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.
Downstairs, was another queue for another rock. This one is claimed to have housed the tomb where Christ was laid. It’s encased in an elaborate marble shrine. It was a long, cold wait. Spirit did battle with stomachs, and many stomachs won. It’s hard to maintain pilgrim fervour without breakfast. You have to duck to squeeze inside. This time we were sure of evocative rock. There isn’t any. The natural stone has been overlaid with marble and an altar squeezed on top. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is more tomb-like than the tomb. Maybe after a full English, the tomb is inspiring. Many of us didn’t feel it.
Across the old city is the Pool of Bethseda where Christ healed the man who had been ill for 38 years and provoked the ire of the Pharisees. The ruins were unearthed and identified in the 19th-century. The colonnades described by John’s gospels have vanished; the water is now grass. Clothes hang from the washing of the houses stacked high above its walls. But there’s power in that place where Christ walked and there was power in the healing service we held beside the ancient cisterns.
Jesus can be elusive on a pilgrimage. He comes and goes. Not many of the urban holy sites resemble our imaginings. They’re too ornately packaged, their environs too built up. You have to work hard to feel a spiritual connection and let the ear rather than the eye bring them to life through the gospel readings. Guilt happens when you don’t feel as you ought. But some places look so exactly as they’re supposed to that your breath catches. The Mount of Olives is one of those places. Viewed from the top of the 1st-century steps to the high priest’s house, up which Jesus was dragged from Gethsemane, you can almost see with his disciples climbing at sundown to Bethany after his city ministry. Half of the slope is green and speckled and spiked with olive groves and cypress trees. The other half looks like desert sand; in fact, it’s the tight packed tombs of the Jewish cemetery which, over 3,000 years, have crept the full height of the hill.
We tackled the Mount from the top where, traditionally, Jesus taught his disciples to pray. On the white walls of a monastery, the Lord’s Prayer is written on plaques in over 100 languages. Bethany has grown into a tentacle of Jerusalem, its buildings bristling along the mountain ridge, but, below the monastery, time peels back and you can see the backdrop of Holy Week from the heights. We were on the precipitous route Christ rode on Palm Sunday on his arrival from Jericho - past the congested stone tombs, past the terrace where he wept over Jerusalem. Far below, the old city spreads. You can track his route to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane, to the house of the high priest. You can see where he was brought to Pontius Pilate and where Herod’s palace stood. The grey domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre show where he was crucified and buried.
At the bottom of the Mount is Gethsemane. The remains of ancient churches mark the spot. The lush green olive groves surrounding it look like Gethsemane ought; Gethsemane itself does not. A mental fence shuts in several lines of antique olive trees are and neat gravel pathways. Spotlights are half buried in the soil. It’s a compact rectangle and you can’t go in. And beyond the boundary wall, traffic roars past on a congested highway. It is not a plausible place for private, anguished prayer and even the Gethsemane frescoes in the adjacent church could not reclaim the spirit of that night.
There are times in the Holy Land when faith feels more nebulous that in church at home. There are other times when places are so resonant, it feels the incarnate Christ has only just left. Now and then, locations that are not designated sacred sites speak more volubly across the centuries than those that are. The rocky round hills that lead north towards Nazareth; the lush olive orchards that aren’t the official Gethsemane.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The settings are like icons – a window onto the divine. The journey in itself is bearing witness. Today has probably changed us. We just don’t yet know how.
Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom (Luke 23:42)
Day 5 - Conflict
‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day.’ John 6:54
The beginning and the end. Christ’s first night on earth in Bethlehem and his last in the dungeon of the High Priest on Maundy Thursday.
Religion and politics are on public display in Jerusalem. In the clothes of the Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Greeks and Roman Catholics. In the buildings of the Israeli settlements which straddle the hills between the West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem. In the poverty of the Arab villages, the graffiti on the wall and the watchtowers that divide Judea. The streets are calm, but there’s tension in the air. ‘Do not’ begged our guide, ‘leave the hotel alone.’ The sunrise over Galilee feels 2,000 years ago.
It's five miles from the old city to Bethlehem, but it’s essentially another country. The coach passed through an Israeli check point manned by armed guards. We had our passports at the ready. The Arab residents of Bethlehem need a permit to reach Jerusalem. Permits are hard to come by and some have never been.
