The Journey of Jesus

Bethlehem is the first stop because it is the birth, not because it was Jesus' home. Luke, chapter 2, places the birth in a census. A decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. Luke says this enrolling was first made by Cyrinus, the governor of Syria. Joseph went up from Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David, called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his espoused wife, who was with child.

Luke does not dress the scene. When they were there, her days were accomplished. The Douay-Rheims gives the birth in one sentence: "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:7). Shepherds were keeping the night watches over their flock. An angel told them: "Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, that shall be to all the people: For, this day, is born to you a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David" (Luke 2:10-11). The sign was the infant in the manger. A multitude of the heavenly army praised God. The shepherds went with haste, found Mary and Joseph and the infant, and told what had been said. Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart. The child was circumcised on the eighth day and named Jesus, the name given before he was conceived. Luke then takes the family to the Temple in Jerusalem for the presentation, and afterwards home to Nazareth. The finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple, at twelve years old, also belongs to Luke 2, but that scene is in Jerusalem, not in the cave at Bethlehem.

Matthew, chapter 2, tells a different part of the same infancy, not a second birth story. Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Juda in the days of King Herod. Wise men came from the east to Jerusalem asking, "Where is he that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to adore him" (Matthew 2:1-2). Matthew does not say how many wise men there were, or that they were kings. The number three, and the names later given to them, are tradition, not the text. Herod was troubled. The chief priests and the scribes pointed him to Bethlehem, because the prophet had said the ruler of Israel would come from there. Matthew is using the prophecy of Micheas, that Bethlehem Ephrata, small among the thousands of Juda, would bring forth the ruler. The star led the wise men to the house. They found the child with Mary his mother, adored him, and offered gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Warned in sleep, they did not return to Herod. Joseph was told to take the child and his mother into Egypt. Herod, seeing that he was deluded, killed the male children in Bethlehem and the coasts thereof, from two years old and under. The Church keeps them as the Holy Innocents. After Herod's death the family returned, but not to settle in Judea, because Archelaus reigned there. They went into Galilee and dwelt in Nazareth.

The Church reads the two chapters together. Luke's road is Nazareth to Bethlehem, then back to Nazareth. Matthew's road is Bethlehem, Egypt, and then Nazareth. The manger, the shepherds, the city of David, and the prophecy are what the Gospels give. The cave in which the Church prays is the place those chapters have been kept.

Luke also gives Bethlehem its older name in the story of David. This is the city of David, a few miles south of Jerusalem, not the fortress of David inside Jerusalem itself. Keeping those two cities of David apart saves a great deal of confusion later, when the Cenacle on Mount Zion comes into view.

Pilgrims go to Bethlehem because the Church has prayed on this hillside since the fourth century, and because the Gospel names the town. The church over the traditional birthplace is the Basilica of the Nativity, on Manger Square. Saint Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, is remembered as the promoter of the first great churches of the Holy Land. A basilica was raised here in the time of Constantine, in the 330s. Little of that first building is still standing as a wall a visitor can touch. It was badly damaged in the Samaritan revolt of the sixth century. The Emperor Justinian rebuilt on a larger scale, and the church the pilgrim enters is substantially that sixth-century basilica: a long nave with four rows of columns, in the form of a cross. Wooden trapdoors in the floor open onto sections of the mosaic pavement of the Constantinian church. On the upper walls, fragments of Crusader mosaic remain, with Latin and Greek inscriptions. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem notes scenes from the New Testament, images of councils, ancestors of Jesus in medallions, and an inscription naming the painter Basil.

The entrance is the Door of Humility. The older doorway was much taller. In the Ottoman period, after 1516, it was reduced to a low opening, about a metre and a half high, so that a rider could not come in on horseback. Christians have taken the forced bow as a fitting way to approach the place where the Son of God was laid in a manger.

Under the sanctuary is the Grotto of the Nativity, reached by curving stairs. At the eastern end, beneath a small altar, a fourteen-pointed silver star is set into the marble floor. The Latin inscription reads Hic De Virgine Maria Jesus Christus Natus Est, "Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary," with the date 1717. A round opening in the star lets a pilgrim touch the stone beneath. Nearby, tradition places the manger, and an altar remembers the adoration of the wise men. The Gospel does not mark a star on a floor. The star is a sign put there by the Church, not a relic of the night itself. Lamps of the communities that share the basilica hang in the grotto.

The basilica is not a Latin church alone. Under the Status Quo, the old Ottoman settlement of rights which still governs the great shared shrines, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Catholics, through the Franciscans, each have their places and their times. The altar of the Nativity is in the care of the Greek Orthodox and the Armenians. A Catholic who wants the Latin liturgy goes next door.

Adjoining the basilica on the north is the Church of Saint Catherine, the Catholic parish church, with the Franciscan convent. The Franciscans have lived in Bethlehem since 1347. Saint Catherine's has medieval origins and was enlarged over time; the church a pilgrim sees was rebuilt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is administered within the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Latin Patriarch celebrates Midnight Mass here on Christmas Eve. Beneath it lie further grottoes tied to the memory of Saint Jerome, who lived and worked in Bethlehem, and of the Roman noblewomen Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium, who settled here with him. The passage from Saint Catherine's into the Nativity grotto is the way Latin pilgrims often enter the cave.

Two other places in the town belong to the same days, and both should be kept in their proper rank.

The Gospel sends the shepherds from the fields to the manger. The field itself is tradition rather than a named place in the text. At Beit Sahour, east of the basilica, the Custody of the Holy Land keeps the Catholic Shepherds' Field, the traditional place of that night. The chapel, built in 1953 to the design of the architect Antonio Barluzzi, is round, like a tent, and stands over a grotto, with remains of a Byzantine monastery on the site.

