GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 7:24
Are we there yet?
What parent hasn’t heard—or maybe thought to themselves—“Are we there yet?” Alice and I took a trip to visit our children and their families. It took nearly two weeks, and we drove approximately four thousand miles. We went through areas neither of us had seen before, like the plains of Nebraska. We visited one grandson’s family in South Dakota and saw our second great-granddaughter for the first time. Oh, we had pictures, but none of them measured up to holding that bundle of joy.
When at last we drove into the garage and shut off the car’s engine, we wondered at the distance we’d traveled. Four thousand miles in fourteen days! Distance has become a rather “squishy” concept. One can board a plane and travel thousands of miles in a day. We have watched several rocket launches from Cape Canaveral, where astronauts travel huge distances in minutes.
In the New Testament era, distance was usually measured in walking time. There were other modes of transportation—horses, donkeys, or camels—but most people walked. The New Testament writers seldom mention distance because nearly everyone used the same mode of travel: walking. Mark, for example, wrote, “And he arose and departed from there into the region of Tyre and Sidon. And when he entered into a house, he wished no one to know, but he was not able to escape notice.” (7:24) In less than a dozen words, Mark’s story covers 70 miles—the distance from Gennesaret, by the Sea of Galilee, to Tyre, a busy seacoast area to the northwest in the region of Phoenicia. If the average walking speed was about four miles per hour, it would have taken over 17 hours for Jesus and his disciples to make the journey, at least two long days of steady walking, or four days with rest breaks and meals. Jesus desired a time of rest and quiet, but he found that even at that distance from Capernaum, people knew of his ministry.
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