Between the tentacles of suburbia lie the rocky round hills that Jesus would have known. I’d imagined the Mary on her donkey crossing desert sands; in springtime, the landscape is more like Yorkshire. It’s on one such rocky hillside that the shepherds received the angel visitation. Archaeological research and the testimony of 4th-century pilgrims have narrowed the spot down to a particular slope two miles from biblical Bethlehem. ‘This,’ said our guide is Shepherds Fields,’ and we peered out at a noisy beige suburb which takes its name from the gospel story.
The part of that sacred hill that is not housing is churches and brick pathways and al fresco chapels roofed with corrugated iron from where hymns wafted, sung in different languages by different pilgrim groups. What the environment lacked, the Eucharist supplied. We sat in an iron roofed chapel, an intact green hill, such as the shepherds would have known, in our sightlines across the valley. And there we commemorated Christ’s sacrifice in the place where his birth was proclaimed.
The mystery of the incarnation is even more mysterious amid the ordinariness of the surroundings where it began. And the conflicts which ravage the country are even more incomprehensible, as we read of the Prince of Peace born 2,000 years ago.
Country folk in the hills of Galilee and Judea were cave dwellers. Mary is thought to have been raised in a house built into the rock. Shepherds used caves to shelter their sheep at night and a particular cave has been designated as the one where the biblical trio received the good news. It’s now a rocky chapel.
And it’s probable that Jesus was born, not in a stable but a cave. Homes in Bethlehem were a room built above a cave. The family lived in the ‘upper room’; their animals were housed in the cave. Joseph, our guide explained, undoubtedly had family in his home town of Bethlehem and any family would certainly have offered a berth in their one-room home, but when Mary went into labour the only privacy would have been the cave below.
That cave was identified by St Justin the Martyr in the 2nd Century when word-of-mouth recollections were recent enough to be more reliable. The shepherds would have crossed the rocky green hills to the place. We drove through a large town. You couldn’t miss it. An enormous church was built over the site in the 6th-century and much of it survives intact. It’s one of the oldest churches in Christendom and has itself been source of such conflict over the years that it’s now been divided up by the Roman Catholics and the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches. To get to the cave, you walk through the Greek Orthodox part, walls of gold icons, chains of brass lanterns and shiny scarlet baubles glinting mystically in the gloom. There is a queue for a flight of steps descending to a tiny stone archway. Red and gold brocade drape the walls and line the narrow passage that leads downwards, its ending blocked by the queuing heads. It could have been Aladdin’s Cave. There was tangible suspense as we waited our turn to enter – apprehension about a dark, narrow descent into the unknown, fear of an encounter with the sacred. This is the place where Heaven met earth and we realised the trepidation of the shepherds.
But even the sacred can be neutralised by mass tourism. The cavern at the end of the passage was small, lamplit and crowded, but the reverence that brought so many from so far morphed into greed for a good photo and resentment of pilgrims who lingered and blocked the view. In Galilee we were pilgrims. In the frenetic sights of Judea we are in danger of becoming sightseers.
A silver star marks the spot where Christ was born and a replica manger across the stone floor shows where he was laid. In solitude it might have been moving. In a crush of waving phones it was stressful.
Bethlehem’s main ‘industry’ is Christianity, yet less than 20 per cent of the inhabitants are Christian. Women in hijabs preside over shops selling rosaries and nativity scenes. As we left the church, an address blasted on loud speakers from the mosque across Manger Square. ‘Christians,’ our guide told us, ‘are caught between a hammer and an anvil.’ Oppression from Jews and Muslims and the economic impact of the security barrier which almost surrounds the town have caused thousands to emigrate.
Briefly, we experienced what they face weekly. As our coach approached the security barrier to return to Jerusalem, the huge metal door slid shut. Our guide remonstrated with the guards. They levelled their rifles at him. A Palestinian, we learned, had driven his car into a queue at a Jerusalem bus stop while we were in church and killed a man and child. The West Bank was locked down. We faced being locked down with it. The coach crossed town and made for another gateway that remains open for Israelis returning home. We were waved through by two smiling young guards. On the opposite carriageway, a queue of Palestinian cars stretched almost to Jerusalem. Each one would be searched before they would be allowed home. It would take the rest of the day.