A short distance from the basilica, the Franciscans also keep the Chapel of the Milk Grotto. Tradition says the Holy Family sheltered in a cave, and that a drop of Our Lady's milk whitened the stone. The Gospel does not mention this cave. It is a devotion beside the biblical story, not part of the biblical story. People still come to pray there, especially parents.

Why people go is simple enough to say and hard to exhaust. They go to kneel where the Church has said, for sixteen centuries, that the Word made flesh was laid in a manger. They go to hear Luke 2 read in the place the reading names. They go at Christmas, when the square fills and the Patriarch's Mass is sung at Saint Catherine's. They go, too, because Bethlehem is a living Palestinian town, not a museum, and the parish is a real parish.

Bethlehem lies in the hills of Judea, a little south of Jerusalem. The Basilica of the Nativity stands about eight or nine kilometres south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in a straight line. On this journey it is the southern starting point. Nazareth, Cana, and Capernaum are all far to the north, in Galilee. The Jordan baptism place is not on the way north through the hills. It is east of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, down in the rift valley, near the river and north of the Dead Sea. Emmaus, at the Franciscan shrine of El-Qubeibeh, is north-west of Jerusalem, so Bethlehem and Emmaus sit on opposite sides of the holy city. The shepherds' chapel at Beit Sahour is the near neighbour of the basilica, on the eastern side of the town, not a separate region.

Nazareth is the town of the hidden life, and of the day the Word was made flesh.

Luke, chapter 1, sets the Annunciation in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy. "The angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth" (Luke 1:26), to a virgin espoused to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. The angel said, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women" (Luke 1:28). Mary was troubled and asked how this could be, since she knew not man. The angel answered: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35). He gave Elizabeth's own child as a sign. Mary said: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). The angel departed. Luke does not say whether this was in a house, a cave, or by a well. He says it was in Nazareth, and he gives the words.

Matthew, chapter 1, tells the same conception from Joseph's side. Mary was found with child before they came together. Joseph, being a just man and not willing to expose her, was minded to put her away privately. An angel of the Lord told him in sleep not to fear to take Mary as his wife, for what was conceived in her was of the Holy Ghost. He was to name the child Jesus, because he would save his people from their sins. Matthew reads this as the fulfilment of Isaias: a virgin shall conceive, and the name Emmanuel, God with us. Joseph rose and did as he was commanded.

After Egypt, Matthew 2 says Joseph was warned in sleep and retired into the quarters of Galilee, and coming he dwelt in a city called Nazareth. Luke 2 says that when the family had performed all things according to the law, they returned into Galilee, to their city Nazareth, and the child grew. The one scene of the hidden years that the Gospel actually narrates is the Passover journey when Jesus was twelve: he stayed behind in Jerusalem, was found in the Temple among the doctors, and went down with them to Nazareth and was subject to them. His mother kept all these words in her heart. Luke says Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and grace with God and men. The Gospels do not describe the carpenter's bench, the daily meals, or the words spoken in the house. Those years are holy because they are hidden, not because a later writer has filled them in.

The public ministry breaks the silence in Luke, chapter 4. Jesus came to Nazareth, where he was brought up, and went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, as his custom was. The book of Isaias was delivered to him. He read: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Wherefore he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the contrite of heart" (Luke 4:18), and the lines that follow, about liberty, sight, and the acceptable year of the Lord. He sat down and said, "This day is fulfilled this scripture in your ears" (Luke 4:21). They wondered, and said, Is not this the son of Joseph? He would not work in Nazareth the mighty works they had heard of from Capernaum. He spoke of Elias sent to a widow in Sidon, and of Eliseus cleansing only Naaman the Syrian. The congregation rose up and thrust him out of the city, and brought him to the brow of the hill on which the city was built, meaning to cast him down headlong. He passed through the midst of them and went his way.

John adds one sharp sentence from outside. When Philip told Nathanael that they had found him of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth, Nathanael said, "Can any thing of good come from Nazareth?" (John 1:46). The village the Church keeps under the basilica was a small farming town, and the question belongs to that town.

The Catholic heart of Nazareth is the Basilica of the Annunciation, in the centre of the modern city, in the care of the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land. The building a pilgrim enters was consecrated on 23 March 1969. The architect was Giovanni Muzio. It is a church on two levels, planned so that a large upper church could hold the glorification of Our Lady, while the lower church kept the pilgrim close to the rock. A wide opening in the floor lets the eye travel from the cave up into the dome. Pope Paul VI visited the shrine while it was still being built, in 1964. Pope John Paul II came as a pilgrim in 2000 and left a golden rose, which is carried in the Annunciation procession.

The lower church is built on the plan of the Crusader basilica. Three apses recall the twelfth-century east end. In the middle of the floor, below the present pavement, is the Grotto of the Annunciation: a rock-cut room, partly natural and partly shaped by later builders, with a small apse. The altar bears the inscription Verbum caro hic factum est, "Here the Word was made flesh," kept from the Franciscan church of 1730. Two columns have long been pointed out, one called the angel's and one, broken, called the Virgin's. They are medieval markers of the memory, not objects described by Luke. Seven steps lead down. Grain silos cut in the rock beside the entrance belong to the old village. They show that this cave was part of a house and a working farm in the town where Mary lived.

