At Caesarea-Philippi

157:0.1Be­fore Je­sus took the twelve for a short so­journ in the vicin­ity of Cae­sarea-Phi­lippi, he ar­ranged through the mes­sen­gers of David to go over to Ca­per­naum on Sun­day, Au­gust 7, for the pur­pose of meet­ing his fam­ily. By pre­ar­range­ment this visit was to oc­cur at the Zeb­e­dee boat­shop. David Zeb­e­dee had ar­ranged with Jude, Je­sus’ brother, for the pres­ence of the en­tire Naz­a­reth fam­ily—Mary and all of Je­sus’ broth­ers and sis­ters—and Je­sus went with An­drew and Pe­ter to keep this ap­point­ment. It was cer­tainly the in­ten­tion of Mary and the chil­dren to keep this en­gage­ment, but it so hap­pened that a group of the Phar­isees, know­ing that Je­sus was on the op­po­site side of the lake in Philip’s do­mains, de­cided to call upon Mary to learn what they could of his where­abouts. The ar­rival of these Je­ru­sa­lem emis­saries greatly per­turbed Mary, and not­ing the ten­sion and ner­vous­ness of the en­tire fam­ily, they con­cluded that Je­sus must have been ex­pected to pay them a visit. Ac­cord­ingly they in­stalled them­selves in Mary’s home and, af­ter sum­mon­ing re­in­force­ments, waited pa­tiently for Je­sus’ ar­rival. And this, of course, ef­fec­tively pre­vented any of the fam­ily from at­tempt­ing to keep their ap­point­ment with Je­sus. Sev­eral times dur­ing the day both Jude and Ruth en­deav­ored to elude the vig­i­lance of the Phar­isees in their ef­forts to send word to Je­sus, but it was of no avail.

157:0.2Early in the af­ter­noon David’s mes­sen­gers brought Je­sus word that the Phar­isees were en­camped on the doorstep of his mother’s house, and there­fore he made no at­tempt to visit his fam­ily. And so again, through no fault of ei­ther, Je­sus and his earth fam­ily failed to make con­tact.