Back in Jerusalem there is the Upper Room where Jesus broke the bread with his disciples on his final night before his Crucifixion. It’s not the real upper room. The structure is a 12th century church, which became a mosque in a street of buildings that didn’t exist in Christ’s day. Scholarly minds reckon the real upper room would have been nearby, if not there, but it was hard spiritually to make sense of the place.
What did make sense, searingly, was the walk from the room through the city walls from where Judea undulated away into a horizon of misty mountains. To the left reared a beige peak speckled towards the base with evergreens. The peak was the Mount of Olives, the distant speckles Gethsemane. We were surveying, over the traffic barrier, the whole setting of the Passion. It was strangely astounding to realise those familiar names are actual places.
The Pit isn’t mentioned in the gospels. None of us had heard of it. Yet the Pit was the most moving stop of the day. Across the valley from the Mount stand the ruins of the house of the high priest Caiaphas and under those ruins are a series of caves that served as dungeons. One of the cave is a pit like a well. It’s thought that Jesus was held here for the night after his arrest in Gethsemane until Passover was over and he could face the Jewish council. Crosses and a praying figure etched by Byzantine Christians dot the walls. He would have been lowered into the depths through a hole in the roof and abandoned in pitch darkness.
Pilgrim groups took it in turns to gather in that hole. Psalm 88 was read. ‘You have put me in the lowest pit; in the darkest depths.’ There was a power in there, a horror, that gave the Passion a new dimension. The idea of a night of abandonment is more agonising than the scourges. ‘You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.’ (Psalm 88). We had seen with our own eyes the placid green hills of Galilee and the sunrise over the lake that Christ for which, in his anguish, might have longed.
Outside the cave is the site of the courtyard where Peter denied Christ three times and below are the very steps down which Christ made his way to the Mount of Olives with his disciples after the Last Supper and up which he returned in custody. They are the only stones on which it’s known for certain that his feet trod.
Day 4 - The Way to Jerusalem
I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord.Psalm 122
A glorious dawn. A sense of foreboding. Our route to Jerusalem had had to be amended because of the deteriorating security situation. We should have followed Jesus on his journey through Samaria, now the West Bank, and paused at Jacob’s Well in Nablus where Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman. Nablus is now deemed too dangerous by The Foreign and Commonwealth Office as the Israeli military target Palestinian insurgents. Our new route lay along the Mediterranean. The anguished convulsions of the land Jesus knew are replicated today; the transfer from Galilee to the Holy City felt similarly risky.
It was hard to part from the lake. As the sun rose, pilgrims gathered on the jetty. We gazed at the same stretch of water Jesus would have beheld as he ‘resolutely set out for Jerusalem’ (Luke 9:51). We saw with our own eyes the breathtaking tranquillity that he had to forsake; imagined, for the first time, the pain of leaving the place he called home. Two fishermen were drawing in their nets. Fish flapped inside. They were chatting and laughing. All in a day’s work. But their mundane routine seemed holy. Through a slit in the cloud a fan of sunbeams hit the water and gilded it. It felt like a sign. Everything feels like a sign in Galilee.
The next settlement along the shore is Magdala, home of Mary of Magdalen. It would have been the first lakeside village that Christ saw when he emerged from the cleft in the mountains where the trail winds south to Nazareth and Jerusalem and the last that he passed on his final journey. If he walked that way now, he’d be met by a gaudy retail park and two service stations on a roundabout.
Hidden behind is the remains of Magdala built from the same grey basalt as Capernaum. The village Christ knew was doomed. Within 30 years of his death, it was obliterated by the invading Romans. The huge stone the residents hauled across the entrance to thwart them still lies there. The caves where they hid when the armies came and the cliffs from which they leapt when they were smoked out rear above the service stations. Erosion buried the ruins. For centuries no one knew that a city lay buried under the shore.
Still recognisable among the stumps of walls is the synagogue which Jesus would have visited, the carved table which bore the Torah still in place. He may have touched that very stone when gathering the scrolls to read the scriptures. He would certainly have sat on the stone benches round the room.
