Everything in Israel seems to be on a hill. If not actually on a hill, it’s at the foot of at least a couple of them.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve driven and walked up and down lots and lots of ridges, knolls, rises, mounds, slopes, and just plain hills.
That experience caused me to fixate on one particular scriptural passage, about the Virgin Mary, who, upon learning that her cousin Elizabeth was pregnant, traveled to visit Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah.
In those days, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.
Luke 1:39-40
It was just eight verses earlier that the angel had told the young girl:
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call him Jesus.
Luke 1:31
Over the past few weeks, given the prevailing nature of the terrain throughout this country, I kept thinking, “What must the ‘hill country’ be like?”
This past Thursday, I drove less than 10 miles west from the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem to the Chuch of the Visitation, in the town of Ein Karem, in the “hill country.”
The trip took me all of about 20 minutes.
When I arrived, I thought to myself, “Yeah, okay. This is pretty hilly.”
But, don’t forget, I drove there.
Mary traveled over 90 miles to get from Nazareth to what is today the town of Ein Karem, generally navigating a route that is now the comfortably paved Highway 60. Moreover, the terrain she traversed featured a non-stop series of severe elevation changes, over which today’s travel is facilitated by several long tunnels and a couple of bridges.
And, remember, she was also newly pregnant, and wasn’t driving a rented Kia Sonata.
That crazy collection of facts is primarily what inspired me to write this essay. A pregnant teenage girl making a 180-mile round trip, on a donkey or something, over ridiculously treacherous terrain, with no parental supervision or support.
Oh, yeah, and then, less than nine months later, she’d retrace her steps and tack on another eight or nine miles to make it to a stable in Bethlehem for the main event.