Daily updates were published during the course of the Diocesan Pilgrimage to the Holy Land which took place from 6th to 13th February.
Day 8 - Mission
‘And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’ Matthew 28:20
The road to Emmaus is a six-lane motorway. No one is sure it goes to Emmaus at all. The destination of those bereft disciples on the evening Christ rose from the tomb has been lost in time. Early Christians were undaunted by geographical niceties. If they didn’t know where an event took place, they made a guess (and built a church on it). Various contenders for the town have been earmarked over the centuries. The Emmaus we were headed for was selected by the Crusaders since it was handily on the pilgrimage route from Jerusalem to Jaffa. It’s a hillside town called Abu Ghosh, the seven miles specified by Luke from Jerusalem’s old city. It looks as though the Crusaders may have guessed correctly. Four years ago, excavations on the outskirts uncovered the ruins of the ancient settlement of Kiryat Ye’arim where, according to the Book of Samuel (7:1-2), the Ark rested for 20 years after being returned by the Philistines. Archaeologists reckon this could be the lost town of Emmaus.
Our week as pilgrims has taught us not to nitpick. It’s of interest, but little consequence, precisely where an event unfolded. What matters is that it happened, and that we are in the land where the prophets proclaimed and where God became incarnate.
At Abu Ghosh is a Crusader church of immense beauty. It soars from a courtyard lush with palms and cyclamen and lemon trees. The risen Christ may not have broken bread precisely here, but as we celebrated Mass in that ancient building we were in communion with 1000 years of Christians. The figures on the remains of the 12th-century frescoes were a shadowy presence alongside us round the altar. In that place, Christ was revealed to us through scripture and sacrament as he was to the disciples on that long-ago road. That church in the spot that may not have been Emmaus was as powerful as the shores Christ walked in Galilee.
The hill above the village is straddled by the Shrine of Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant Church, its statue of the Madonna and child dominating the region. It’s said to be the site of Avinadav’s house, where the Book of Samuel records that the Ark rested. The figure of Mary holding the infant Jesus is compared to the Ark which held the Ten Commandments. Across the motorway, a hilltop now engulfed by Jerusalem’s sprawl, is traditionally the home of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, where Mary stayed for three months after the Annunciation.
It’s here that we diverged. Half the pilgrims travelled on to Jordan, the rest took the coach to the airport. The unfamiliar faces who had gathered in the arrivals hall a week ago, parted old friends. The depth of our shared experience dwarfed the briefness of our time together. As soon as the coach bearing the clergy leaders vanished down the slopes, our spiritual discipline went likewise downhill as our new driver selected a spot for our final meal in the Holy Land.
Late that evening, we landed with a bump (a very mighty bump as the wheels collided with the runway) back in the real world. There’s nothing like airports and flights and airports to kill transcendental euphoria.
This week of pilgrimage has been a road to Emmaus. We have travelled it together, doubting, hoping, seeing, stumbling. Pilgrims who have been bereaved confided the sense that their lost loved ones have accompanied them along the way. And Jesus has walked beside us, sometimes discernible, sometimes out of sight, explaining the Scriptures to us through the Word and the Bread and through our Palestinian guide Peter, whose Christian faith has withstood decades of war and oppression and faces a frightening future.
Pilgrimages make family out of strangers. It’s not an individual journey, but a communion of souls. Different people were moved by different aspects. An experience that left some of us cold were a revelation to others. We’ve learned as much from our fellow travellers, as from the sacred sites we visited.
And what have we learned?
That we are rooted in centuries of faith whose churches lie layered beneath our feet.
That we are one body with Christians from across the world, whose prayers and hymns mingled in a myriad languages with ours.
That the most powerful witness is not born by the triumphant basilicas, but by the simple, makeshift chapels is in the open where the breeze blows and the waves lap and the still small voice can be heard.
We arrived in the Holy Land at a time of escalating violence. The road to Emmaus passes the ruins of an Arab village forcibly evacuated in 1948. On the ridge above towers an Israeli town. The scene encapsulates the convulsions of the country Jesus loved. During our week three young Israelis lost their lives when a Palestinian rammed a bus stop and Palestinians lost their liberty when the West Bank was sealed in retribution. Jesus wept over Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. He is still weeping today. Christians, said our guide, have the power to encourage change. And when politics fail, we can pray.
