Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land

by Ruth Everhart

  There’s no mistaking the piety in my fellow pilgrim’s heart. Charlie loves Jesus. He asks me for a page and pen so we can make a rubbing of the cross. The rubbing doesn’t come out well without the right tools, but at least it’s some kind of evidence of where we’ve been, a kind of paper trail that we are working out our own salvation by being here, by exploring these ideas (Philippians 2:12). Perhaps the rubbing is an attempt to reconcile the opposing forces of religious history: piety and oppression. Perhaps the rubbing is foolish. Perhaps every pious enterprise appears foolhardy when seen from great time and distance.

  In a few moments the whole group stops again, this time at the Chapel of the Prison of Jesus, which honors those who are prisoners of conscience. We crowd into the small space in order to conduct a brief prayer service. My body presses against the warmth of an elderly pilgrim on one side and cold stone walls on the other.

  We have been in the church for more than an hour. Stephen says that now we will go to two chapels, each with the “original” tomb. The first chapel is used by the Syrians, though it’s owned by the Armenians. The walls are coated black with incense.

  “Why don’t they clean the walls?” someone asks.

  “Because neither side will pay for clean-up or renovation,” Stephen answers. “Each thinks the other should pay.”

  He smiles wryly and we return the smile. We are beginning to understand this Holy Land.

  This Syrian/Armenian chapel has a koch tomb (from the Hebrew for “oven”). Stephen says that this may not be the original tomb, but it’s a terrific model for how the real tomb probably looked. I look around and don’t believe him. He can’t know everything. Someone gave him bad information. This is certainly not the way the tomb of Jesus looked in my Sunday school lessons. Everyone can picture the rock that was rolled before that tomb — a nice, round rock, clean and white. After all, it was a perch for angels!

  But we are deep underground. There’s not a bit of natural light. Nothing is white or clean. Picture a black wall with a brick oven set into it, the kind for making pizza. That oven door opens into the tomb. Each tomb has two parts. In the larger front part, the “foyer,” so to speak, the body would be anointed. Then the body would be pushed into the second part, one of the deeper recesses, and the tomb would be sealed. Eighteen months later a family member would open the tomb and scrape the bones together and put them in an ossuary, or bone box. In the Hebrew scriptures this scraping/gathering is what is meant by the phrase “and he was gathered to his fathers.” Stephen makes scraping motions with his arms to cement our understanding. I shiver involuntarily.

  We are allowed to enter the tomb three at a time. Kyle, myself, and a woman from another pilgrim group stoop very low to enter. We are practically on our knees on a filthy floor. We shine the flashlight around. The only other light comes from a single wick burning in an oil candle. There are multiple doors all the same size: small. You couldn’t crawl into those doors. We are in the shared foyer, and the doors lead to the deeper recesses. You’d have to lie down and have someone shove you in. Head-first or feet-first? We count two open doors and two sealed doors.

  “Are there bodies in there?” the woman asks.

  “Yes,” Kyle says confidently, as if he knows.

  We all shudder. Then we crawl back out. We cross a large, open area to another chapel to see a second original tomb. This one is housed in a structure made of stone and marble that is ornately carved. This tomb is closely supervised. A man who is distinctively dressed in a round fur hat and long black robe lets people into the tomb four at a time. He signals entrance and exit every few minutes by clapping his hands vigorously, which makes his enormous cross necklace swing against his chest. We wait obediently until he claps for us.

  Inside the structure, the tomb itself is all marble. At least it feels clean. The washerwoman part of my DNA is happy. I put my shekel in the box to pay for a candle. When I kneel to light the candle, I am beside Michael, and our knees are on the marble floor. Ashley and Jessica are on Michael’s other side. I feel depleted rather than Spirit-filled. Maybe I’ve used up my allotment of Spirit for the day. Maybe the Spirit can’t penetrate all the marble. Maybe the fur-hatted man clapping his hands drives the Spirit away.

  When we leave, I’m glad that this is the last site on the agenda.

