Advent: Reflections on visit to the Holy Land

Our eleven days pilgrimage in Israel and Palestine last month were remarkable, enjoyable and challenging. They will take time to process and reflect on. We were blessed with excellent leadership from Geoffrey Marshall; and better than average weather for the seaspn.

Where to begin? Perhaps we should note the remarkable fact that pilgrims are still visiting Jerusalem and the other Holy Sites – in large numbers. Despite uncertainties about the security situation, there were crowds of visitors from the UK, USA, Nigeria, Brazil, Russia, France, Italy and more. No doubt fror a few it was just another holiday – from Chaucer’s time, pilgrimages have had something of the package holiday about them. But something was driving people to queue patiently in the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem for up to 2 hours, to gain a few moments in the crypt chapel that marks the site of Jesus’ birth.

What draws them? Many of these places are charged with significance, with memories and with allusions. They are places where ‘prayer has been valid’ for centuries; places which remind us of the remarkable claim that God has acted in – intervened in – human history, at specific times and in specific places.

In an important sense, we can only worship God in England on a Sunday at the end of 2014, because he spoke to Abraham in various parts of Palestine, to Gideon at the springs of Harod, to Mary at the well in Nazareth, to Jesus at the Jordan and in the Judean wilderness. We can only meet the Risen Christ in our weekly eucharists all over the world, because Jesus broke bread with his disciples in the Upper Room, prayed in agony in Gethsemane, carried the cross along the Via Dolorosa, suffered and died on Golgotha and rose from the tomb in a garden somewhere nearby. We can only be guided by the Holy Spirit today, because on the Day of Pentecost, 33 AD, the disciples on the steps to the Temple Mount were filled by his power and enabled to preach in tongues.

The danger of the gilded palaces that have been built on the holy sites is that they obscure tyhe ordinariness. Frederck Buechnner wrote of Jesus’ birth:

If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."

So, although the places we can visit in Jerusalem, Judea Palestine and Galilee are not exactly the same as those that Abraham, Isaiah, John the Baptist and Jesus knew, they remind us that we are not imagining things, or creating our own stories. We are responding to events and places that real people – like us – experienced and knew.

For those privileged to have gone to the ‘Land of the Holy One’ (as the Anglican Church in Jerusalem prefers to call it), our reading of the Bible takes on a new freshness and liveliness. ‘That’s where Zaccheus climbed the tree to see Jesus.’ ‘That’s where the paralysed man was lowered through the roof.’ ‘That’s where Lazarus was called out of the tomb.’ ‘That’s where Jesus’ body lay for three days before the Marys found the tomb empty.’

Pilgrimage is not necessary. Unlike the hajj for Muslims, it’s not required of Christians, and there are many who are unable to go to the holy sites who have a deeper and more lively faith and commitment than those who have.

But for all who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the privilege of this experience means we shall not be the same again.