We stopped at the Valley of Pigeons, the deep, narrow cleft which led out of Galilee. It’s a path Jesus would have taken every time he returned home to Nazareth, every time he travelled south to Jerusalem. He would have seen the same jagged cliff on one side and the same mountain sweeping almost sheer to a sculpted sandstone peak across the stream. Sometimes, when you contemplate a place that Jesus knew, you feel yourself clay when you want to be spirit. And sometimes you feel a fizz, a tug as something within is drawn forth and connects. This place was the latter. Spring grass in Galilee is almost fluorescent green and sprinkled with poppies. A large brown cow grazed placidly and miraculously on the sheer and stony mountainside. A turtle sunbathed on a stone. The path curled along the stream and disappeared into the chasm. The urge to follow it, to tread literally in Christ’s footsteps, was overwhelming. But we were shepherded back to the coach and pointed towards Mount Carmel, haunt of Elijah, on the coast.
Mount Carmel is now covered with Haifa. Haifa is not a beautiful city. Clinging to its flanks are grey concrete tower blocks. Grey concrete apartment blocks bristle along its ridge. It looks like East Croydon enlarged. It was on the summit that Elijah competed with the prophets of Baal to incinerate dissected bulls (Kings 2) and ordered his servant to look towards the sea. The servant saw a tiny cloud rise from the waves. If the servant looked down today, he’d see a container port and a car scrappage plant.
It’s a tricky mental shift from New Testament to Old. We missed Jesus! A Carmelite convent sits on the ridge run by business-like nuns (it costs $1 to spend a penny). Their church embeds one of the caves Elijah is said to have hidden in on his flight from Jezebel into Egypt. The nuns provided our lunch. Lunch stops, especially three-course lunch stops, can seem an imposition on a pilgrimage. The hour spend feeding could be spent venerating a holy site and convent cooking is pricey. But we’re realising they are an essential part of the journey. Meals were a crucial element of Jesus’s ministry. It’s at the table that he taught servanthood and humility, showed his empathy with frail human need. Relations are formed over food and its over our shared meals that we’ve learnt of the lives, hopes and losses of our fellow travellers.
Further down the coast a segment of aqueduct, arching along the shore, leads to the city of Caesarea Maritima. It was built by Herod, who fancied a beachside palace, and was the base of Pontius Pilate. Now it’s a ruin, crammed incongruously alongside a power station and a desalination plant. It’s to Caesarea that St Peter was summoned by the pagan Cornelius and realised that Gentiles were deemed fit for salvation and at Caesarea that the captive Paul demanded to be tried by the emperor and was escorted from its port to Rome and his execution.
Onwards then to Jerusalem. Jesus made the journey over hills, plains and valleys. We sped through a landscape of motorways, flyovers, tower bocks and building sites. And, as we neared the permitter of the West Bank, the 10-foot security barrier that zigzags behind illegal settlements and imprisons the population inside. The residents of the tower blocks that protrude over the razor wire are forbidden to leave the confines without a permit and permit holders are only allowed to use one of the half dozen gateways controlled by the military.
We entered Jerusalem on the Palestinian side. We were expecting ancient walls. We encountered miles of industrial sites, impoverished estates and that 10ft wall which divides the Palestinians in the West Bank from their brethren in East Jerusalem. The ancient walls lie long traffic jams away from the city boundaries. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city of endless traffic!’ remarked our guide. And behind those walls in lanes where traffic is barred is our hotel.
The Holy City is the turning point on our pilgrimage. It’s not hard to imagine Christ’s ministry and the lives of his fishermen followers. In Jerusalem it’s more of a challenge to conjure 1st-Century Israel out of this tense and roaring metropolis. We have been warned not to venture out alone in case we stray into danger zone. It’s the first time for most of us that we’ve taken risks for our faith.
‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.’ Psalm 120
Day 3 - Beginnings
Matthew 7:7 Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find.
In the beginning was a rainbow which hovered briefly over Nof Ginosar Hotel when the night’s rain cleared. A clutch of pilgrims kept vigil over the dawn on the jetty. It’s a remarkable thing to watch the sun rise from the opposite hills and to know that it has risen in the same way and cast the same golden light on the water for 2,000 years. Jesus, standing on the jetty today, would be familiar with the scene (if you blotted out the tower blocks of Tiberias cascading down the adjacent mountainside). It might have been the last view he had of his homeland before he headed that last time for Jerusalem, passing through the valley a mile along the shore on the main route south.
