What
is it about this place that pulls us into its presence? How do we explain this mysterious force that
draws us, this mystical call that beckons us, this ethereal conviction that
persuades us to go to a country where there is a constant travel advisory and
family and friends worry about our safety?
Why do we pay thousands of dollars to fly 6,000 miles to a troubled land
full of jagged rocks, barren wilderness, and intense political division?
Of all the places on the face of the earth,
why this land? The answer is found not in
where we go, but why we go; not in our destination but our determination, for
we go not as tourists, but as pilgrims, we are not on holiday but on a holy
journey. We travel to Palestine, not
because it is the nation of Israel, but because it is the Holy Land, the land
of the Bible.
To understand the power that draws us to
the distant land, we must understand the nature of holiness. We stand on the Mount of Olives not merely to
marvel at the beautiful vista, but because the crucible of the Passion is
played out before our very eyes. Our
physical eyes see the glowing Dome of the Rock, but our spiritual eyes see the
majestic Temple of Jesus’ day. We can
visualize the palm fronds and hear the shouts of “Hosanna” as the humble man
from Galilee rides a donkey through the Golden Gate into the Holy City.
We walk into a Byzantine church, stand
in a menagerie of jostling humanity, listening to a cacophony of languages, all
clamoring to reach one spot that rests down steep steps through a narrow door
in an ancient cave. We kneel down to
touch a slimy rock as millions have done before us, touching the rock in
Bethlehem where God knelt down to touch the earth 2,000 years ago. And when we do—we feel the power, we are
overcome with the mysterious presence and we know why Simon Montefiore wrote
that this land has become “the essential place on earth for communication
between God and man.”
Isn’t God everywhere and can’t we
communicate with God anywhere we may be?
Of course we can. And for that
very reason I resisted traveling to the Holy Land for many years. But when I did make my first journey over 20
years ago, I experienced the reality of “Sacred Space,” of what Montefiore
calls “Holiness.”
As we sailed in a little boat on the Sea
of Galilee a gentle breeze caressed my face and suddenly I was overcome with a
powerful sense of contentment, fulfillment, and peace—what the Bible calls
“Shalom.” I had the strange sensation
that I had been there before. Then I
realized that indeed I had been there on the Sea of Galilee my entire
life. From the time I was a small child
in Sunday School, to a teenager on a mission trip, to a college student
studying religion—this was my spiritual center.
I had traveled half way around the world to come home.
Montefiore wrote: “Many atheistic
visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition in
a city suffering a pandemic of righteous bigotry. But that is to deny the
profound human need for religion without which it is impossible to understand
Jerusalem. Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that
mystify and frighten humanity: we need to sense a greater force than
ourselves.”
And that is what
two dozen of your friends and neighbors recently experienced; “a greater force
than ourselves,” as we traveled to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage of faith. From a stirring sunrise over the Sea of
Galilee, to the cold waters of the Jordan River rejoicing in baptisms, to the
lonely and chilling pit where Jesus was held at the house of Caiaphas hours
before his crucifixion, to the tomb that remains as empty today as it was 2,000
years ago, the force of life and light inspired and illuminated our dynamic
pilgrimage. And we echoed the
proclamation of Jacob centuries ago, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I
did not know it.”
