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Jerusalem and Christianity
Al Quds Index
The
Significance of Jerusalem
The care of the Christian view
From the book Jerusalem Today edited by Ghada Karmi
with a contribution by Edward Said
The sacramental principle in Christianity means that the land is
hallowed by (association). History signifies because of what it
contained: geography is sanctified because of what it housed. "I
will be there", said the voice in the bush to Moses, "as whom
there I will be". The event of exodus gives the only feasible
clue to the God whom exodus pledges. What happened became
definitive of what had to be recognized. The actual event
enabled- and warranted- a mythology about its meaning, a meaning
meant to be, for all generations, a reliable disclosure of "whom
they had believed". How "all our fathers passed through the sea"
became a theme of memory. Exodus had sacramentalised their
status as "the people of God", and Passover simply transacted
the meaning in annual experience. Apostolic Christianity was
heir to this perception of theology, only that the Cross of
Jesus had become the epic theme. Jesus, in the meaning of his
wounds, became for founding-Christians "the place of the Name",
where God could be known in how he had "been there" in the
dimensions of the love that suffered.
This sense of
things inherently hallowed the physical place where all had
transpired, the Galilee of his words and ministry, the
Gethsemane of his sorrows. It was a sense of things which
subsumed, if it did not supersede, all other sanctifying aegis
having to do with land and story. In a sense the significance of
the Temple as "the place of the Name", the expression of divine
identity, passed over for Christians into the person and the
work of Christ. The Pauline phrase "in Christ" came to mean a
spiritual domicile in which peoplehood-in-faith became "the body
of Christ" was thus 'dis-enlandised' (if we may invent the term)
while remaining in fond and gentle love, by association, of the
"where" and the "when" of the eventfulness that made it so.
Before pursuing this essential theme more fully in the first
Christian mind, it may be well to reflect briefly on the
centrality of the basic concept of the sacramental. Despite the
word's Latin origin, the idea has deeply Hebraic sanction,
though Christian faith had its own welcome for it. The term is
initially simple enough, namely that things physical embody and
express things spiritual- a frown, a smile, a handshake,
flowers, a kiss, an embrace. All these do not merely inform,
they transact. They indicate relationship but they also
effectuate it. Two realms combine. I put my sympathy into a
gesture, I write my anxiety on my face.
These devices are bound to have theological counterpart. The
Aaronic blessing tells of "the face of the Lord", the prophets
asked of "the arm of the Lord". All faiths need these measures
of speech. Without some inter-penetrability of the divine and
the human all thought of God, even more all worship, would be
null and void. Even mystic silence must return to some sort of
conceivability. Christianity grasps this secret full-handedly
with due, but not crippling, compunction. It is faith in
incarnation where "Word is made flesh and dwells among us, full
of grace and truth". Even faiths that demure over that
conception necessarily turn on some measure of divine
condescension to the human, or human agency for the divine. For,
otherwise, faith and love and truth would be vacuous for lack of
medium and meaning.
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