The Custody's archaeologists, above all Father Bellarmino Bagatti in the 1950s, when the eighteenth-century church was taken down, found three things that a student should be able to repeat. First, the village: caves, silos, cisterns, and presses on the slope between the basilica and the Church of Saint Joseph, an agricultural settlement of the centuries around the time of Jesus. Second, the plans of a Byzantine church and a Crusader cathedral, both wrapped around the same grotto. Third, under the Byzantine mosaics, plaster, graffiti, and building pieces of a still earlier place of Christian veneration. Beneath the Byzantine mosaics the Custody found a rock-cut basin and the remains of a still earlier place of Christian veneration. Christians were honouring this cave long before the Crusaders, and a real village stood here in the Gospel period.

The pilgrim from Piacenza, about 570, saw the house of Mary made into a church, and a synagogue still used by Jews. The pilgrim Arculf, about 670, saw two churches: one of the house of Mary, and one called the church of the Nutrition, where the child was brought up. The second is the memory now kept at the Church of Saint Joseph, a short walk north of the basilica, past the convent. The present church is a neo-Romanesque building of 1911 to 1914, by Brother Wendelin Hinterkeuser, on the remains of a Crusader church. Its crypt shows caves, silos, and a basin. Tradition calls the place Joseph's house, or his workshop. Arculf's word was nutrition: the place of the upbringing. That is as much as the early pilgrims give. They do not hand us a workbench.

The upper basilica is bright, and its walls carry images of Our Lady sent from many countries. The great mosaic of the apse confesses the Church as one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic. A chapel is kept for the Custody of the Holy Land, and another for the Blessed Sacrament. These are twentieth-century gifts. They do not pretend to be the house. They teach the consequence of the house: that the Incarnation is celebrated by the whole Church.

Two other Nazareth sites are often folded into the same morning, and each needs a label.

Mary's Spring, called locally Ain Sitti Maryam, still flows in the town. An old tradition, not the Gospel of Luke, says the angel first addressed Mary as she drew water. The Catholic shrine of the Annunciation is the grotto in the basilica, where the Church reads Luke 1.

South of the town, the Mount of Precipitation is the traditional place of the brow from which the crowd meant to throw Jesus. A church in the town is shown by tradition as the synagogue of Luke 4.

The Latin parish worships at the basilica and at Saint Joseph's. The Custody gives the Latin community as about five thousand faithful. Nazareth today is a large Arab city in Lower Galilee, with Greek Orthodox, Melkite, Maronite, and Latin Christians, and a Muslim majority. The shrine is not apart from that city. The Custody also runs a school here that takes Christian and Muslim pupils.

The feast of Saint Joseph is kept on 19 March, and the Annunciation on 25 March, with a vigil in the grotto and a procession in which the Book of the Gospels is carried, because this is the place where the Word was made flesh. On Tuesday evenings the Crown of Nazareth is prayed: five scenes from the life of Jesus in this town, offered for families. That devotion is local. It is a way of staying with the Gospel texts, not a fifth Gospel.

Nazareth is in Lower Galilee, in the hills above the plain of Jezreel, which the older writers call Esdraelon. The basilica lies a little over a hundred kilometres north of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in a straight line, and much further by the roads that climb out of the Jordan valley or come up the coast. It is the home town of this journey. Cana, at Kafr Kanna, is only about seven kilometres to the north-east. Capernaum is further, about thirty-three kilometres north-east of the basilica, down on the north-west shore of the Sea of Galilee. The Jordan baptism place is far to the south of Nazareth, near the Dead Sea end of the river, not on the lake. Bethlehem is the other end of the country. Mount Tabor, the traditional mountain of the Transfiguration, is visible in the region of the Jezreel plain, but it is not one of these seven stops.

All four Gospels put the baptism of Jesus at the Jordan, at the hands of John. They do not give a grid reference. They do give a region, a preacher, and a revelation.

Matthew, chapter 3, sets John in the desert of Judea, preaching, "Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the country about the Jordan, confessing their sins, and were baptized by him in the Jordan. He wore camel's hair and a leather girdle and ate locusts and wild honey. He told the Pharisees and Sadducees to bring forth fruit worthy of penance, and he said that one was coming after him who would baptize in the Holy Ghost and fire. Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. John would have stayed him. Jesus answered that it was fitting that they should fulfil all justice. "And Jesus being baptized, forthwith came out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened to him: and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him. And behold a voice from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:16-17).

Mark, chapter 1, is shorter and, in this Gospel, addressed to Jesus: Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan, and a voice from heaven said, "Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11). Luke, chapter 3, sets the date by the rulers of the day, names John's preaching and his imprisonment, and says that when all the people were baptized, and Jesus also, and he was praying, heaven was opened, the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape as a dove, and the voice came. John, chapter 1, is the witness of the Baptist rather than a description of the moment in the water. Priests and Levites from Jerusalem asked John who he was. He said he was not the Christ, not Elias, not the prophet, but the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. The Douay-Rheims then fixes the place in a way the other Gospels do not: "These things were done in Bethania, beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing" (John 1:28). The next day John saw Jesus coming and said, "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). He testified that he saw the Spirit coming down as a dove and remaining upon him, and that this was the one who would baptize with the Holy Ghost.

John 3:23 also says that John was baptizing at Ennon near Salim, because there was much water there. That is another day in the Baptist's ministry. The baptism of Jesus is the Jordan. John 10:40 says that Jesus later went again beyond the Jordan, to the place where John was baptizing first. The Church has kept that river, and the name Bethania beyond the Jordan, as the place of the baptism.

The baptism is not a private moment only. It is the start of the public mission. The Father's voice, the Spirit's descent, and the Son standing in the water are the reason the Church reads this scene on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and the reason a Christian who enters the water of Baptism is being joined to this one.

The river here is not a wide green stream. Near the end of its course it is a muddy channel in a hot rift, with the Dead Sea a few kilometres to the south and Jericho to the west. The Church keeps the holy place on both banks of this same stretch of water.