It can be a strain being a pilgrim, illusions broken, struggling to feel permanently spiritual. But faith is not about fantasies and feeling. It might be a slow dawning. It may take a long time to discern the change in us; there’s worry that real life will subsume us and we’ll lose the connection we found in Galilee. What is certain is that road to Emmaus continues for a lifetime and that, from now on, when we are in church and we hear the gospel read, we will be there because we were here.
Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits thou hast given me,
for all the pains and insults thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,
may I know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly, day by day.
Prayer of St Richard of Chichester
Day 7 - Renewal
‘I tell you the truth, noone can enter the Kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.’ John 3:5
The hills north of Jerusalem are Yorkshire green, but take the road east from the city you’re deposited startlingly in desert. This is real biblical desert in both appearance and history. It’s the baked sand across which Mary on her donkey and the camels of the kings toil on Christmas cards. It was the refuge of King David when he fled from Saul. John the Baptist preached in its arid wastes and Christ chose it for his 40-day retreat after his baptism in the Jordan.
The wilderness beyond the road remains unchanged. Fleetingly in spring, the gritty sand is tinged green with thin grass before it withers in the summer heat. Bedouin lead goats and sheep along rocky ledges above the dual carriageway. In clefts and hollows cling Bedouin villages of canvas draped over wooden stakes and shacks corrugated iron. The land rears into pyramids of puckered rock, then subsides as you near the Jordan into plantations of date palms on a plain. And barbed wire and yellow signs warn of landmines left over from the 1967 Arab Israeli conflict.
This Sunday morning, the service was above the Jordan. Qasr al Yahud is the place where John is thought to have baptised Jesus. On this spot – or along this stretch of river – the spirit of God descended like a dove on his Son with whom He was ‘well pleased’. Today two doves were ascending – to the tower of a church which rose from the opposite bank in Jordan.
It’s first come first serve at Qasr al Yahud. If other pilgrims have bagged the al fresco chapels, you have to make do. A gravel terrace served as our church; a picnic table was requisitioned as the altar; picnic tables became pews. There, under the huge hanging pods of acacia trees, we were sprinkled with the same water in which Christ was baptised and renewed our baptismal vows. The hymns of the neighbouring congregations mingled with ours. It was good, Lord, to be there.’
The Jordan is not the majestic river we’d supposed. It’s brown, overgrown and it’s narrow. It seems as though a running jump could land you in Jordan. If it did, you’d likely be shot by the Jordanian police guarding the opposite bank.
Down by the water’s edge, a decked terrace was thronged with white robed worshippers waiting to be baptised. Or re-baptised. Priests perched on metal steps in the shallows and dribbled beige water onto heads. A few fearless faithful ventured into their waists. Metal rails protrude from the depths to prevent any over-zealous from being washed downstream.
On his way to his baptism from Galilee, Christ would have passed through the oasis city of Jericho. It’s on the road out of Jericho that he healed Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, and on the road in, on his way to Jerusalem and his Passion, that he spied Zacchaeus the tax collector lurking up a sycamore and invited himself to his house.
Jericho is the oldest city on earth, the first city the Israelites conquered when they reached the Promised Land. You wouldn’t know it. The city Christ knew is buried deep under fields of cauliflower and concrete houses. The streets are gaudy with Coca Cola hordings, crates of soft fruit spread along the kerbs and barrows of dangling bananas. Goats snack on wasteland. Mopeds buzz and a flock of sheep block the highway. It’s bright, loud and lively and, until this week, it was locked down in an lengthy blockade by Israeli armed forces following a terrorist attack by a resident.
Sometimes history seems more changeless than geography. The Jericho Jesus knew on his journeys to and from Jerusalem was under military occupation by the Romans. Today it’s under military occupation by the Israelis. Huge cameras on pylons survey the streets and an army base looms over the city from a mountain top.
The barren hulks of the Judean mountains dwarf the towns and villages string along their base. Overshadowing Jericho is the Mount of Temptations where the devil tried twice to entice Jesus during his desert retreat. It’s understandable that he would have made for that summit, so high it scrapes heaven and so remote no one would have strayed near. It’s understandable that there might have been a fleeting temptation, gazing at infinite reach of his calling, to take the easy way. It’s possible, standing beneath in the car park of a gift emporium, to feel his presence.