Today followed the start of Christ’s Galilean ministry from the shore where he called his first disciples, to the place where, according to Matthew (14:13-21), he fed the five thousand and first revealed himself publicly as the Messiah, and the Mount of the Beatitudes where, soon afterwards, he taught his followers the foundations of his mission.
First a boat ride. Pilgrim boats are modelled from the fragments of a 1st-century fishing vessel, excavated and reconstructed. It was pouring as we made our way down the jetty. It was supposed to be pouring all day, but out of a black sky the sun burst and, for 45 minutes, winter turned to summer on the Sea of Galilee.
The land unfurled as we sailed. The low hills that Jesus walked are spiked with pylons, speckled with buildings and striped with the plastic sheeting that shields banana crops. They are remarkably green. Behind them loom the snowy peaks of the Golan Heights. From a distance, the scene blurs into changelessness and looks authentically biblical.
In the middle of the lake the boat stopped and the engine cut. Wavelets lapped the hull. A fish leapt. And a strange thing happened. Time stood still. For God a thousand years is but a day, and at that moment it seemed so for us. It could have been a week ago that Christ walked that water and stilled the storm. He walked again in the gospel story read out as the boat bobbed. Every word of the verses glittered because we were there. Every pilgrim was overcome. ‘We’re not seeing where the gospels happened,’ said a pilgrim. ‘We’re living them.’
The sun, so elusive, beamed down and the water blazed. Sky and lake were too dazzling to gaze on. The ‘silence of eternity, interpreted by love’. It was our second Transfiguration moment.
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind was the chosen hymn. ‘Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,’ we sang, mindful of the thousands of quake victims over the border and of the same fault line that passes through Galilee.
We drove the short distance along the shore to Tabgha. Tabgha is thought to be the place where Christ fed the 5,000 because of a 4th century mosaic of loaves and fishes discovered there. A modern church protects it, its altar perched on the rock on which the meal is supposed to have been prepared. Jesus had withdrawn to the spot because it was solitary, according to Matthew (14:16-21), but his presence attracted the multitudes. Nothing’s changed. A coach park is the entrance to the site. There’s a queue to enter the church and a queue to snap the rocky, fishy altar. There’s a toilet block and a gift shop. There’s even a playground. But down a long path, past an olive grove of radiant green grass, there is a tiny shelter on the shore. The pews are logs, the altar a stone. On three sides is the lake and aquatic thickets of trees submerged by the storms.
Here, where Christ fed bread to the multitude, he fed us in the Eucharist. Many of the pilgrims have suffered sickness and loss. Many are bearing grief old and new. As the water lapped the shore and the Host was elevated, souls gained new strength. This simple church had a power that far exceeded the mighty basilicas on the pilgrim trail.
There was another feeding round the bay. A small church on a waterside outcrop marks the spot where the risen Lord barbecued breakfast to welcome the disciples back from their fruitless night’s fishing. In these waters, he ordered them to cast their nets on the other side and draw up a haul and on a rock inside the church, he laid out the meal and asked Peter three times if he loved him. The church is called the Primacy of Peter and is built on the foundations of a 4th century predecessor known as Church of the Coals. It’s assumed that if 4th century Christians were confident that this was the picnic spot, it’s likely to be true. When you’re there, it doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t this spot it, would have been a similar one nearby. Geography is secondary to an overwhelming sense of Presence all round this shore.
The water had grown rougher since our boat ride. The tiny beach was crowded with pilgrims trying to touch the lake while waves broke over their trainers.
Most of us had expected Capernaum to be a busy village. We were braced for tower blocks and filling stations. What confronted us was a ruin. The place Jesus made home was dug out of the ground over the last century. It declined after an 8th century earthquake and all that’s left is the footprint of the basalt-rock houses and a ruined synagogue on the spot where Jesus worshipped. The house of Peter’s mother-in-law, where Jesus stayed, has, through archaeological sleuthing, been identified and huge and hideous church squats over it. You can peer through glass panels to the ghostly contours of the room where the paralytic was lowered through the ceiling and from where it was a short stride to the synagogue.
You could trace the route of the lanes and alleys Jesus would have known, see the view that lay outside his lodgings, walk the shore where he called five of his disciples. You could bring to life the bustling town, the noise and odours, and it seemed incomprehensible that the Son of God could have dwelled in such an ordinary, domesticated environment and that the residents should have lived their alongside divinity.