On the eastern bank, in the Kingdom of Jordan, is Al-Maghtas, the place of immersion, also called Bethany Beyond the Jordan. UNESCO inscribed it in 2015 as a World Heritage Site. The protected area has two parts: Tell el-Kharrar, also called Elijah's Hill, Jabal Mar Elias, and, nearer the river, the churches of Saint John the Baptist. Excavation has found Roman and Byzantine remains: churches, a monastery, hermit caves, a cruciform baptismal pool, marble steps, and a chapel tradition calls the Mantle Chapel, where later pilgrims said the Lord's garments were laid. Pilgrims from the late Roman and Byzantine centuries left crosses scored in plaster. The site fell out of easy reach in modern times and was recovered for pilgrimage in recent decades. Pope John Paul II prayed here in 2000. In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI, with King Abdullah II, laid a foundation stone for a Catholic church. Pope Francis came in 2014, on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. On 10 January 2025 the Church of the Baptism of the Lord, on the eastern bank, was consecrated. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, acted as pontifical legate, with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. The Latin Patriarchate describes a large shrine, with houses for religious of the Incarnate Word, built after land was given for a Catholic church in 2003. This is now the Latin Church's own church on the Jordanian side. It should not be confused with the ruined Byzantine churches closer to the water. A pilgrim can stand in a new Catholic church and, a short walk away, look at the pools and chapels of the fifth and sixth centuries.

On the western bank, at Qasr al-Yahud, the Custody of the Holy Land has the Franciscan church of Saint John the Baptist. The chapel was built in 1956. Pilgrimage to this stretch of the river is attested from the seventeenth century. In 1967 the area became a minefield, and the friars left. A way in was opened for Pope John Paul II's pilgrimage in 2000. Daily visits became possible again around 2011. Clearing of the mines was finished later, the keys were returned in 2020, and on 10 January 2021 the friars celebrated Mass in the church again, after more than fifty years. A path behind the church leads to an altar at the water, also on Custody land. Other Churches, including the Greek Orthodox, have their own chapels along the same western bank. The river is narrow enough that a person on one bank hears the singing on the other.

People come to be sprinkled, to renew the promises of Baptism, to fill a bottle, and to stand in the line of Matthew 3. The water is the point. The churches exist so that the water is not a picnic place only, but a place where the Gospel is read and the Eucharist is offered. White clothing, changing rooms, and a strong current are practical matters the Gospels do not mention and a pilgrim should not ignore. The theological matter is the one John stated: the one who stands in this river is the Lamb of God.

Qasr al-Yahud lies about thirty kilometres east of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the Jordan valley, and Al-Maghtas is about a kilometre further east, across the river. UNESCO places the eastern site nine kilometres north of the Dead Sea. From Bethlehem the distance is of the same order, a little longer, and the road drops from the Judean hills into the rift. Jericho is the nearby town on the western side. Nazareth is roughly a hundred kilometres to the north. Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee are further north again, where the Jordan enters the lake, not where it leaves the valley towards the Dead Sea. A map that draws a line from Nazareth to Jerusalem should show the baptism as a descent to the river in the south, not as a stop on the lakeshore. The two banks are so close that a map of the whole country can barely separate them. A map of the valley must show both, or it will send a pilgrim to the wrong state.

Cana belongs to John, and to John alone. The other Gospels never name it.

John, chapter 2: "And the third day, there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee: and the mother of Jesus was there. And Jesus also was invited, and his disciples, to the marriage." The wine failed. Mary said to her son, "They have no wine." Jesus answered, "Woman, what is that to me and to thee? my hour is not yet come." She said to the waiters, "Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye" (John 2:5). Six waterpots of stone were set there, "according to the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three measures apiece." He told the waiters to fill them, and they filled them to the brim. He told them to draw out and carry it to the chief steward. The steward did not know where it had come from. The waiters did. The steward said to the bridegroom that every man sets out the good wine first, and the worse when men have well drunk, "but thou hast kept the good wine until now." John then tells the reader how to weigh the sign: "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee; and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him" (John 2:11). Afterwards he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brethren, and his disciples, and they stayed there not many days.

The text is careful about what it does not say. It does not name the bride or the bridegroom. It does not say that John himself was the bridegroom, or that the wine was a particular vintage, or that Mary asked for a wonder in so many words. She stated the need, and she told the servants to obey. The stone jars were for the Jewish rites of purification, which is why they were large and why they were stone. The sign is the first in John's counting, and its fruit is faith.

John, chapter 4, brings Jesus back to the same village. "He came again therefore into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine." A ruler, whose son was sick at Capernaum, asked him to come down before the boy died. Jesus said, "Go thy way; thy son liveth." The man believed the word and went. His servants met him and said the boy lived. The fever had left him at the seventh hour, the hour of the word spoken in Cana. "This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee" (John 4:54). Cana and Capernaum are linked by that journey: a word in the hills, a healing down by the lake.

One more verse keeps Cana from being only a wedding. In John 21, among the disciples who went fishing after the Resurrection, John names "Nathanael, who was of Cana of Galilee." The man who had asked whether anything good could come from Nazareth was from Cana. The two villages are neighbours in the Gospel as well as on the map.

The Church reads the wedding at more than one depth, and all of them are already in the text. It is a mercy to a particular household, on a particular day, when the feast would have failed. It is the first manifestation of glory, and the disciples believed. It is a sign set beside purification: the water set apart for washing becomes the wine of the feast. Christian preaching has long set this sign next to the Eucharist, not because John uses the word Eucharist here, but because the same Gospel will later, at Capernaum, speak of eating the flesh of the Son of man, and because the Church has always seen in the good wine a promise of the wedding feast of the Lamb. That is the Church's reading of the sign.

