Last week I mentioned Sepphoris — a city about 4 miles from Nazareth which was a major urban-renewal and pet project of Herod. The excavated areas at Sepphoris have so far yielded public buildings and baths, residential areas, an amphitheater, market building, industrial installations, cisterns, and a complex drainage system. Sepphoris was built on a hill, and was visible for miles. (As Jesus said, “A city built on a hill cannot be hidden.”) Two aqueducts flowed from springs at Abel three Roman miles to the east supplying the city with water.
Meanwhile, Nazareth in those days was little more than a wide-spot in the road, with an estimated population of 500. (Sephoris more like 10,000 to 25,000.) I speculated that Joseph and Jesus might have walked to Sepphoris where employment was plentiful. Roughly an hour walk each way — many modern folks have commutes worse than that!
Sepphoris was also a center of Jewish academic study — many academies were located there. Also, its location on or near major trade routes in the lower Galilee made it a prime market for traders of all commodities. It was, for most of its flourishing years, a thriving city with a large enough population to require a great variety of different products. Indeed, the rabbinical scholars who helped compile the Talmud and Mishna frequently earned their living by working in humble occupations — day laborers, stone masons, carpenters, shoemakers, potters and smiths among them.
And Sepphoris has another interesting claim to fame. Glass working in general goes back to the dawn of human history (glass beads and such), but glass blowing was invented in Syria in the first century BCE. It so happens that Sepphoris was a major center of glass manufacture!
So it occurs to me that when Jesus and His disciples were given the use of an ‘upper room’ for Passover, that we don’t know how nice it was. Maybe it was on the upscale end of things for that day and age. Maybe the cup supplied with the that room, used for the Last Supper, was glass.
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In a way such speculations are silly. The observation that it’s plausible that the cup Jesus used for the Last Supper was glass has no theological implications that I can think of.
But I also think that this sort of imaginative exercise has value. Every major innovation in the history of humanity began as an idea. Einstein’s Relativity famously began when Albert daydreamed “what would the world look like if I could ride a beam of light?” Or Martin Luther King: “I have a dream.” Or countless other insights where someone was paying attention and noticed something: “What’s this mold on this bread?”, brought their intelligence and imagination to bear, and now we have penicillin. Science isn’t just about observation, it’s about Imagination + Intelligence + Observation.
Humanity has always faced problems that need solving. But some periods seem to have more problems that need solving than others, and it seems to me we are in one of those periods. For a new solution, we first have to Imagine — and Believe — that a solution is possible. In this context, Imagination and Faith are very close to each other. And once we have that Faith/Imagination that a solution is possible, THEN we can start imagining what actual solutions might be.
But imagination is a skill, a ‘muscle’ like most any other that gets better with use and practice. Of course, like every other skill, some folks have a greater knack for it than others. Tiger Woods clearly has a ‘knack’ for golf. But he wouldn’t be a world-class golfer without practice beyond imagining. Imagination is a skill that can be developed with practice too.
Indeed, Imagination has been enshrined as a “Spiritual Practice”! Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) promoted the ‘meditative’ practice of fully imagining the Gospel stories, putting yourself in the scene, imaginatively engaging all your senses to fully immerse yourself in the Gospel story: Jesus is speaking to a blind man at the side of the road. We feel the hot Mediterranean sun beating down. We smell the dust kicked up by the passersby. We feel the itchy clothing we’re wearing, the sweat rolling down our brow, a rumble of hunger. We see the desperation in the blind man’s face and hear the wail of hope in his words. We note the irritation of the disciples. And so on…
And so I see notions like ‘what if the cup at the Last Supper was glass’ purely as exercises, as practice strengthening the muscle of the Imagination, so that when we really need it, our Imagination will be up to the challenge.