Overlooking Capernaum is the high green hill where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. There is, naturally, an enormous church where the crowds would have gathered to hear him. And a convent and hotel and carefully arranged palms and lawns and worship spaces.
It has the air of an upmarket Floridan holiday complex. But as we sat where Christ’s followers sat, heard the words he spoke and saw the grassy descent to Capernaum where, teaching ended, he would have walked with Peter to his adopted home, the spirit of the place transcended the encroachments. The pilgrims spoke unanimously: ‘I can’t believe I’m here!’
Address for Eucharist at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, Tabgha - Click Here to read
Day 2 - Revelation
Mark 9:7 ‘This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him.’
The Sea of Galilee lay, astonishingly, beyond our hotel windows when we awoke, the water navy-striped beneath the storm clouds. The sun rose from behind the Golan Heights on the opposite shore; a fishing boat was nosing through the reeds. We were looking upon the same water, the same hills, the same rising sun that Christ saw. It was an indescribable feeling of connectedness.
The rain, that had thundered through the night, gave us a brief reprieve, then redoubled. ‘God often appeared in cloud!’ remarked a pilgrim optimistically as we set forth. From the streaming coach windows we saw olive and banana groves and avocado plantations. The expressway (and all roads in Galilee seem to be expressways) wove beneath mountains, the same mountains Christ may have climbed. The slopes were lumpy with boulders and prickled shrubs. Bleached villages trickled down them. Jewish and Arab villages intersperse, the former modern, European, spacious, the latter a chaos of crammed houses bearing black barrels on their roofs because water is scarce and divisively distributed. From a distance, through the rain, they look Biblical. At closer quarters, shabby tower blocks poke up from the hills.
The day followed the revelations of Christ’s glory from the Annunciation, Transfiguration and the first public miracle in Cana. ‘Your life,’ said the guide, ‘is about to change.’ Tourists, he explained, pass through places; pilgrims let places pass through them. Living in the Kingdom of God is happening now, here, in the present. That feels easier to believe when ‘here’ is the Holy Land. The incarnate Word makes more sense when you’re on the spot where it was spoken.
We began with the Transfiguration. Since no one can be sure where Jesus first showed his divinity to his disciples, Mount Tabor has been designated as the spot. The mountain soars cone-like in rocky tiers from a plain. The gospels refer casually to Christ’s pre-dawn ascents up mountains to commune with the Father. Looking at the craggy peaks we passed, they were no pre-prandial strolls. It would take all of a morning to conquer the precipitate slopes of Tabor. You feel you’re half way to Heaven when you reach the summit. We may as well have been half way to Heaven because the world was obscured by spouting clouds. All we could see as we slewed round hairpin bends were the flanks of Tabor, surprisingly green with grass and herbs and pine trees.
But as we emerged from our buses the rain halted and the sun briefly blazed on us. The summit where Christ received Moses and Elijha is covered by an enormous church. It was the Byzantines who began the idea of building vast basilicas over holy sites. Impressive but not quite the wilderness experience that Jesus had sought. The aerial views He and his disciples would have had over the surrounding valleys are largely obscured by walls ancient and modern. Pilgrims have to take their chances on a small terrace overlooking a wide green plain identified in Revelation as Armageddon.
The basilica was designed to replicate the Transfiguration as nearly as humanly possible with windows on each side which funnel beams of intersecting sunlight across the sanctuary. The rain had resumed when we entered and there was no celestial radiance.
Our extraordinary experience was to happen next door in a small chapel where we celebrated Mass. The gospel reading was the Transfiguration. Every word had new significance when we were sitting there where the disciples had flung themselves to the ground in terror. Peter’s offer to build three shelters made more sense if it had been a day like today. The rain was pummelling the glass roof. Wind buffeted the walls and, during the Eucharistic Prayer, thunder rolled. As Fr Edward broke the bread, lightening flashed across the altar. And then the storm abated and we emerged dazzled in more ways than one into sunshine. It was our own Transfiguration moment.
