Todays blessings started with rain. Then a guided tour around the Old City and through the Via Dolorosa. More of a blessing than the places I go to is the person I am with. This is a tour gide, taking a day off to tour me. He is super kind, smiles and says Hi to everyone whilst looking ruggedly handsome at the same time. A lesser man would be jealous but he’s engaged to a friend of mine.
Round the coner from here, I kid you not, is Santa Claus Street. Obviously Santa needs a little sun.
Josh generously throws out dates and histories and stories some of which i hope to slip into my sermons later to make me sound more profound.
Its Friday morning so that means that there are plenty of Muslims on their way to prayers midday and later this afternoon and plenty of Jews buying last minute foods before shabbat this evening.
I meet a member of the Armenian Church that I’ve mentioned and he tells me about the Olive tree that they have near the cathedral that is the tree that Jesus was tied to when he was whipped.
I meet a muslim man selling leather bags (the one i like might be $300) that he himself has made. He shows me the biggest piece of (camel) leather i have ever seen.
I visit a shop where a man selling Christian tat sells me something i want but for three times the price I should have paid, if only i could haggle better. Little does he know that he will be the butt of a sermon joke next time i am preaching on ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’.
I am nervous entering into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (incase I get physically lost in worship – see yesterdays blog for more). Josh points to some planks that I am walking over and says thats the grave of Philip Someone who signed Magna Carta and who wanted as a penance after death to be walked over as spiritual compensation for his sins in this life.
There is the tiniest chapel that i have walked past before and paid no attention to. Josh explains that below that altar cloth is the other side of the tomb of the resurrection and would i like to kneel there and pray? Its the sort of cheesy thing that pilgrims do. So of course I kneel.
And here’s an odd moment of peace. I find that I am both aware of the craziness of this place where different groups of Christians find it hard to agree on how to change a lightbulb (literally) and of the hate and hurt that we cause – and also of the indescribable enormity of a world changing, life changing, personal changing miracle that happened on the other side of the wall that I’m touching.
Ok that’s not quite right about the wall, courtesy of Hadrian but my points are still good and i leave this moment feeling peculiarly overwhelmed by the blessings i see about me.
I meet a Syrian Orthodox man who points me to his Church of St Mark which may credibly be the place of the Last Supper. Josh has used his charm to get us into this closed place and downstairs to a chapel, and down some more stairs to another chapel- perhaps this is the place of the last supper, perhaps above it is the place where Pentecost broke out, certainly there’s been a remembrance of this since the mid 200sAD.
As we are coming back for a coffee, a little Jewish boy runs up to me and presses a business card into my hands. I say ‘Shabbat Shalom’ and keep walking. Its an invitation to listen to a rabbi more than my rabbi and wouldn’t the world be a better place if we followed the covenant of Noah. Its hard to disagree but I am content with my Rabbi. He has given me enough blessings for today. I feel as if all my Christmasses have come at once today.