RESURRECTION
By J.L. Barnett
The Jerusalem Report
May 30, 2005
Cristos Annesti! Cristos Annesti! Cristos Annesti! A congregation of
thousands shouts out these dramatic words over and over. Christ Is
Risen! Christ Is Risen! Christ Is Risen!
Tears of both joy and mourning stream down the pilgrims’ faces. A
multitude of bells, high-pitched, deep, fast and slow, compete to be
heard, and the choirs of the Armenians, Syrians, Greeks and Russians
each vie, with different incantations, for the ears of the pilgrims.
Monks in gloriously colored robes dart from corner to corner of the
cavernous Church of the Holy Sepulcher to galvanize their respective
flocks.
It is rare to see the adherents of the highly fragmented, ritualized
and hierarchical Orthodox Christian sects of the Holy City in a
state of ecstasy and, as I precariously balance myself 50 meters up,
on a narrow, low-railed balcony within the great rotunda, a feeling
of exhilaration sweeps through me as well. It is 12:50 a.m. on Easter
Sunday, the climax of eight days of commemorations among the Orthodox
Christian communities of Jerusalem.
The Orthodox churches had their origin with the Council of Nicea,
in 325 C.E. when the Roman Catholic Church came to a tumultuous
split with the Eastern churches over the precise nature of Christ’s
divinity. In the centuries that followed, the Orthodox churches tended
to develop along national lines.
In Orthodox churches around the world, the calculation for when
Easter falls is based on the unamended Julian calendar, as opposed
to the corrected Gregorian calendar favored by almost all other
churches. This year, Orthodox Easter Sunday fell on May 1.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Holy Week started with Lazarus
Saturday, commemorating what is considered the ultimate and most
striking of Jesus’ miracles, the raising of Lazarus. It then carried
through to Palm Sunday, the anniversary of the triumphal processional
arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. The countdown to Good Friday, the
day of the Crucifixion, is marked by the washing of the patriarchs’
feet in the Parvis Square on Maundy Thursday, a powerfully visual
reminder of Jesus’ gesture of humility, when he washed the feet of his
apostles. Easter Saturday, the most dramatic of all the days of Holy
Week, is when the Resurrection is believed to have taken place. By
the following morning, the tomb of Jesus was empty.
In the Orthodox Christian world, it is Easter, not Christmas, that
is the focal point of believers’ faith and the climax of the year.
Whereas the Roman Church and the Protestants, in their holidays
and readings, concentrate on the deeds and words of Jesus, for the
Orthodox, it is as if Jesus came alive only during the 40 days between
resurrection and ascension.
It has become my annual custom to retire to the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher to embed myself among the throngs and observe all that
goes on during these last four days of Holy Week. I take with me food
supplies, a small portable cooker, toiletries and, most important, a
stamina that will allow me to remain continuously awake for 96 hours,
throughout all of which there are wonderful things to be experienced.
I typically spend these days at various monks’ residences within
the church. (When they go to sleep, I move on, so as not to waste
time sleeping.) Around 150 monks actually live in the church, and,
in addition to performing all manner of practical church duties –
both spiritual and temporal – they act as a symbolic presence staking
out a representative claim to their respective sects or communities
in this, the most venerated of Christendom’s churches.
For years, one of my favored monk’s haunts was that of Skiatre,
a Syrian Orthodox priest originally from Lebanon’s Beka Valley. He
was a school chum of Walid Jumblatt, the famed Druse leader. The
multilingual Skiatre had all the trappings of a man of God: the
robes, the long beard and withered bony fingers, an air of dignity
and gravitas and the bearing of a wise and calm inner self.
The surprise came when one entered his abode, a small hut located
high up on a balcony, where one found shelves, from floor to ceiling,
stacked with about 900 videos, recordings of films that Skiatre would
watch on his flat-screen TV. But on Easter the man was transformed,
becoming not just the picture, but the reality of holiness. He was
focused and concentrated in his devotions, he exhibited remarkable
powers of stamina and dedication to his duties and he was very
obviously uplifted to a dramatic degree by the power of Holy Week.