The Catholic shrine of Cana is at Kafr Kanna, a town in the hills of Galilee a few kilometres north-east of Nazareth, where the Church has long kept the wedding. The Latin church is the Franciscan Wedding Church, a white stone building of the late nineteenth century, in the care of the Custody of the Holy Land and serving as the parish church of the Latin Patriarchate. Under it are the remains of a Byzantine church built to commemorate the changing of water into wine. A stone jar is kept in the shrine. It is a vessel of the church's tradition, not one of the six named in the Gospel. Couples come to Kafr Kanna to marry, or to renew the promises of marriage, and the Gospel of the wedding is read over them. The parish is a living parish of the Latin Patriarchate, and the feast of the first sign is kept here with the other Catholic rites of the town.

Kafr Kanna is about seven kilometres north-east of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, still in the Galilean hills. Capernaum is about twenty-six kilometres north-east of Kafr Kanna, on the lake, which is why John's ruler can go down from Cana to Capernaum and meet his servants on the way. The Jordan near the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Emmaus are all far to the south. A map of this journey should show Cana as a short step out of Nazareth, before the longer drop to the Sea of Galilee.

After Nazareth rejected him, Jesus made Capernaum the centre of the Galilean ministry. Matthew, chapter 4, says that when he heard John had been delivered up, he retired into Galilee, left Nazareth, and came and dwelt in Capernaum on the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim, so that the word of Isaias might be fulfilled: a people that sat in darkness has seen a great light. "From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say: Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). The Douay-Rheims gives the call as "Do penance," and the note in that edition says the word covers both amendment of life and the punishment of past sin. The sentence is the programme of the town.

Mark, chapter 1, gives the lakeshore. Walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew casting a net, and said, "Come after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men" (Mark 1:17). They left their nets. A little further on he called James and John, the sons of Zebedee, in the boat with the hired men. They went into Capernaum, and on the sabbath he taught in the synagogue, not as the scribes. A man with an unclean spirit cried out. Jesus rebuked the spirit, and it came out. They went straight to the house of Simon and Andrew. Simon's mother-in-law lay in a fever. He took her by the hand, and the fever left her, and she ministered to them. At evening the whole town was at the door, and he healed many. In the morning he went apart to pray, and then on to the next towns, because this was why he had come.

Mark, chapter 2, is the day of the paralytic. Back in Capernaum, it was heard that he was in the house. The crowd filled the room and the doorway. Four men uncovered the roof and let down the bed. Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the paralytic that his sins were forgiven. The scribes, sitting there, asked who could forgive sins but God. He asked which was easier, to say the sins were forgiven or to say rise and walk. So that they might know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins, he told the man to take up his bed and go home. The crowd glorified God. The same chapter, in the other Gospels as well, places the call of Levi, or Matthew, the publican, at the customs post of this town. Capernaum stood near a road and a border. Tolls were collected here. It was not a desert.

Luke 7 and Matthew 8 tell of the centurion. In Luke, the elders of the Jews ask Jesus to come because the centurion loves the nation and has built the synagogue. The centurion sends word that he is not worthy that Jesus should enter under his roof, but that a word will heal the servant. Jesus marvels, and says he has not found so great faith in Israel. The Church still uses his sentence, in a later form, before Holy Communion: Lord, I am not worthy. The sentence was first spoken about a house in Capernaum.

Matthew 11 and Luke 10 also contain the hard word. Capernaum is named with Chorazin and Bethsaida. Mighty works were done there, and they did not repent. Capernaum, exalted, will be brought down. The town of the ministry is also the town of the warning. A study that keeps only the healings has not read the chapter.

John, chapter 6, is the teaching that gives Capernaum its deepest Catholic memory. After the feeding of the five thousand, on the far side of the water, the crowd crossed to Capernaum looking for him. He told them they sought him because they had eaten, not because they had seen signs. They asked for a sign like the manna. He said it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven, but his Father. "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall not hunger: and he that believeth in me shall never thirst" (John 6:35 in the Douay-Rheims). They murmured, because they knew him as the son of Joseph. He went on: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world." Except they eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, they have no life in them. Many disciples said the saying was hard. Many walked no more with him. He asked the twelve whether they also would go. Simon Peter answered, "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life." John closes the discourse with a place-name: "These things he said, teaching in the synagogue, in Capharnaum."

The Church calls this the promise of the Eucharist. It is not yet the Last Supper. It is the teaching, given in this synagogue, without which the Supper in Jerusalem is harder to understand. The feast kept by the Custody at Capernaum on a Friday in Eastertide is the feast of that promise.

One more domestic note belongs here. John 2:12 says that after Cana, Jesus went down to Capernaum with his mother and his brethren. Mark 3 says that his mother and his brethren came to the house and stood outside, and that he looked at those sitting around him and said that whoever does the will of God is his brother and sister and mother. Our Lady was in this town. The Gospel does not build a shrine for her here. It shows her among his own, and it shows him widening the family to those who hear the word.

Capernaum, Kfar Nahum, the village of Nahum, is no longer a living town. The Arabic name of the ruins was Tell Hum. The Custody of the Holy Land bought the site in a long negotiation with the Bedouin and the Ottoman authorities, completed in 1894, and has excavated and guarded it since. What the pilgrim walks is the village, the synagogue, and the house the Church has kept.

