Expository Times, Apr 2003
When I was planning my first visit to the country the sentimental call the Holy Land and the politically correct call Israel/Palestine, I was told by those who had been there before that wherever I went I would sense how close I was to the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth. And I was not disappointed because I had not believed a word I was told. The fault no doubt is mine, but that sort of intense experience which has merant so much to others passed me by. I was much more moved by the suffering of a family I visited in a refugee camp in Gaza, or by the sight of a Palestinian family scraping a living from rough land just outside Jericho, at the spot, I suspect, where blind Bartimaeus called on Jesus, than I was by any of the so-called holy sites.
I have now been to Israel/Palestine half a dozen times, and while I have never been moved by the places associated with the life of Jesus, I have always learned something which helped me the better to understand the Gospels.
On that first visit I was taken totally by surprise, standing at the door of St Andrew's Church, the Church of Scotland's presence overlooking the Valley of Hinnom towards the old city of Jerusalem, waiting for a service were recording for radio to begin, to realise that the noise of traffic, the sound of car horns and screeching brakes was disturbing the air. It dawned on me then that what I took for granted as "the first day of the week" was not the peaceful calm I knew as a boy growing up in pre-commercialised Scotland. The first day of the week was a day of business and activity, resumed commerce and renewed activity, and so, when Mary made her tearful way through the darkness on the first day of the week to the place where they had laid him, it was with the noise of the world's activity in the background.
On that first visit I learned that wherever else the tourist guides might like to point out to me, no-one was able to pinpoint a spot which might be the village of Emmaus. They could take me to the venue of the Last Supper, or the place of crucifixion or the sea of Galilee, but nobody could be certain where the village was that two disciples made for on the evening of the first Easter Day.
Years later, I pointed that out to a congregation where I was preaching to make a point I borrowed from the great American preacher Frederick Buechner: that it is important that nobody can pin-point Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem, because Emmaus can be anywhere that is seven miles from where you do not want to be. As the sermon which Buechner and I had worked on was being delivered, I sensed a more restless congregation than usual. Some nudging and smiling. Afterwards the wife of the minister whose place I was taking explained to me that the previous Sunday (Easter Sunday) the preacher had described vividly to the congregation how only a few weeks earlier she had sat entranced as the sun set over the precise spot where Jesus and the two disciples had broken bread together at Emmaus.
On a much later visit, on this occasion in July, along with a bishop, a Church of Scotland minister and a Roman Catholic priest, I drove from a relatively cool Jerusalem north to Tiberias. We left Jerusalem around nine o'clock. The car in which we travelled was air-conditioned. There were no long silences as the four of us bantered together. Three hours later, just about noon, we stopped outside our Tiberias hotel and when we got out of the car the sheer force of the heat was physical. We struggle up the hotel steps and into the air-conditioned lobby, vowing that we would work first thing in the morning or in the evening. Suddenly the anger of those who had endured the heat and burden of the day towards those who worked through the evening cool not in Jesus' story became a vehicle for the expression of a theological point about the generosity of God, but a physical experience which made resentment at God's unconditional love all the more understandable.
And my sort of faith revels much more in that than in the sort of experience which makes others rejoice that they have walked in the footsteps of the Master.