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A friend of mine e-mailed from Jerusalem...he's a Rabbinic student spending a semester in Israel. He wrote about sightseeing and, since he was writing to a Christian, he mentioned some of the important Christian sights in the Holy Land. He has visited the Church of the Nativity, the home of the Virgin Mary and the upper room in which the Last Supper took place. Now the first of those is debatable - is the Church of the Nativity really built over the spot on which Jesus was born? Maybe, maybe not. No telling, really. The other two? Well... There appears to be a healthy racket going on over in Israel, charging a fee (because I'm sure the tour's not free) to go look at someone's attic. I'm a Christian who very much believes that the "Last Supper" took place (logically it had to have...there must have been a final time that Jesus ate with his friends before his crucifixion) and I further believe that it was indeed the meal at which Jesus instituted the Eucharist. Still...I know that the room has not been found. Whatever building tourists are seeing is probably mind-bogglingly old, like most of Israel, but I seriously doubt it dates to the time of Christ. I'm sure it's not where he ate his final meal. How could anyone track down just which building it was? The gospel description doesn't give an address. The same goes for Mary's house, of course. Even if the immediate inheritors of those properties staked their claim, they'd have been ploughed under by two thousand years of history (including Muslim conquest which was not always kind to Christian tourism). Besides, Jerusalem was pretty much levelled by the Romans in 70AD.
Like so much of the history and landscape of the Holy Land, the Church of the Nativity is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside and enigma...and coated over with a few centuries of legend. Was Jesus really born in that grotto? Maybe, but I strongly doubt it. So what would it mean if that wasn't Jesus' birthplace? What would that do to the Church of the Nativity? In a sense I guess it wouldn't do a darn thing. It only matters if your concept of truth extends only to bare fact. If you don't think that Shakespeare said anything worthwhile just because Richard III and Macbeth were actually pretty good kings, then sure...the Church of the Nativity's lack of evidence weakens its claim as a sight of any great importance. But if you can acknowledge that truth is more than science, then what does it matter if that was or wasn't the spot on which Jesus was born? December 25 wasn't the day on which he was born, either. What's needed isn't a precise measurement, but a focal point. We pick a date so that we can celebrate the event the way people do - in time. (We happen to place that day on December 25 to drown out pagan celebrations, but that's another discussion.) God doesn't need us to get the date right...but we need some sense of focus toward which we can look. The same goes for space. We celebrate things in time because we all operate within time, and we celebrate things in space because we all operate within space. We're temporal and physical creatures, so we pick certain places and times to celebrate not because those times and places are any more special but because we need something to latch onto. But then something happens. Once we've done that, once we've claimed a time or a place as special, sacred, holy...then we imbue it with that same specialness, sacredness and holiness. Our attention and faith and reverence hallow the times and spaces of our celebrations. By celebrating the holy, we make the day holy. By worshiping in a space, we make it fit to worship in. You can feel it in the air as Christmas approaches. You can feel it in an old church or mosque or synagogue or temple - there's a palpable encounter with the divine, and with the ages of prayer and faith witnessed by the very walls. So does that extend to the supposed "Upper Room"? Does it cover the dubious home of the Virgin Mary? I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. It's tough to shake off the feeling that these are tourist traps, scams developed who knows when by who knows who, to bilk pilgrims of their money. After all, people of all faiths have been coming to the Holy Land for centuries, looking for an encounter with one of those riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Looking for contact with the holy. So who are we to say that they didn't have that, just because they got the wrong address? Are our minds really that narrow? |
But what about the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem? It was supposedly built by Emperor Constantine's mother...ahem. Well, be that as it may, the original structure dates from the 4th century. Was that close enough to Christ's birth for the exact spot to be remembered? Jesus wasn't quite the rock star at his birth that he was when news of his resurrection spread, so why would anyone bother to remember where he'd been born...or to connect that funny family with the odd visitors to the rebel rabbi who died and whom some people say they saw risen?