Adventures of an Ignorant Protestant in the Holy Land

Our study group was given a free afternoon today following the morning's shabbat service at the Reform synagogue. The shabbat fed my soul tremendously, see my previous two posts about that! The five of us decided to walk back down to the the old city, to see the Museum at David's Tower and see if we could catch the preparations that take place on Saturday afternoon at the Church of the Resurrection.

Window at Christ Church

After walking down the narrow corridors, which were very crowded with visitors and merchants, we found our way to the museum only to learn that it was closed. So we popped in to Christ Church, which is a somewhat unique house of worship for this area in that it houses both an Evangelical Anglican and Messianic Jewish congregation. The young man who showed us around was kind and welcoming, the building is beautiful. It has an interesting history of proselytizing to the Jewish community during the Ottoman Empire. I had heard of Messianic Jews (Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah), and encountered them from time to time on New York street corners. Evangelizing in a land that is so religiously complex can be downright dangerous, and it is usually discouraged by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

We has received a tip earlier in the day that the Church of the Resurrection (aka Church of the Holy Sepulchre) has a liturgical procession in the middle of Saturday afternoon in order to prepare the site for Sunday services, and we were all eager to check it out. The following description is taken from Wikipedia, which is actually pretty helpful in understanding this complicated place:

The site is venerated as the Hill of Calvary (Golgotha), where Jesus was crucified and is said also to contain the place where Jesus was buried (the Sepulchre). The church has been an important Christian pilgrimage destination since at least the 4th century, as the purported site of the resurrection of Jesus. Today it also serves as the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, while control of the building is shared between several Christian churches and secular entities in complicated arrangements essentially unchanged for centuries. Today, the church is home to Eastern Orthodoxy, Coptic, Armenian Apostolic Orthodox and Roman Catholicism. Anglicans and other Protestants have no permanent presence in the church.

I expect that some of you who have been following my Jerusalem posts feel a little skeptical about all of the claims regarding the places I have visited, and certainly some of the spots are a little less than historically accurate. However, the best scholarship right now believe that the Church of the Resurrection is an authentic site.

Anointing Rock

When we entered, we saw that it was not as busy as we expected. I spent a moment watching the people who came to pray at the anointing rock, just inside the main door. It is said that this rock is where Jesus' body was anointed after death, and pilgrims bring their own burial shrouds to rub on the rock and pray with. One cleric dressed in Eastern Orthodoxy robes walked around the rock and asked the faithful if they wanted a blessing, which I thought was a kind pastoral gesture.

We turned left to climb the steep steps to Golgotha so that I could have a chance to place my hand on the spot which it is said held the cross. The wait wasn't very long, and there were certainly icons and art to look at while we were standing around. Just as we came to the front of the line, the Orthodox clerics began to yell and gesture at us to step back. We huddled against the large stone pillars as a group of four men dressed in black suits with red fez hats pounded large posts into the group keeping a slow and steady beat. One by one, each of the four main presences of the church came forward with 20-60 clergy, all dressed alike, waving incense, chanting competing songs and carrying large banners. They worked their way around the entire church, visiting Golgotha, the Annointing Stone and the Sepulchre (and circling each three times). All the while, security guards kept the crowds back, loudly yelling and gesturing to make way.

After seeing the first few processions, we tried to make our way out of the church but kept getting stuck by other processions. It was maddening. Crushing throngs of people tried to get a good picture of the holy men (they were all men, of course) and we received many elbows and shoves.

The energy in the place felt to me so violent, with priests yelling and guards ordering and crowds shoving that I wondered out loud to one of my companions "What do you think Jesus would have to say about all of this pomp and circumstance?" Each faction trying to maintain their sliver of the holy, spending what must be tremendous resources in their incense budget alone! What might the money spent on all of this do for struggling schools and hospitals, not to mention feeding and providing clean water for people in the region who are so economically desperate? Didn't Christ mandate that we are to feed his sheep?

I know that for many people this is a sacred place, but it feels more to me like Disneyland of the Holy.