  We find the other members of the documentary group to discuss logistics. Then we all walk slowly back through the Old City of Jerusalem toward the Damascus Gate, shopping as we go. When some of the others buy small silver Jerusalem crosses on necklace chains, I decide this is a good idea. I try to count how many I should buy: two daughters, three sisters, one mother, one secretary, how many friends? I cannot think. I buy only six crosses, knowing it won’t be enough. I cannot bring myself to buy more. I hate to feel like a tourist stocking up on postcards when these are crosses bought on the day I touched the rock of Golgotha and wept at the Stone of Anointing.

  On impulse, I buy figs from a street-seller. I’ve never had fresh figs before. They’re plump and as purple as eggplant, streaked with green. They feel alive, and are delicious.

  By the time we get back to Saint George’s, it’s past five o’clock. We’re supposed to attend a vespers service immediately. But my pilgrim feet hurt. I’m thirsty and hot: I feel like I’ve been thirsty and hot for days. At vespers we will not be allowed even a water bottle. So Kyle and I detour to the cathedral courtyard for a different sort of vespers. Taybeh beer is made in a Christian village near Ramallah. Drinking it will be an act of solidarity — like intercessory prayer. We raise our bottles to the Christians of Palestine.

  I say to Kyle, “I suppose, if it’s possible to get drunk on God, Jerusalem is the place to do it.”

  “Amen,” he agrees.

  “Honestly, I feel a bit punch-drunk,” I say.

  “Would that be the Spirit doing the punching?”

  We laugh at the image. But the truth is that all of us gorged ourselves on spiritual experiences today. We were spiritual gluttons. Does that make us pilgrims or tourists? I want to slow this pilgrimage down and allow room for the Spirit. But I want to drink it all in because I may never be able to come back. I don’t want to miss a thing.

  Dinner is chicken and saffron rice. Then there’s a meeting of the whole group in the lecture room to share the day’s experience.

  “Where did you experience a communion of the saints?” is the question.

  People describe moments of connection with pilgrims past and present. I think about my connections. My experience at the Western Wall would seem an unlikely sort of communion. But weren’t the Jewish mother, the baby, and I all connected by our hope in God? And the Crusader crosses, those strange acts of devotion. I didn’t want to claim my connection to their bloody history, their savagery. But aren’t we connected by folly? Perhaps future generations will see our folly more clearly than we do.

  Michael describes an experience of the Spirit while in the marble tomb, a sense of the Spirit right there beside him, which made him appreciate the enormity of Jesus’ crucifixion. I had been kneeling beside Michael and hadn’t known he was moved. How intimate, how personal these holy experiences are! It’s hard to give voice to them even to the person beside you.

  After the meeting, the smaller documentary group has a brief worship service on the rooftop. Jessica leads us, using some David Crowder music and the text about the healing of Blind Bartimaeus, which forms the basis of the Jesus Prayer. My very long day has come full circle. To close, we stand and take turns praying. It is sweet, even as our language betrays our doctrinal differences.

  After the Amen, Brian produces a bottle of wine and small glass cups like jelly jars. We pour the wine and drink, still standing in our prayer circle. The lights of Jerusalem are spread at our feet. The moment feels sacramental, and no one moves to break the circle.

  Shepherds’ Field, Bethlehem

  CHAPTER 10

  Birth and Death

  I am the gate for the sheep.

>   JOHN 10:7

  TODAY IS TUESDAY. Bethlehem.

  When I go down to breakfast, the documentary group is sitting at a table, looking dispirited.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Jessica sighs. “Tomatoes and cucumbers are all right, I guess. But for every meal? For breakfast?”

  “Let’s just hope they have something different for lunch,” Ashley says with a forced smile. “Not chicken.”

  “Why bother hoping?” Charlie says, emphatically. “Lunch and supper will be the same as always: chicken and yellow rice. And yellow — why? ” Charlie’s drawl gives the word “why” two syllables.

  “That’s from saffron — ”JoAnne begins to explain.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know why it’s yellow,” Michael says, and everybody laughs.

  After breakfast, Stephen begins his lecture with a simple question: “Was Jesus born in Bethlehem?” Warm, dry air wafts through an open window, and I want to get up and look out at Jerusalem. “There are some good reasons to answer, ‘Probably not.’ ” Some of my fellow pilgrims shift audibly in their seats, telegraphing discomfort. I squiggle deeper into my molded plastic chair and open my notebook.