The rain has been a surprise. But we’re realising it adds an extra dimension to the gospel stories. The familiar image is of Jesus and his followers striding across sun-baked sand. It’s startling to imagine the disciples huddled under a brolly in Gethsemane! Now as we trace their footsteps under thunderous skies, we realise that much of Christ’s ministry, many of his long journeys on foot, were undertaken in cold and wet and mud.
The coach drove us on to Cana. It’s more of a challenge to see Galilee through Christ’s eyes in a town. The towns are sprawling, shabby, modern. They have out-of-town retail parks, estates of tower blocks and dual carriageways thundering up to the centres. Christians have settled on a site where the wedding might have taken place and (of course) built a large church over it. We celebrated a blessing of the married couples among us in a tiny chapel behind. The lane outside is lined with shops offering Cana wedding wine.
Cana was a sizeable town when Christ attended the wedding and neighbouring Nazareth was a tiny village. Now Cana is the village and Nazareth a large town and it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins. If Mary and her son walked to the wedding from their home today, they’d have to negotiate dual carriageways and toil past petrol stations, Pizza Hut, office blocks and shopping centres.
We assumed that the place of the Annunciation was another hopeful guess. Startlingly, there’s good reason, we were told, to suppose that Gabriel appeared to Mary at that very spot on a steep hill where the largest basilica in the Middle East now soars. The basilica was begun in the 1950s and beneath the layers of ruined churches built by successive centuries of Christians was found architectural remains and inscriptions suggesting that this was the site of Mary’s home. Embedded deep within the modern church is the stone remnants of the house built into a cave, it’s humbleness at striking odds with the cathedral soaring around it. It was difficult to process how the world changed from that tiny hovel. Extraordinary to see that, 2,000 years after Mary accepted her calling, coachloads of Christians cross the globe to venerate it. Impossible to imagine the Nazareth Mary knew – a scattering of houses built high into the rock with vistas across Galilee.Up the narrow alleys of a souk beyond the cathedral is another church, erected on the site where the synagogue is thought to have been. The synagogue where Jesus worshipped and where he revealed himself as the saviour prophesied by Isaiah to his irate neighbours who tried to throw him off the brow of the hill (Luke 4:14-30) – the very hill on which we sat.
That was our final stop. However wonderful the churches, how enriching the services, the most inspiring spot is, for many of us, the shore beside our hotel from where we can see the water where Jesus sailed, walked and preached and from where the land still looks as it did when he gazed on it.
Address for Eucharist at Mount Tabor
Day 1 - Journey
Matthew 4: 15-16 ‘Galilee of the Gentiles – the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.’
We flew up into a pink dawn and landed in a rainstorm. Of the 44 of us, every one had overcome doubts, fears, hurdles of many kinds to be here in this place, buffeted by gales. Every one had hopes that the coming week would transform them and fears of what that might entail. ‘On site means insight,’ quoted one pilgrim as we cowered in the downpour with our luggage.
The first sight of the Holy Land requires a mental adjustment. We passed retail parks, tower blocks and flyovers. The way to Galilee was a six lane expressway in rush hour. And the landscape was soaked in the downpour. ‘Rain, storm and maybe snow,’ our guide, Peter, promised us.
Our driver is a man from Nazareth. We gazed at him awed. The first Nazarene we’d seen in the flesh.Peter is one of the 1 per cent of Christians in Israel. It is not easy, he said, to be a Christian in the Holy Land. He told us we are not on a holiday or a sightseeing tour. That we would be guided in prayer through the places Jesus knew. ‘I want to help you see things in a different way,’ he said.
By the time we reached Galilee it was dark. The expressway looped past the outer sprawls of towns. A McDonalds stood sentinel above our hotel which lies on the shore of the invisible lake.
We were welcomed by a buffet banquet in a refectory filled with other pilgrims, then retired. Christ liked to rise before dawn and climb mountains to pray and for us it’s a 6am start tomorrow.
Pilgrim's Prayer
Heavenly Father,
As follow in the steps of your Son,
we ask the grace to keep our eyes on you.
Open our hearts that we may find you not only in ancient stones,
but in your people and in each other.
Let your words be a fire burning within us.
Write your Gospel upon our hearts.
Give us a spirit of prayer
lest we return full of facts but not of your grace and love.
Lord, teach us to pray in the very land where you taught your disciples
so that we may say: Our Father, who art in heaven...