Cana and Mount of the Beatitudes

The Beatitudes Sermon by James Tissot.

       Now we are waiting for orders to mount for Cana of Galilee. We find in the village at a Greek convent some of the water-pots, or specimens of the same kind, that were used at the famous wedding where Christ turned the contents of them from common water into grape juice. We were surprised at the size of these water- jars. I measured them and found them eighteen inches in width from edge to edge, and nineteen inches in depth. What a bountiful and strange vintage at that wedding. Not a grape, not a winepress, yet six of these great jars filled with a beverage richer than Malaga, and yet so harmless that after all the wedding banqueters had partaken till they could drink no more, there was in all the festal hall, not a flushed cheek, nor a glassy eye, nor a dizzy head, nor a disturbed stomach. But let not the modern guzzler pat himself approvingly as though he were, in drinking wine, doing only what the Lord helped the people of Cana to do. There is not one drop of that kind of wine in any of the flasks, decanters, or rum jugs of the present day. Christ, by a glorious miracle, turned water into wine, but the devil by infernal miracle turns wine into suicide, and poverty, and assassination, and orphanage, and woe, and death. Take your choice of miracles.

       The most fearful climb in Palestine is the ascent of the Mount of Beatitudes. The horses fairly groan with the effort of transporting one up the first mountain, which is only a stepping-stone to the Mountain of Blesseds. Then we ride across fields where every step seems a trap for the feet of the horses. They stumble with their fore feet, and knuckle with their back feet, until it is only by a stout grip of mane or saddle we stay on. But oh, what a sweep of vision, now that we have reached the top. It is like the Valley of the Hudson, from Catskill Mountain House. I am entranced. Hail, hills of Galilee! Hail, Lake Gennesareth! Yonder, clear up and most conspicuous, isSafed, the very city to which Christ pointed for illustration in the sermon preached here, saying, "A city set on a hill cannot be hid." There are rocks around me on this Mount of Beatitudes enough to build the highest pulpit the world ever saw. Ay, it is the highest pulpit. It overlooks all time and all eternity. The Valley of Hattin, between here and Lake Galilee, is an amphitheatre, as though the natural contour of the earth had invited all nations to come and sit down and hear Christ preach a sermon in which there were more startling novelties than were ever announced in all the sermons that were ever preached. To those who heard Him on this very spot, His word must have seemed a contradiction of everything they had ever heard or read or experienced. The world's theory had been, "Blessed are the arrogant; blessed are the supercilious; blessed are the tearless; blessed are they who have everything their own way; blessed are the war eagles; blessed are the persecutors; blessed are the popular; blessed are the Herods and the Caesars and the Ahabs." "No! No!! No!!! " says Christ, with a voice that rings over these rocks and through yonder Valley of Hattin, and down to the opaline lake on one side, and the sapphire Mediterranean on the other, and across Europe in one way, and across Asia in the other way, and around the earth both ways, till the globe shall yet be girdled with the nine Beatitudes. But as we were climbing to the top, I could not help remarking to the one who rode next to me, "It is appropriate that the ascent to the Mount of the Savior's Blesseds should be difficult, for some of the attainments commended there by our Lord are heights most difficult to reach. For instance: Who really loves his enemies? We may not wish them harm; indeed, you may wish them well. But there are not many who have a real affection for those who maltreat them. I never, personally, knew of but one person who without doubt, gained the glorious height. That was David T. Talmage, my father. More like Christ was he than any person I ever knew, unless it were my mother. Dead, a quarter of a century, yet their example is to me pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. But such characters are not frequent. Loving your enemies is a grace not easily attained. Was I not right in saying to our dragoman, ' David, the Mount of Beatitudes is hard to climb.'"

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