The pilgrim walks into a black village. The houses are basalt, the local stone, in blocks of rooms around courtyards, with ovens, millstones, and a main street running down towards the lake. The roofs of the Gospel period were of beams, branches, and packed earth, which is why four men could open one. The lake is the Sea of Galilee, also called the sea of Tiberias, more than two hundred metres below the level of the Mediterranean. Three kilometres to the south are the springs of Tabgha, where the Church remembers the multiplication of the loaves and the primacy of Peter. Those are neighbouring Gospels, not this stop, but a visitor who can see Tabgha from the shore understands why John 6 moves so easily from the grass where the crowd sat to the synagogue of Capernaum.

The white building is the synagogue. It is limestone, brought from the hills, and it was meant to be seen against the black houses. The prayer room measures about twenty-three by seventeen metres, with benches, Corinthian capitals, and a courtyard on the east. Franciscan architects rebuilt parts of it from the original blocks found on the ground. The excavations of Fathers Virgilio Corbo and Stanislao Loffreda, with the coins under the pavement, date this white building to the fifth century. Under the floor the Custody shows the basalt remains of the earlier synagogue, the one in which the Lord taught and in which he gave the promise of the Bread of Life.

About thirty metres south is the house called Peter's. The Gospels put Jesus in the house of Simon and Andrew. Pilgrims from the fourth century were already being shown a church made of that house. Egeria, around the 380s, is reported to have seen it. The archaeology follows the same line. A first-century house of basalt was, by the late first century, singled out: one room was plastered and treated with a care the other rooms did not receive. In the fourth century an enclosure wall set the block apart from the village, and pilgrims scratched invocations to Christ on the plaster, in Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin. In the fifth century an octagonal church was built directly over the venerated room, with a mosaic peacock, an old sign of life beyond death, and a baptistery on the east. The octagon is the Byzantine way of marking a precise memory, used also at other holy places. The village itself was abandoned by about the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

On 29 June 1990, the feast of Saint Peter, a new memorial was consecrated over the ruins. The architect was Ildo Avetta. It is a modern building, raised so that it seems to float above the old walls, in the form of a boat, because Peter was called from a boat to be a fisher of men. The inscription on the face reads, in Latin, that it was dedicated to Blessed Peter the Apostle in 1990. A pilgrim looks down through an opening onto the venerated room, and can also walk at ancient ground level. This is not a replica of Peter's house. It is a cover and a church, so that Mass can be offered over the room without destroying it. Father Corbo, who led the excavation, is buried beside it.

East of the Franciscan property, a Greek Orthodox church stands on another part of the ancient town. The main visit, the synagogue, and the house are on the Custody's side.

Three feasts shape the Catholic year here: the promise of the Eucharist, on a Friday in Eastertide; Saint Peter, on 29 June; and the solemnity of Capernaum, the city of Jesus, on a Saturday in October. People come for the shore, where the call was spoken, for the house, where the paralytic's sins were forgiven, and for the synagogue, where the Bread of Life was named. They also stand in a ruined town over which Jesus pronounced a woe. Both are in the Gospel. A pilgrimage that cannot bear the woe has not yet read Matthew 11.

Capernaum is on the north-west shore of the Sea of Galilee. It is about thirty-three kilometres north-east of the Basilica of the Annunciation, and about twenty-six kilometres north-east of Kafr Kanna. The Jordan River enters the lake a few kilometres to the north. The baptism place of this journey is not this northern Jordan. It is the southern Jordan, near the Dead Sea, a long way down the valley. Tabgha is the near neighbour to the south, then the lake opens towards Tiberias. Jerusalem and Bethlehem are more than a hundred kilometres to the south. This is the furthest north of the seven stops, and the only one on the lake. A map that puts Capernaum in the Judean hills has confused it with somewhere else.

Jerusalem is not one scene. It is the city of the Passion, the tomb, and the first meetings with the risen Lord, and the Gospels have been leading here from the start. A study page cannot retell all of Holy Week verse by verse. It can put the places a pilgrim will be shown back into the chapters that mention them, and refuse the ones the chapters do not mention.

He went up for the feasts. John's Gospel is built around those journeys. The last of them is the Passover of the Passion. On the Sunday before it, he entered the city from the east. The Mount of Olives, Bethphage, and Bethany are the approaches. Crowds took branches and cried Hosanna. Luke says that when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it. The little church called Dominus Flevit, the Lord wept, on the slope of the Mount of Olives, marks that moment. It is a traditional localisation of Luke 19, designed in the twentieth century. The tears are in the Gospel. The building is not.

In the evenings of that week he went out to the Mount of Olives. John 18 names the place of the arrest with care. After the discourse and the prayer of chapter 17, Jesus went with his disciples over the brook Cedron, where there was a garden, into which he entered with his disciples. Judas knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with them. The Synoptic Gospels call the place Gethsemani, and they describe the prayer. He took Peter, James, and John apart, and began to fear and to be sorrowful. He asked that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him, and he prayed that the Father's will be done. He found them sleeping. Luke says that his sweat became as drops of blood. Then Judas came with a band. Peter cut off the ear of the high priest's servant, Malchus. Jesus healed the ear, and told Peter to put up the sword. They bound him and led him away.

The trials occupy the night and the morning: Annas, Caiaphas, the council, Peter in the courtyard denying him three times, then the governor's hall. John says they led Jesus to the praetorium, and that it was early, and that the accusers did not enter, so as not to be defiled, and so miss the Passover. Pilate questioned him. Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world." Pilate had him scourged. The soldiers plaited a crown of thorns. Pilate brought him out and said, "Behold the Man." He sat on the judgment seat in a place called, in Hebrew, Gabbatha, and in Greek Lithostrotos. The chief priests said they had no king but Caesar. Pilate delivered him to be crucified.

