In the three years of his public ministry Jesus visited Jerusalem at least four times, and perhaps as many as seven. Assuming these were round trips, this could mean that he logged as many as 984 kilometres on the road, by foot, in three years. And that’s just counting his trips between Galilee and Jerusalem. He also travelled from town to town in the region of Galilee while he was ministering there.
He did a lot of walking, is my point.
Living as we do in the automobile age, we tend to forget the fact that every time one of the Gospel writers tells us Jesus journeyed up to Jerusalem, it would have taken him 3 straight days of walking to get there. And from what we can tell, he did this as naturally as you or I might nip on down to the corner store for a carton of milk on a Saturday morning.
During the covid-19 pandemic, I’ve been doing far more walking than I’ve ever done before. This is partly because there’s not much else to do, but mostly because, what with all the gyms being closed, I’ve needed to find some other way to get exercise and stay healthy.
Walking, incidentally, is a great way to do both these things. Even at a mere 30 minutes a day, it will boost your immune system, increase your levels of vitamin D, reduce your risk of cancer, alleviate symptoms of depression, lower your blood pressure, tone your abdominal muscles, strengthen your back, and improve your blood circulation. The list of walking's health benefits, in fact, is so long that you’d almost think our bodies were especially designed to do it.
If Jesus’s ministry is anything to judge by, it looks like they were.
This is certainly what I’ve been learning as I’ve increased the amount of time I spend on foot these days, anyways. Sometimes I can almost sense the joy in my muscles as I put them to this particular use, as if they were each individually happy to be doing the thing they were so clearly made to do.
And for all I know, they are. They say that heavy muscle work (like walking) releases serotonin into your system, a feel-good hormone that boosts your mood and reduces your stress levels. Not only this, but I’ve also noticed I’m far more aware of my neighbors than I ever was when I just zipped past them in the car; I’m more in tune to the trees and birds and bunnies I share the neighborhood with (we have a lot of wild bunnies in my neighborhood); and I’m generally more at peace inside whenever I get back from a long walk. Add to this the fact that it’s about as cheap a workout as you can possibly get, and it may be that walking is, in fact, the perfect exercise.
It certainly was in Jesus’s day; and this brings me at last to the real point of this post. Jesus couldn’t have covered as much ground as he did in the three short years he had to proclaim the Kingdom of God, unless he was in relatively good physical condition. And the flipside of that point is equally true, that all the walking he did would have had to have kept him that way.
Centuries of seeing Jesus depicted as a “Swedish Supermodel” has maybe influenced the way we think of him so strongly that it’s hard to imagine him like this, but the Gospels suggest that whatever else was true of him, Christ must have had calloused feet and strong sinews.
He was physically fit, I mean. He would have had to have been to do the ministry God had called him to do. I don’t mean, in making this point, that there is something intrinsically Christ-like in physical exercise, or that if you’re not physically fit then you’re not Christ-like. Far from it. As I’ve said in previous posts, everyone has different temperaments and constitutions, with different body types and different movement needs.
But that’s why it’s so wonderful that Jesus’s exercise of choice, it seems, was walking. Except for those of us in very specific situations that make walking impossible (and the Gospel reminds us, too, that Christ had boundless compassion for people in such circumstances), we can all do it. Regardless our present level of fitness, regardless our athleticism, regardless our body-type, a 10-minute stroll out of doors is in reach of us all.
We could start today. If we did, who knows, but we might find ourselves getting in shape for the ministry God has called us to do; and we may just discover that it was no accident the Bible chose the metaphor of “walking,” in particular, to describe a life lived fully for Jesus, when it told us that we should “walk in the light, as he is in the light.”
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