Christ is Preaching in Perea

With Easter approaching I thought it would be interesting to chronicle the last few weeks of Christ's life. I did this last year and while I have no idea if you enjoyed it I know that I certainly did. For that reason, and also because I think it is good for all of us to remember the importance of Christ in our lives I'm going to repeat this series of blogs again this year. 


As the life of Christ is told in the gospels we sometimes find contradictions in the stories by the different writers. I believe this can happen for a number of reasons. Each person telling the story see's it from a different angle. Some things may be more important to one person than to another and so he will describe it with more detail. We all know that if there are several witnesses to an event you will get slightly different stories from each of them. As I tell the story of Jesus I will do my best to make it consistent with the scriptures but please forgive any inconsistencies. Hopefully you will accept my account in the spirit in which it is given.

Today, March 11, is twenty eight days before Easter Sunday. On this day, nearly two thousand years ago Christ was in the land of Perea around Jericho. He had been in Jerusalem during the feast of the Tabernacles (in October) and rather than head back to Galilee where he lived he had decided to preach in Perea instead. His mother, of course, lived in Nazareth and since we know that she went to Jerusalem with her son it was probably around this time that she went to meet up with her son in Perea. It is likely that at this point Jesus mother Mary was a widow and we can assume that she traveled with a group of close friends who most likely included friends and family of the apostles who were with Jesus and hadn't been home for some time.