The fourteen stations of the Cross are a devotion of the Church, walked in Jerusalem on Fridays by the Franciscans, and walked in every parish church. The Via Dolorosa is that way of prayer through the Old City, beginning near the Ecce Homo arch and the convent of the Sisters of Zion and ending in the Holy Sepulchre. John names the praetorium. The street itself is the Church's traditional path of the Passion.

John 19 says he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called Calvary, in Hebrew Golgotha. They crucified him between two others. Pilate wrote the title: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The soldiers cast lots for the coat woven from the top. There stood by the cross his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen. He said to his mother, "Woman, behold thy son," and to the disciple, "Behold thy mother." He said, "I thirst," and then, "It is consummated," and gave up his spirit. A soldier opened his side with a spear, and there came out blood and water. The Church has always read that flow as the birth of the sacraments, the water of Baptism and the blood of the Eucharist, from the side of the dead Christ, as Eve was taken from the side of Adam. That is doctrine read out of the verse, and the verse itself is the witness: he that saw it hath given testimony.

Joseph of Arimathea asked for the body. Nicodemus brought myrrh and aloes. They bound the body in linen cloths with the spices. John says that in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid. There, because of the parasceve of the Jews, they laid Jesus, because the sepulchre was nigh at hand (John 19:41-42). The nearness is the fact that explains Jerusalem's greatest church. Calvary and the tomb are not two sanctuaries in two quarters of the city. John puts them in the same garden, the tomb close by, because the sabbath was about to begin.

On the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalen came and saw the stone taken away. She ran to Peter and to the other disciple. They ran. The other disciple saw the linen cloths and did not go in. Peter went in, and saw the cloths, and the napkin that had been about his head wrapped apart. Then the other disciple went in, and he saw, and believed. Mary stayed, weeping. She saw two angels, then a man she took for the gardener, until he said, "Mary." She answered, "Rabboni." He sent her to the brethren. That evening, the doors being shut, he stood in the midst and said, "Peace be to you." He showed his hands and his side. He breathed on them and said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." Thomas was absent, and would not believe unless he touched the wounds. Eight days later Jesus came again. Thomas said, "My Lord, and my God."

The Last Supper is told in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and, in its own way, John 13. He sent disciples to prepare the Passover in a house, in an upper room. Luke gives the fullest words over the cup and the bread, and the command to do this in memory of him. John gives the washing of the feet, the morsel given to Judas, and the new commandment. The Church understands these texts together as the institution of the Eucharist and of the priesthood, on the night he was betrayed. The room was in Jerusalem. Luke does not say on which hill.

Pentecost, in Acts 2, finds them again in one place, and the Spirit comes as a wind and as fire. Christian memory has long set that room in the same upper room as the Supper. The text of Acts says they were together in the city. It does not repeat the address.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, inside the present walls. It is the church of the garden John described: the rock of Calvary and the tomb, under one roof, because they were nigh at hand.

In the fourth century, after Constantine, the site was identified, the Roman temple that had stood over it was removed, and a great complex of buildings was raised and dedicated about the year 335. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim destroyed the church. It was rebuilt by the Byzantines in the eleventh century, and again, in the form a pilgrim still partly sees, by the Crusaders, and consecrated in 1149. Fire, earthquake, and repair have marked it since. It is not a clean monument. It is a church that has been wounded and mended for seventeen centuries, and the wounds are part of its truth.

Inside, the pilgrim meets, in a small space, the end of the Gospels. A stone of anointing remembers the binding of the body, though the present slab is not a stone named by John. Stairs lead up to Calvary, where the rock can be touched under glass, at Greek and Latin altars. Below, the Chapel of Adam is set against the same rock. In the rotunda stands the Aedicule, the small shrine built over the tomb. The marble that covers it is later work. The tomb itself is the burial shelf of an old Jewish rock-cut grave. In 2016 and 2017 the Aedicule was restored, and the burial place was opened and examined so that the shrine could be strengthened. Behind and around are the choir of the Greeks, called the Catholicon, the Franciscan chapel, the chapel of Saint Helena, and the chapel of the finding of the Cross, down in the ancient quarry. The finding of the Cross is a fourth-century tradition, told of Saint Helena. It is not a verse of the Passion narratives. It is the reason there is a crypt, not the reason there is a church.

Six ancient communities share the building under the Status Quo: the Greek Orthodox, the Franciscans for the Latin Church, and the Armenian Apostolic Church as the three principal custodians, with the Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian Churches in their own chapels and times. The arrangements are exact, and they are often tense. A ladder left on a ledge of the facade, and the custom by which two Muslim families have for centuries opened and closed the door, are visible pieces of that long settlement. They are not edifying in every way. They are true, and a Catholic should know them, because the Holy Sepulchre is not a Latin parish church. It is the common shrine of the places where the Lord died and rose, and the Catholic altars inside it are the Franciscan ones.

Mass is offered here every day, in several rites. People come before dawn, when the building is quietest, to go into the Aedicule. They come for the liturgy of Good Friday and of the Easter Vigil, which in Jerusalem is still kept, by the different communities, according to more than one calendar. They come because there is nowhere else in the world where the altar stands over the place of the Resurrection.

Gethsemane is outside the Old City, across the Kidron, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. The Catholic church is the Basilica of the Agony, called the Church of All Nations because several countries gave towards it. Antonio Barluzzi designed it, and it was consecrated in 1924, over the remains of a Byzantine church and a Crusader chapel. The rock of the agony is left bare before the altar. The windows are dark on purpose. Outside, in the garden, are ancient olive trees, part of the traditional place of the prayer. The garden, the brook Cedron, the slope, and the view back to the Temple Mount and the city wall are the setting John and the other Gospels describe. Judas knew the place because Jesus often resorted there.

