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Holy Land Tourists
27 May 2002
by Ryan Beiler
While anticipating this trip, I had the expectation that visiting the “Holy
Land” should impress upon me in a new and powerful way the reality of the
incarnation of Christ. To walk where Jesus walked, to visit the Mount of Olives,
the Temple Mount, the Garden of Gethsemane—this would give me a profound sense
of the reality of the human person of Jesus, the history of Scripture.
This expectation has not been met. If anything, visiting the holy sites here has
had the opposite affect. I’m not utterly disillusioned or experiencing anything
on the magnitude of a crisis of faith, but the context in which these various
sites are presented serves to distance them from the Bible story rather than
connect them.
The ornate churches that now physically surround each significant moment of
Jesus’ life make it hard to imagine him walking around as a real-live-person.
The disputed and alternate sites venerated by different churches for the same
event—the Orthodox and the Catholics each have a separate Authentic Upper Room,
among other things—further enshroud what is already disputed history among
academics and theologians. What’s a pilgrim to do?
So, if the geography of Jesus’ life has failed to impact me in ways I had been
led to expect or hope, I raise another possibility—that I will discover and be
impacted by the reality faced by Palestinians under occupation—that they will
somehow incarnate Christ.
Where a rock surrounded by iron thorns within the imposing Basilica of the Agony
failed to impress me with Jesus suffering in Gethsemane, perhaps hearing
Palestinians tell of the agony of 40-day curfews, homes destroyed, and loved
ones killed will.
And perhaps experiencing that curfew for myself—which I am under as I write
this—will “have my imagination better informed” as Tim Peebles said during a
time of group sharing. But of course, just as I can never fully enter the
reality of the Bible story—separated by time if not space—I can also never fully
enter the reality of occupied Palestine, even as I share the same time and
space.
Yet still I enter as an “authentic tourist” as Rev. Mitri Raheb, our host calls
us. This is no sentimental, penitential, sacrificial pilgrimage to gilded
shrines. Even though I may not walk exactly where Jesus walked, I can seek to
walk as Jesus walked (1 John 2:6). By being present, by listening, by serving
where invited, and by being served in holy hospitality, I can do justice, love
mercy, and walk humbly with the body of Christ incarnate in the Palestinian
people.