The Rev. Know-it-all’s Guide to the Holy Land, part 3

Let’s set the way back machine for, say, 175 AD.  We are on a Roman ship like the one we saw in the “Domine Ivivmus” graffito. As we approach the eastern shore of the Mediterranean we see a city rising on the coast, magnificent with Greek style temples, amphitheaters, theaters, baths and fountains fed by a Roman style aqueduct, a race track and what a harbor! The harbor seizes your attention. What a harbor! It rivals the harbor of Egyptian Alexandria in size. It juts out into the sea from a flat and harborless coast, a wonder of the latest Roman engineering and technology.

It started out as a Phoenician naval station, but there was no deep-water harbor to speak of on that part of the coast until Herod the Great got his mitts on the place in around 30 BC and built a city which he dedicated to his new best friend, Caesar Octavianus Augustus who had just the year before clobbered Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. 

At this point we must do an excursion into history.  If you are going to understand the Holy Land, you must understand Herod the Great and the whole Herod family. They were bloodthirsty, sex-crazed psychopaths for the most part, but they loved to build things. They were thoroughly Hellenized (Greek-ifed). When most people think of the Holy Land they think of the Bible pageants of their childhood, long flowing beards and Charlton Heston and people wearing towels on their head. This was not the Holy Land at the time of Christ. The Holy Land is where two worlds met and clashed. Asia met the Mediterranean and they met in the town of Caesarea. You are going to see amazing ruins and to understand them you must understand Herod the Great and his brood. It helps to think of “Herod” as a last name, not a first.

Let’s start with Herod the Great. He is the only one of them who was just “Herod.” He was born in 73 BC in Idumea, just south of Judah and Jerusalem. His father was Antipater the Idumaean. His mother was Cypress, from Nabataea another little country just next door. Herod was not ethnically Jewish at all. The Idumeans were forcibly converted to Judaism the century before Christ. Herod the Great was raised as a Jew, but was really whatever religion happened to be politically useful at the time. His father, Antipater the Idumaean, served the Maccabee rulers of the Holy Land and was thus able to place his sons in good government jobs, but Herod wanted more. He got to know people like Mark Antony of Rome and Cleopatra of Egypt and was their loyal servant until he got into a quarrel with Queen Cleopatra over some revenues from Jericho. An interesting aside. Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemy monarch of Egypt and was 100% Macedonia Greek, not a drop of Egyptian blood in her.) Herod may have had issue with Cleopatra, but he fell out with Mark Antony. 

In 41 BC, Herod was appointed tetrarch (that means ruler of a district in the Holy Land something like an Illinois county board president, by Mark Antony. His job was to support the Maccabee kings of the Holy Land whom he promptly killed after marrying their beautiful sister Mariamne. We all know what happened to Mark Antony and Cleopatra (as played by Richard Burton and the whiny Liz Taylor in the famous film.) When Antony was dead and Octavian Augustus, the new Roman victor, was camped on the island of Cyprus, Herod got the fastest ship with the fastest rowers and made a bee line for Cyprus.  Here I will quote Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian.  If you take the time to read it you will understand the man who built a lot of what you are going to see in the Holy Land

“O Caesar, as I was made king of the Jews by Antony, so …. I have used my royal authority… entirely for his advantage… I sent him as many auxiliaries as I was able …I did not desert my benefactor (even after you defeated him at the battle of Actium) ...I gave him the best advice I was able, when I was no longer able to assist him in the war; and I told him that there was but one way of recovering his affairs, and that was to kill Cleopatra; and I promised him that, if she were once dead, I would send him money and walls for his security, with an army and myself to assist him in his war against you: but his affections for Cleopatra stopped his ears…. I have laid aside my crown and have come here to you and I ask that you consider how faithful a friend, and not whose friend, I have been."

This is the classical chutzpa. He is saying I was loyal to Antony. I will be as loyal to you. Octavian Augustus was delighted! He confirmed Herod as King of the Jews (When Pontius Pilate wrote that Jesus was “King of the Jews” this was sarcasm. Herod was dead and his children had only little bits and pieces of his kingdom. Pilate was poking his thumb in the eyes of people he loathed and used the sacrifice of the Son of God to do so!)

Herod went on to consolidate his power by killing his in laws, his wife, and a couple of his sons. And by building, I mean buildings like few people have ever built before or since. (Don’t worry. He had about eight wives and lots of children, so he had plenty to spare). This is certainly not the Bible pageant stuff of our childhood. Jesus was born into a world of sex, violence and political intrigue and all without cable TV.

More next week

The Rev Know-it-all’s guide to the Holy Land, part 2

 Pilgrimage?  What’s with pilgrimage? If God is everywhere why go to a war zone to pray? First, it is safer than most people think. The south side of Chicago? Now that’s dangerous. The Holy Land? Pretty safe. They pay attention there and pilgrims are everybody’s bread and butter, so it’s a lot safer than a major American city. Still why Pilgrimage? Well. We’ve been doing it for a very long time. Such early teachers as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus Julius Africanus and Origen talk about the sacred sites, those places associated with the life of Jesus.

Origen, Julius and Justin were all residents of the Holy Land within the first centuries of the life of Jesus. The Holy Shrines were well known and well visited even in the first centuries after Christ. Were they different from us? People were visiting Civil War battlefields before the Civil War in the United States was even over. People just like us wrote journals about their travels. We have the Bordeaux Pilgrim and his itinerary, the oldest known Christian pilgrimage journal which recounts a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 333 AD. It sounds a lot like some modern itineraries, “It’s Tuesday. We’re in Venice.”, but still it is an account of the urge to go on pilgrimage. 