  The earliest writings in the New Testament are the Epistles of Paul, and the apostle never mentions Bethlehem. In fact, Paul mentions Jesus’ birth only in two passing references to the fact that Jesus was born of flesh. Usually, when Paul talks about Jesus, it is “him crucified.” Perhaps Paul preached about the birth elsewhere and that record has been lost to us. Or perhaps Paul didn’t know the tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

  The earliest Gospel is Mark’s, and he is silent on Jesus’ birth. Luke’s famous account of the census — Mary and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, which we read and hear every Christmas — is problematic because there is no historical record of the census that Luke mentions. Did this census, in fact, ever happen? Stephen’s voice underscores the improbability. Another wrinkle: No one disputes that Nazareth was Jesus’ hometown. Was Nazareth, then, where he was actually born? Still another wrinkle: There is a second Bethlehem in Galilee. Which one is the correct location?

  “Was Jesus born in Bethlehem?” Stephen asks again. “The question is more difficult to answer than might appear. Yet there are some good reasons for us to answer, ‘Probably yes.’ ” Again, there is shifting in the seats.

  For openers, not just one but two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, record the Nativity as taking place in Bethlehem. So the Bethlehem tradition is very old, dating back to the first century, perhaps even before the written record, and is well-developed in the earliest literature. As for Bethlehem versus Nazareth, that conundrum isn’t really so difficult. We all understand that a birthplace and a hometown can be different places.

  Stephen presents scholar Raymond Brown’s suggestion that Christology developed retrospectively, beginning with the cross, and moving back toward the birth. “The idea of objective history is a Western Enlightenment idea that we often mistakenly apply to Scripture.” I glance at Shane and notice that he’s scowling. My heart softens. Stephen’s lecture is not new material to me, but I remember when I learned all this and found it threatening. Biblical criticism is a lot to absorb, especially if you’re already overloaded by the sights and smells and people of the Holy Land.

  “The upshot?” Stephen says. “After you balance faith and history — the Gospels, the Epistles, and the tradition — Bethlehem is a reasonable answer to the question of where was Jesus born.”

  Then come some easy facts. Beth-lehem means “house of bread” in Hebrew. The fourteen-point star is a symbol of Bethlehem because Jesus’ genealogy is recounted in three groups of fourteen generations in Matthew 1:17. It is a pleasure to write down these undisputed facts.

  We board the bus for the five-mile trip to Bethlehem. As usual, we documentary folk sit in the back of the bus. “So, what did you think of the lecture?” JoAnne asks Shane.

  “Why do you ask?” he responds.

  “Because it reminded me of seminary, I guess. It’s not every day you hear a lecture like that. So I wondered what that was like for you.”

  “Why? Because I haven’t been to seminary?” Shane says. “I’ll tell you what. I don’t think any of this is as hard as people make it out to be.”

  “The Bible is compli — ” JoAnne begins, but Shane cuts her off.

  “Maybe I’ll never go to seminary. I don’t have to. I’m already doing ministry.” Shane’s voice has an edge.

  “Good for you,” says JoAnne. “You’re doing what you want to do.”

  There’s a little lull as people let go of the conversation and turn back to their seatmates. “When you went to seminary,” I ask Michael, “did they dismantle everything you thought you believed?”

  He grins. “They sure did.”

  “It’s good to know the Lutherans do that, too,” I say.

  Stephen gets on the bus’s loudspeaker to alert us to the fact that we’re passing through Gehenna Valley, which was the city’s original garbage dump. In the Bible it’s referred to as a place that’s constantly burning, a place where the outcasts scavenged a living. It’s significant because it gave birth to Scripture’s Gehenna/hell imagery. The bus windows are open, but I don’t notice any overpowering odors, which is disappointing. I have a good nose and had hoped to catch the stench of hell itself. But I’ve smelled much worse in New York City during garbage workers’ strikes.

