Jonathan Williams, July 27, 2010
I want to talk this evening about a particular experience I had on a remarkable pilgrimage to the Holy Land that I was lucky enough to undertake with about 25 other mildly confused but whole-heartedly committed Anglo-Catholic Anglicans earlier this year. We came from three north London parishes, from the London diocese deanery of South Camden in the Edmonton area which, if any of you know it, is about as liturgically exotic as they come. Some of us had never been abroad before. Carol, sacristan in one of the parishes, got her first ever passport for the trip at the age of 71. Enabling Carol to go and see places that she had visited a thousand times in her heart and mind was, for me, one of the best things we achieved on the pilgrimage.
The Holy Land, or Israel and the Occupied Territories as we call it nowadays, is a wholly remarkable corner of the world. It is the size of Wales. Everything is the size of Wales, I realize - how much rain-forest we cut down every day and so on - but the Holy Land really is. It is tiny! Jericho really is only 15 miles from Jerusalem. In Welsh terms this is the distance between Holywell and Prestatyn, which happens to be where my family come from. These Great and Holy Places were small towns in a small country. But it was where Jesus came from.
But where did he actually come from? We went to Bethlehem in Judaea, now in the Occupied Territories and under the tensely watchful eye of the Palestinian Authority, and we went to Nazareth in Galilee, now in Israel, where the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation left me cold but the 17th-century Greek Orthodox Church of St Gabriel filled us with warmth and heavenly benediction (it also sold the most peculiar species of Holy Land tat that we came across, to go with all the vials of holy oil and water, bags of holy soil and so on: wipes, moistened with sacred Jordan water. Quite splendid). My money is on Nazareth as the scene of the real nativity, for what it's worth. But it didn't matter where exactly he was born, in the end. He was from here, from this small corner of the fertile crescent, son of Mary and Joseph, born a Jew.
Jesus' Jewishness has been a problem for almost all Christians for most of the past two thousand years, until the work of scholars such as Albert Schweitzer and Geza Vermes transformed our understanding of it. But it is still a problem now for our fellow-Christians in the Holy Land, most of whom regard themselves as Arabs, and as such tend to stand in some degree of distance, antipathy, or outright enmity with the state of Israel. Our guide, Yahya, a Palestinian Anglican from Ramallah, was keen at every opportunity to point out that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. On the other side, he was also clear that he was not an Arab, though he spoke Arabic. He was, he claimed, a Greco-Roman. What on earth could he mean by this? At first I thought he was just indulging his passion for history. But eastern Christians in the Islamic world are often called "Rum", Romans in Arabic, as the spiritual descendants of the Greek-speaking Roman Christians who dominated the Holy Land before the rise of Islam in the seventh-century. The Nazarene church of St Gabriel is called "al-kinesset al-Rum" in Arabic, the "gathering place of the Romans". So Greco-Roman is not a bad description for what Samer thought he was. But that he did not want to be an Arab, even as an alternative, points up one of the great difficulties for Palestinian Christians living in the Holy Land. Recent years have seen Arabness becoming much more heavily identified with being Muslim. So it's often difficult for Palestinian Christians to know where they fit in. They are Arabs to the Israelis, and not really Arabs to the Muslims. And they sometimes have a hard time from their Muslim neighbours. So, many of them opt out of the struggle, either by calling themselves Greco-Romans and reputiating their Arabness, like Yahya, or by emigrating, as many have. Indigenous Christian communities are seriously on the decline throughout the Holy Land.
But the pressure felt by the local Christians is only a consequence of the pressures and tensions experienced by all Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, and of course by many Israelis too, both Jews and Arabs. The spiritual and human highlight of our pilgrimage was our visit to Bethany, where we came to understand something of the practical consequences of living under occupation and witnessed an extraordinary example of Christian witness that reaches across the religious divide to obey the biblical injunction to help the weak and the fatherless.
Bethany is, and was in Jesus' time, a satellite town of Jerusalem. It is just over the Mount of Olives, only about 30 minutes walk from the Temple Mount. A perfect place to stay while on pilgrimage to the Holy City for visitors from Galilee. Jesus had friends there: Mary, Martha and Lazarus. They were Galileans too. We know this because other sources indicate that Lazar was the Galilean dialect form of the Jewish name Eleazar. Galilean northerners spoke Aramaic with a strong accent that made them stand out in Judea. Peter was recognised as one in the High Priest's house on the night of Jesus' trial as soon as he opened his mouth. So, Jesus liked to stay with his fellow northerners, with whom he was obviously very close. Perhaps they were family or childhood friends. Whether we believe that he brought he brought Lazarus back from the dead, there’s no reason to doubt that he cried when he heard he had died. And if he really did revive Lazarus, he must surely have done so in part because he wanted him back, because he could not imagine life without him. So Bethany was an important place for Jesus, inhabited by people who were special to him, a place of intense, loving friendship in life that also reached into the grave and beyond.
