “the fact that He chose it as the scene of His opening ministry will give a sense of sacredness and pathos to its lonely waters till time shall be no more.”
On these shores, the Savior called Peter and Andrew to be “fishers of men.” On the hill above them He preached the Sermon on the Mount; near them He fed the five thousand. He walked on their waters and twice stilled their storms. And on one last morning, as Edersheim describes it, as “early morning was breaking, and under the rosy glow above the cool shadows were still lying on the pebbly beach,” the risen Lord made breakfast on a fire of coals and called Peter back to the work of feeding His sheep. Jeffrey R. Holland imagined Him asking gently, “Why are we back on this same shore, by these same nets?” The shore is where He meets us—to teach, to feed, and to call us a second time. “Come ye yourselves apart,” He said, “and rest a while” (Mark 6:31).
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