  The bus winds through city streets and then suburbs, never leaving greater Jerusalem before we arrive at the Wall of Separation between Israel and the West Bank. We are armed with our passports. A teenager in a dark green uniform and black beret boards the bus carrying a rifle in both hands. He strides down the aisle, swinging his head from side to side for a cursory glance at our papers. He doesn’t stop to examine anything. When he passes me, I notice that his cheeks are peach-fuzzed.

  The bus gets the go-ahead and begins to move. Camera Michael scrambles in front of me to film out my window. We both strain and crane as we roll past the barrier. The Wall stretches twice as high as our bus and casts a long shadow, both literally and figuratively. It is an obstruction that demarcates inside from outside, Israeli from Palestinian, citizen from noncitizen. My heart beats faster when I see a large group of soldiers and a tank at the ready. I wonder if the young men in uniform like being on the side they’re on, or if they feel locked into this conflict in complicated ways.

  In Bethlehem we stop to pick up our guide for the day: Sam, a Palestinian Christian. The staff at Saint George’s always hires a Palestinian guide when the pilgrim tours cross into the Occupied Territories. They do this partly as a courtesy, because this is Palestinian land; but they also do it as an act of justice: the people here are desperate for employment. The Second Intifada in 2000 decimated the tourist business — it declined by some 90 percent.

  The bus heads to the Shepherds’ Field on the eastern side of Bethlehem, grinding gears as the driver downshifts on a long, steep hill. On either side of the street are boarded-up businesses and barred windows. There are very few people out and about. Sam tells us that the population of Bethlehem is currently 28,000, and nearly everyone is unemployed. He gives us the religious breakdown: 70 percent are Muslim and 30 percent are Christian, although both groups may include large numbers of atheists.

  I remember Tercier, the atheist we encountered at the Monastery of the Flagellation. He was from Bethlehem, and told us the joke about Jesus being trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. I recorded that joke just as I now record Sam’s statistics. I tell myself that I’m writing down facts to use in sermons later; but in truth I’m trying to capture this experience so that I can process it later. I want to appreciate each point of view. There is so much I don’t know, and the statistics are the least of it. To me the real growth comes from meeting Tercier, and Sam, from passing through the shadow of the Wall, from seeing everything here firsthand.

  Sam explains that the Shepherds’ Field is the setti
ng for two well-known Bible stories. As I hoped, he mentions Ruth and Boaz. I love that story, and I delight in being Ruth’s namesake. She was so brave! I want to have access to her courage and resolve. She was powerless because she was a woman, as well as an outsider, a Moabitess. Yet she ended up in the covenant line because she gave birth to a child who was one of Jesus’ forebears. She is named in Matthew’s genealogy, the passage immortalized in that fourteen-point star we’ll be seeing in the Church of the Nativity. Certainly that makes her a chosen one.

  Ruth’s combination of outside-ness and chosen-ness has always struck a deep chord in me. These two poles are also important to my life story. Because I was born into an ethnically tight faith community with a strong theology of the covenant, I always felt chosen. We were all chosen, my whole Dutch Reformed community — born into that covenant and chosen by God. How I would like to talk to a Jewish person about this sense of chosenness, which seems to be a double-edged sword! But I have no idea how to begin that conversation. Besides, I was chosen, but I was also a woman, and because of that I had a certain role to play. When I felt called into ministry, I moved outside the acceptable boundaries of the community. I had no choice but to leave the womb of my early world and become an outsider.

  Palestinian Sam is quoting a familiar Scripture passage: “In that region there were shepherds abiding in the field. . . .” And the whole busload of us shouts in unison, “Keeping watch over their flocks by night.” We grin at each other as the bus lurches down the hill.

  Finally we arrive. The Shepherds’ Field is rocky and steeply sloped. We go single file, making a hairpin turn around a precipitous drop, which exposes the entrance to a cave. Single file down eight or so stone steps between rough rock walls. The steps are spaced evenly enough to have been hewn.

  By the dim light I can see that the cave is made entirely of stone. There are niches chiseled into the wall here and there. In certain spots the walls and ceiling are black with soot. I imagine the fires that people burned in those places to chase the chill away. One “room” has enough space for us to gather. Sam explains that this empty pocket occurred naturally in the hillside, and over the centuries has been enlarged.