Bethany was also the place where Jesus had supper with Simon the Leper, on the occasion when nameless, famous woman poured precious ointment on his head. So it was also a place of warm, but characteristically path-breaking conviviality for our sociable saviour. It's good to know he liked a meal with friends and wasn't the just lonely ascetic hero he's sometimes made into, though what certainly was, and still is, unusual about him was that his friends were as likely to be lepers, whether metaphorical or actual, as old pals from home. He chose his friends widely, bravely, and eclectically. And I'm sure he did so because he liked them, not just because he wanted to send a message.
So the Bethany of Jesus' time is a good place for us to think about, as a new community trying to learn together about issues of friendship both with one another and with those at the margins of our world. For it was a place where Jesus investigated the diverse meanings of friendship, where he had both familiar and unconventional friendships. And Bethany now is a place where what I take to be our other principal themes, love and justice, are exemplified in an extraordinary institution that I and my fellow pilgrims went to on our visit. In 1972, a Palestinian Christian couple, Alice and Basil Sahhar, founded an orphanage and school for children from across Palestine in Bethany. The Jeel al-Amal (Generation of Hope) orphanage still stands, and it has looked after generations of Palestinian children for the past 40 years, some of whom now teach at the school. Though a Christian foundation, it was obvious from their dress that most of the female teachers were Muslim, as were most of the children - 98% of Palestinians are Muslim. The Principal sat us all us down in one of the classrooms, and told us in no uncertain terms that his school was a holy place, like a church or a mosque. Quite something to say in this Holy Land which has an over-abundance of sacred places, and is all but starved of love and justice. Which is why Jeel al-Amal in Bethany was such a potent sign of hope in a town which seemed to me to be now a place of tension and a community under pressure. You can't follow in Jesus' footsteps from the Temple Mount to Bethany any more. The Security Fence runs between them, and you need to go through a checkpoint to get there from Jerusalem. Bethany is a poor, parched, shabby-looking town, a world away even from Arab East Jerusalem. Not much going on, nothing being built apart from a large mosque. There's a bit of tourist development around the traditional site of the tomb of Lazarus, but not much else as far as I saw. Which is why the orphanage and school are so important as an ecumenical sign of hope in what looked to me like a difficult situation for the people who live there.
They need our help. The Principal appealed to us to come back, and to tell our friends to visit them. They want our friendship. They are building a new girls’ home for which they are currently raising money. We as a community might in the future do something for them, with them, as part of our inquiry into the fullness of what friendship means for Christians, and as one element of our contribution to the establishment of love and justice in the world. Bethany was an important place for Jesus. It can mean something for us too.
If you want to know more about the home for girls, go to http://www.friendsoflazarushomeforgirls.org.uk/project.html
The Holy Land, or Israel and the Occupied Territories as we call it nowadays, is a wholly remarkable corner of the world. It is the size of Wales. Everything is the size of Wales, I realize - how much rain-forest we cut down every day and so on - but the Holy Land really is. It is tiny! Jericho really is only 15 miles from Jerusalem. In Welsh terms this is the distance between Holywell and Prestatyn, which happens to be where my family come from. These Great and Holy Places were small towns in a small country. But it was where Jesus came from.
But where did he actually come from? We went to Bethlehem in Judaea, now in the Occupied Territories and under the tensely watchful eye of the Palestinian Authority, and we went to Nazareth in Galilee, now in Israel, where the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation left me cold but the 17th-century Greek Orthodox Church of St Gabriel filled us with warmth and heavenly benediction (it also sold the most peculiar species of Holy Land tat that we came across, to go with all the vials of holy oil and water, bags of holy soil and so on: wipes, moistened with sacred Jordan water. Quite splendid). My money is on Nazareth as the scene of the real nativity, for what it's worth. But it didn't matter where exactly he was born, in the end. He was from here, from this small corner of the fertile crescent, son of Mary and Joseph, born a Jew.
Jesus' Jewishness has been a problem for almost all Christians for most of the past two thousand years, until the work of scholars such as Albert Schweitzer and Geza Vermes transformed our understanding of it. But it is still a problem now for our fellow-Christians in the Holy Land, most of whom regard themselves as Arabs, and as such tend to stand in some degree of distance, antipathy, or outright enmity with the state of Israel. Our guide, Yahya, a Palestinian Anglican from Ramallah, was keen at every opportunity to point out that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. On the other side, he was also clear that he was not an Arab, though he spoke Arabic. He was, he claimed, a Greco-Roman. What on earth could he mean by this? At first I thought he was just indulging his passion for history. But eastern Christians in the Islamic world are often called "Rum", Romans in Arabic, as the spiritual descendants of the Greek-speaking Roman Christians who dominated the Holy Land before the rise of Islam in the seventh-century. The Nazarene church of St Gabriel is called "al-kinesset al-Rum" in Arabic, the "gathering place of the Romans". So Greco-Roman is not a bad description for what Samer thought he was. But that he did not want to be an Arab, even as an alternative, points up one of the great difficulties for Palestinian Christians living in the Holy Land. Recent years have seen Arabness becoming much more heavily identified with being Muslim. So it's often difficult for Palestinian Christians to know where they fit in. They are Arabs to the Israelis, and not really Arabs to the Muslims. And they sometimes have a hard time from their Muslim neighbours. So, many of them opt out of the struggle, either by calling themselves Greco-Romans and reputiating their Arabness, like Yahya, or by emigrating, as many have. Indigenous Christian communities are seriously on the decline throughout the Holy Land.