On Mount Zion, south of the present walls, is the Cenacle, the Church's shrine of the upper room. The hall a visitor enters is Gothic, a Crusader room with pointed arches, in a building that has been a church and later a mosque. The traditional tomb of David is shown beneath it. The memory of the Supper and of Pentecost on this hill is ancient. The vaults the pilgrim sees are medieval, the shrine of that memory.

The Temple Mount, the pools, the house of Caiaphas on the slope of Zion, the Lithostrotos under the convent of the Sisters of Zion, and the churches of Saint Anne and of the flagellation belong to the same city and the same week. The spine of this stop is the three places the Gospels force on a reader: the garden of the prayer and the arrest, the upper room of the Supper, and the garden where the cross and the new tomb stood close together.

Jerusalem gathers the southern end of the journey, with Bethlehem about eight or nine kilometres to the south. Inside the city the three places are close, and a walker can confuse them if the map is only a dot labelled Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulchre is inside the Old City, in the Christian Quarter, west of the Temple Mount. Gethsemane and the Church of All Nations are just outside, to the east, across the Kidron, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. The Cenacle is on Mount Zion, to the south of the present western wall, outside the Old City. Standing at the Holy Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives is the skyline to the east, and Gethsemane is at its base. Nazareth, Cana, and Capernaum are far to the north. The Jordan baptism site is about thirty kilometres to the east, down in the valley. Emmaus is the walk out of the city, to the west or the north-west, on the afternoon of the Resurrection. A map of this stop should show three points, not one, and should show the city wall, or the Holy Sepulchre will look as if it stood inside the Jerusalem of Jesus, which it did not.

Emmaus is one afternoon, and it is only in Luke. Chapter 24, after the women and the empty tomb, says: "And behold, two of them went, the same day, to a town which was sixty furlongs from Jerusalem, named Emmaus" (Luke 24:13). They talked of all that had happened. "And it came to pass, that while they talked and reasoned with themselves, Jesus himself also drawing near, went with them" (Luke 24:15). Their eyes were held. He asked what manner of talk this was, and why they were sad. One of them, named Cleophas, answered, "Art thou only a stranger to Jerusalem, and hast not known the things that have been done there in these days?" They told him of Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in work and word, whom the chief priests and rulers had delivered to death and crucified. They had hoped he would redeem Israel. It was the third day. Certain women had found the tomb empty and had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive. Some of their own had gone to the tomb and found it as the women said, but him they had not seen.

He said they were foolish and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory? Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures the things that were concerning him. Luke does not write out the sermon. He says that it happened, and that it set their hearts on fire. A reader who wants the content has to do what the two disciples did: go back to Moses and the prophets, to the servant who suffers, to the king who is rejected, to the promises that do not end in a tomb. The Church's Easter preaching is that walk.

Near the village he made as if he would go further. "But they constrained him; saying: Stay with us, because it is towards evening, and the day is now far spent. And he went in with them. And it came to pass, whilst he was at table with them, he took bread, and blessed, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him: and he vanished out of their sight" (Luke 24:29-31). They said to each other, "Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in this way, and opened to us the scriptures?" They rose up the same hour and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven and those with them saying that the Lord was risen indeed and had appeared to Simon. "And they told what things were done in the way; and how they knew him in the breaking of the bread" (Luke 24:35).

The Gospel names one of the two, Cleophas. It does not name the other. The recognition is told in the language of the Eucharist: he took bread, blessed, broke, and gave. Luke has used those verbs at the feeding of the multitude and at the Last Supper. The Church reads Emmaus as the pattern of the Mass. The Scriptures are opened first, and the heart burns. Then the bread is broken, and he is known. Then he is no longer seen as he was seen on the road, and the disciples are sent back to the Church in the city, where the others are already saying that he is risen. A Mass that is only a feeling on the road, or only a rite without the Scriptures, has not yet learned this chapter.

Luke says the village was sixty furlongs from Jerusalem. That is about eleven kilometres, an afternoon's walk, and the two disciples returned to the city the same night.

The Franciscan shrine of Emmaus is at El-Qubeibeh, in the hills north-west of Jerusalem, about eleven kilometres from the Holy Sepulchre. This is the place the Friars of the Custody of the Holy Land have kept for the memory of Luke 24. The Marchioness Pauline de Nicolay bought the land in 1861 and gave it to the Custody. Excavation found the remains of a Crusader basilica, with a room in the north-west corner venerated as the house of Cleophas, and traces of the medieval village along the road. The church a pilgrim enters was built by the Franciscans at the beginning of the twentieth century, on those Crusader foundations. It is a shrine of the Custody, with a convent beside it, on a road that still runs toward Jerusalem. The house of Cleophas is the traditional name of that room. The Gospel names Cleophas, and does not describe the house.

People go because Luke 24 is the Gospel of the stranger on the road, and this is the road on which the Church reads it. They go because the breaking of the bread is the Mass, and a church at Emmaus is a place to ask for the eyes to open. The Scriptures are opened here, the bread is broken here, and the pilgrim is sent back, as the two were sent, to the city and to the apostles.

El-Qubeibeh lies about eleven kilometres north-west of the Holy Sepulchre, in the hills, an afternoon's walk from the city and a possible return the same night, as Luke describes. Bethlehem is south of Jerusalem, so the Easter road and the Christmas town leave the city in different directions. Nazareth, Cana, Capernaum, and the Jordan are none of them Emmaus. A map of this journey should draw one short line from Jerusalem to El-Qubeibeh on the evening of Easter.