Holy Week 4

Let me tell you something that happened on my second trip to Israel.

Our group went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  It is an amazing place--enclosing under one roof the most likely location of both the crucifixion and the empty tomb.  The church is mainly an Orthodox church, but is shared by Coptic and Catholic Christians as well.

When you go into the main portion of the building,  there is a  narrow flight of stairs leading upward.  Enclosed within the frame of the structure is a rock, which is identified as Golgotha.  According to our guide,  Golgotha  used to be a rock quarry just outside the walls of the city.  In the middle of the quarry was this huge stone that the masons miners apparently could not move. They said it looked like a skull, hence the name "the place of the skull." It was a kind of accidental ampitheater where executions occurred.   First Century stone tombs were discovered to have been later cut into the quarry,  adding evidence to the claim that it was Calvary. 

When we go went up the stairs, we entered a sanctuary built on top of the rock. There is an altar there and underneath the altar, a small area of the rock is visible.  If you kneel down under  the altar, you may touch or kiss the stone.  We stood in line, one by one, to touch the stone. 

I am not one given to mystical experiences, but when a person visits the Holy Land, there is usually something that gets you.  When I touched that rock,  It was an overwhelming experience,  almost a feeling like an electrical shock.  It overwhelmed me for a moment, and I staggered like a drunken man. 

Our guide, a Jewish woman, asked me if anything as wrong.  I was uncertain how to answer that question.

Then I remembered something she had told me the night before. 

Earlier that month she said she was guiding an a Anglican church group on a tour. The British like to start early and be done early in the afternoon, before teatime, allowing time for personal exploration.  The priest was an avid amateur archaeologist, so she and he got permission to visit the lower city, which was the location of the city of David. At that time, it was till an active archaeological dig.  She and he crawled around in some of the caves and holes just below the  temple site.   

As she crawled in the cave,  she looked down at her hands.  They were covered in ashes--very old ashes.  This, she said, was a dump where the priests of the temple put the ashes from the burned sacrifices from the altar. Suddenly she realizes that she had touched the ashes of the sacrifice  Her hands were touching the sacrifice.  She was overwhelmed, and got out as quickly as possible.

Then I answered her  "You know those ashes,  you touched?  Well, these are my ashes."

When we celebrate  Good Friday, we touch the sacrifice. 

I don't know if our date of Good Friday is accurate, any more than I know if what they say is really Calvary is Calvary, or that Jewish woman knew if those really were sacrificial ashes.  I can't say that it matters much in the end.  I know it does not matter if what we touched was real or not.   There is no magic in the date or in so-called  objects.  What matters is not what we touch, but Who touches us.

We are moved with wonder as we contemplate the cross, but that isn't the issue.  The real wonder is not what we felt, but what God felt.  Mystics sometimes received stigmata,  actual bodily marks of Christ, from contemplating His suffering. But His marks He received from contemplating ours.  We feel empathy looking at the pain of Jesus, and then we feel proud of being so sensitive.  But the truth is our empathy for His suffering is nothing compared with His empathy for ours.  Our sufferings were the reason He went to the cross. 

His knowedge of our pain led Him to the cross.  What has our knowledge of His pain caused us to do?