On his journeys from Galilee to Jerusalem he and his disciples would have walked the Roman road through a mountain pass. It’s 18 miles and an ascent of 4,000 ft. It was arduous and notoriously risky and was the setting for the parable of the Good Samaritan.
At the next stop Qumran where the Dead Sea scrolls were found, a clutch of us sneaked away from the discourse on ancient sectarians and followed a path skirting the mountains. It wasn’t several miles from that Jesus took, but the scenery was the same. It’s in those moments, walking in silence through landscapes Christ’s eyes once gazed on, that you connect. That you walk more closely with the risen Lord.
The Dead Sea was a misty smear where the mountain range ended. That was our final stop, more pleasure than piety, as we stripped and floated. It’s the Doomed Sea these days, shrinking by the year with wide expanses of its bed exposed. The gospels don’t tell us if Christ passed that way. He’d certainly have seen it on his descent to Jericho. But the contrast of that dead lake in which we bobbed with the living water that had earlier sprinkled us was poignant. Our guide told us a parable of Galilee’s two seas. One fresh and lively, a magnet for man and nature; the other barren and forsaken. Both are filled by the Jordan, but while gives freely, allowing its water to flow onwards, the other hordes its supply. ‘The Sea of Galilee gives and lives. The other Sea gives nothing. It is named the Dead. There are two kinds of seas in Palestine and there are two kinds of people in the world. Which kind are we?’
Day 6 - Way of the Cross
Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love John13:1
Dawn breaks with sound before light in Jerusalem. The wail of muezzin calling Muslims to prayer, a burst of bells from the basilica, our telephone alarms rousing us at 5am. We gathered at 5.30am to follow the Via Dolorosa. A suitably penitential hour; appropriately sacrificial on an empty stomach.
Much of the old city is the souk and in the labyrinth of tunnels 5.30am is the rush hour. Jews, in prayer shawls and hats like fur mill stones striding to the Wailing Wall. Hijabed Muslim women returning from dawn prayer. Greek Orthodox priests and friars. Gatherings of Christians singing hymns beneath the stations of the cross clamped on the walls of the souk. And in between them, cats darting out of alley ways and men balancing trays piled with curly loaves. It smells of refuse and baking.
We imagined Golgotha as a high hill. We were expecting to ascend the Via Dolorosa through scrub and rock. Instead, the stations led us through the souk. Jesus fell for the third time outside the Ninth Station Juice Bar. In silence we processed up narrow alleys; in song we passed shuttered shops and refuse vans. It felt conspicuous singing hymns in a land where religion can be deadly.
As always, the spirit overcame the surroundings. The Jerusalem Jesus knew might lie buried beneath our feet, but we were alongside Mary and Veronica accompanying him on Calvary. We felt the grief when he was stripped and hung. We also felt the disappointment when we reached his final agonies and found, not a bleak hilltop, but the immense, forbidding Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the precinct guarded by a trio armed soldiers.
Christ was crucified on a hill outside the city; now the hill is in its heart. Inside the towering church doorway, stone steps ascend to the rock we were expecting. It’s encased under glass beneath an altar in a grotto-like chapel. Walls and ceiling glimmer through the gloom. Every inch of stone is plastered with golden mosaics and silver icons; the roof is a congestion of red and silver lanterns dangling on chains. The atmosphere is more Arabian Nights than Calvary. Pilgrims queue two by two to reach the altar and the buried stone. To one side of the chapel, a Greek Orthodox priest was intoning prayers. His words mingled with the chant of the Roman Catholics which wafted from below. The 4th-century church, rebuilt by the Crusaders, has been divided, in an uneasy compromise, between Greeks, Roman Catholics, Armenians, Syriacs, Coptics and Ethiopians. All of them have their own jealously guarded sections and none of them get on. Propped on a window ledge high up the façade is a wooden ladder. It’s been there since 1728 because none of the six communities can move or alter anything in the building without the assent of the other five.
To touch the rock, you have to crawl under the altar one by one. We assumed a strip would be exposed, but crouched there in the gloom, all we could see was what looked like a plug hole. Gingerly I inserted a hand. My fingers scrabbled air. I didn’t dare probe further in case it was a plug hole. Not many of us made contact with rock. It didn’t much matter. We were seized, suddenly, with wonder that here (or near) Christ died for us and here also were we, having crossed continents to bear witness.