But the pressure felt by the local Christians is only a consequence of the pressures and tensions experienced by all Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, and of course by many Israelis too, both Jews and Arabs. The spiritual and human highlight of our pilgrimage was our visit to Bethany, where we came to understand something of the practical consequences of living under occupation and witnessed an extraordinary example of Christian witness that reaches across the religious divide to obey the biblical injunction to help the weak and the fatherless.
Bethany is, and was in Jesus' time, a satellite town of Jerusalem. It is just over the Mount of Olives, only about 30 minutes walk from the Temple Mount. A perfect place to stay while on pilgrimage to the Holy City for visitors from Galilee. Jesus had friends there: Mary, Martha and Lazarus. They were Galileans too. We know this because other sources indicate that Lazar was the Galilean dialect form of the Jewish name Eleazar. Galilean northerners spoke Aramaic with a strong accent that made them stand out in Judea. Peter was recognised as one in the High Priest's house on the night of Jesus' trial as soon as he opened his mouth. So, Jesus liked to stay with his fellow northerners, with whom he was obviously very close. Perhaps they were family or childhood friends. Whether we believe that he brought he brought Lazarus back from the dead, there’s no reason to doubt that he cried when he heard he had died. And if he really did revive Lazarus, he must surely have done so in part because he wanted him back, because he could not imagine life without him. So Bethany was an important place for Jesus, inhabited by people who were special to him, a place of intense, loving friendship in life that also reached into the grave and beyond.
Bethany was also the place where Jesus had supper with Simon the Leper, on the occasion when nameless, famous woman poured precious ointment on his head. So it was also a place of warm, but characteristically path-breaking conviviality for our sociable saviour. It's good to know he liked a meal with friends and wasn't the just lonely ascetic hero he's sometimes made into, though what certainly was, and still is, unusual about him was that his friends were as likely to be lepers, whether metaphorical or actual, as old pals from home. He chose his friends widely, bravely, and eclectically. And I'm sure he did so because he liked them, not just because he wanted to send a message.
So the Bethany of Jesus' time is a good place for us to think about, as a new community trying to learn together about issues of friendship both with one another and with those at the margins of our world. For it was a place where Jesus investigated the diverse meanings of friendship, where he had both familiar and unconventional friendships. And Bethany now is a place where what I take to be our other principal themes, love and justice, are exemplified in an extraordinary institution that I and my fellow pilgrims went to on our visit. In 1972, a Palestinian Christian couple, Alice and Basil Sahhar, founded an orphanage and school for children from across Palestine in Bethany. The Jeel al-Amal (Generation of Hope) orphanage still stands, and it has looked after generations of Palestinian children for the past 40 years, some of whom now teach at the school. Though a Christian foundation, it was obvious from their dress that most of the female teachers were Muslim, as were most of the children - 98% of Palestinians are Muslim. The Principal sat us all us down in one of the classrooms, and told us in no uncertain terms that his school was a holy place, like a church or a mosque. Quite something to say in this Holy Land which has an over-abundance of sacred places, and is all but starved of love and justice. Which is why Jeel al-Amal in Bethany was such a potent sign of hope in a town which seemed to me to be now a place of tension and a community under pressure. You can't follow in Jesus' footsteps from the Temple Mount to Bethany any more. The Security Fence runs between them, and you need to go through a checkpoint to get there from Jerusalem. Bethany is a poor, parched, shabby-looking town, a world away even from Arab East Jerusalem. Not much going on, nothing being built apart from a large mosque. There's a bit of tourist development around the traditional site of the tomb of Lazarus, but not much else as far as I saw. Which is why the orphanage and school are so important as an ecumenical sign of hope in what looked to me like a difficult situation for the people who live there.
They need our help. The Principal appealed to us to come back, and to tell our friends to visit them. They want our friendship. They are building a new girls’ home for which they are currently raising money. We as a community might in the future do something for them, with them, as part of our inquiry into the fullness of what friendship means for Christians, and as one element of our contribution to the establishment of love and justice in the world. Bethany was an important place for Jesus. It can mean something for us too.
If you want to know more about the home for girls, go to http://www.friendsoflazarushomeforgirls.org.uk/project.html