Then there is Egeria, a devout woman, who left us a detailed account of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land around 380 AD.The most amazing pilgrimage evidence for me is the Domine Ivimus graffito (Lord we have come.) It is an ancient graffito of a typical Roman ship carved into the rock of an ancient Roman wall that had been built over the site of Calvary. It seems to paraphrase the 122nd Psalm “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’”. It may well come from the first century after Christ. Some scholars would put it later, but I suspect that it was there before a church was built over the site of Calvary and the tomb of Christ in 325 AD.

People have doing this since the beginning. Pilgrimage is commanded in the Old Testament. People were to go up to Jerusalem three times a year if they were able. So, we’ve been doing it for a long time. That’s still not much of a reason. There is a great distinction between religious pilgrimage and religious tourism. A pilgrimage is motivated by a desire to draw nearer to the Lord by drawing near to the places where the Lord appeared among us. God is everywhere, it is true, but to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land is to “read” what Fr. Bargil Pixner described as the Fifth Gospel – the Gospel of the Land.

When one sees the places, the fields, the flowers and the towns in which the Word of God walked and spoke, there is a sense that these things did not happen “… long ago, in a place far, far away,” but in a place about nine hours away by jet in a land that is as venal, commercial and crowded as it was when the Savior walked there and spoke the words that change our lives.

One can draw close to the Lord in pilgrimage in a way that is different from all others. It is not very mystical. It is wonderfully ordinary and chaotic, but if one pauses and looks and listens, it is possible to sense that this is the place, these are the people, we are the people with all our ordinariness that the Lord loves. There is an old wooden bench in front of the tomb of Christ where I can sit for hours just watching the world go by and remembering that God so loved the world, a crazy imperfect world of which I am most certainly a part.

The Rev. Know-it-all’s Guide to the Holy Land, Part One

In the church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, in the main part of the Catholikon, the Greek Orthodox main church, there is a strange vase looking thing about three feet high called the “omphalos.” Omphalos is the Greek word for navel, or belly button, for those who think navel has to do with ships. It is claimed that here lies the very center of the world. 

I once read in a guide book that to claim to be the center of the world is a statement that is at all points true, the world being a sphere. I wish I could tell you what the omphalos in Jerusalem is and whence it comes, but I cannot. Perhaps it is an old lawn ornament about which someone once said, “Oh, put it over there until we figure out what to do with it.”  That is a very foolish thing to say. Once something is located in the church of the Holy Sepulcher it becomes very important and to move it takes negotiations with 5 major religious groups and the Israeli government.

There is a ladder leaning up against a window on the ledge over the main entrance to the church. It is called the immovable ladder. No one knows how it got there or when, but heaven forefend that it should be moved now. A few years back someone unknown moved it to the other end of the ledge, causing an international and inter-religious crisis that was resolved only when the ladder had been moved back to its original place of uselessness. It is there still, serving no actual purpose. There is a moral here, but I’m not sure what it is. Anyway, the navel of the world is definitely right where it has been as long as I can remember. 

Though many places claim to be the center of the world, this particular center of the world has a good claim to the name. Until Christopher Columbus or the Basques or the space aliens discovered the Americas, the Holy Land was the land bridge where Africa, Asia and Europe met. If you wanted to invade your neighbor, the Holy Land was right on your path. The Assyrians invaded Egypt, the Hittites invaded Egypt, the Egyptians, indeed the Hittites and Alexander the Great invaded everybody all by tromping through the Holy Land, much to the chagrin and inconvenience of the locals. In fact, the geography of the country is a sort of invasion.

The African tectonic plate is pushing up into Europe. The Arabian tectonic plate is pushing over into Africa, or something like that. The result is that Jerusalem is a city in the hills 2,500 feet above sea level.  Go due east almost 15 miles and down 3,400 feet and you come to Jericho and a little further to the Dead Sea which is 1,400 feet below sea level. It is the lowest place on the face of the earth, hot as blazes and dry as a bone.

The Sea of Galilee is the lowest fresh water lake in the world and is about 700 feet below sea level. It is lush and green and tropical, abundant with life. The Jordan River flows out of the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea where its waters evaporate leaving nothing behind but salt and wasteland.  Go straight up 3,400 feet through fifteen miles of desert and you come to the Judean hills, and you cross over them into the basin of the Mediterranean Sea and suddenly it is wet and green and rich.

The Judean hills are pushed up right down in the middle of the land, separating brown and rocky desert from green farms. On the crest of this ridge of steep hills sits Jerusalem like a crown. In the far north, these hills turn into real mountains beginning with snow-capped Mt. Hermon at almost 10,000 feet. All these deserts, salt flat mountains, invading armies, religious prophets and millennia of history, are in a place not much larger than a good sized metropolitan area in the USA.

From Mt. Hermon in the far North to Beersheba on the edge of the southern desert is only 200 miles. From Jerusalem to Capernaum is only about 80 miles and this in a county that is no more than fifty miles wide. The Holy Land, packed with history and faith is tiny. The “Sea” of Galilee is a moderate sized lake, 13 miles long and 8 miles wide. It too is about 700 feet below sea level.  On the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee perches the Gospel Triangle formed by three towns where Jesus did most of his preaching and healing, Capernaum to Korazin to Bethsaida two miles by four miles by five miles as the crow flies, more or less. 

Once upon a time, the Creator of the universe, the Being who is the source of being, fixed His gaze on this little galaxy, on a little star at the edge of this little galaxy, and a speck of dust spinning around that little star, on a little town called “Little Shoot” (Nazareth in Hebrew) in a troubled little country. He fixed His gaze on a little girl from a poor family and “the Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us, all in a little place that really was the center of the world.

Rev. Know-it-all