Two years ago, Skiatre was recalled to his mother monastery in Lebanon,
where he now devotes his life to the painting of icons and illuminated
manuscripts.
The cacophony of midnight on Saturday night comes at the tail end
of a tumultuous day. This day starts, as is the custom in the Middle
East, the evening before. Already on Friday afternoon, thousands of
pilgrims from around the world pour in to the church, in order to
secure their place for the most dramatic of Jerusalem’s Christian
events – the annual “Miracle of the Holy Fire.”
Packing every one of the church’s 27 chapels, the crowd works itself
up throughout Friday night and Saturday morning – with singing,
meditation, public and private reading of Scripture, the rawest of
fervor, weeping and sometimes even flagellation.
The staging for the Miracle is perfect – dramatic delays, the
darkening of the interior of the entire church, excited pilgrims and
clergy screaming and even fainting. And then, the last lights are
extinguished, at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
Darkness and silence.
At just after 1, an invisible fire is said to descend from the heavens,
and violently hit the 42 permanently burning olive-oil lamps suspended
directly above the marble stone marking the tomb of Jesus. The flame
enters the Edicule, the darkened and crumbling burial chamber of
Jesus beneath the center of the church’s dome.
Within the Edicule are assembled the Orthodox patriarchs of the city,
and it is the unlit torches they hold that are then “miraculously”
lit by the heavenly and now visible flame, and only they are witnesses
to the way it happens. Crucially, however, it is the torch of the
Greek patriarch, in this case Irenaeus I, that for a millennium has
been struck first by the light. He then passes the miraculous flame
to the other assembled clergy. This event is taken as a testament to
the resurrection of Christ that the faithful believe took place on
this exact spot 1972 years ago.
Suddenly, the elderly Irenaeus bounds out of the eastern door of
the Edicule, brandishing high above his head two massive flaming
torches – proof to the multitudes of the miracle that has occurred
seconds before. He leaps upon the shoulders of two waiting bishops,
who proceed to carry him straight into the chaotic melee of the
waiting crowds, where he is swallowed from view. The crowd goes wild,
and surges toward the Edicule.
Within seconds, thousands of torches – some of them candles, others
oil- or paraffin-soaked rags tied to crude sticks – are ignited,
as one person’s torch touches another’s, and the fire seems to leap
all over the vast building. It is an undoubtedly dangerous moment,
and on many occasions there have been injuries and even deaths from
this wild scene.
People are hanging off of pillars and precariously balanced atop
or on the sides of structures all over the church – scaffolding,
balconies and even sections of the natural bedrock that pokes high
above the ground level of the building, and which is said to be
a part of the original Golgotha, upon which Jesus was crucified.
Children leap or scamper from the shoulders of one adult to another,
the crowds cry and shout and weep, begging for the holy fire to be
passed to them. I spot a group of three Klysts, a mysterious and
heretical excommunicated order of Russian monks, uncontrollably
screaming out in celebration of the miracle that has just occurred.
I am witnessing religion at its wildest, at its most untamed. A church,
which is normally so totally controlled by ritual and tradition,
seems for these few moments to be taken back by the people.
This ritual is of great antiquity. Does it echo and therefore rival
the holy fire that burned in Solomon’s Temple? Is it a Christian
adaptation of Zoroastrianism’s holy fire? These issues are still
debated by anthropologists and religious historians, but its first
reliably written description came from the pilgrim Bernard the Wise
in 867, and the essentials of the ceremony have remained unchanged
since Byzantine times.
Within minutes of the miracle, torches lit, directly or indirectly,
from the original are being dispatched all over the world – to
nearby Bethlehem, to Mount Athos in Greece, to Rome, Sao Paolo, St.
Petersburg, to Axum in Ethiopia and to Constantinople, all of them
treasured and guarded in tiny lanterns as they make their flights or
land journeys to their destinations. Upon arrival, the light will
be welcomed with honor and joyful processions, and taken into the
sanctuaries of designated churches. These sanctuaries themselves
then become the focus for thousands more of the faithful, and thus
the fervor of the Holy Sepulcher is transported to all corners of
the world.
The events of this most recent Easter had the added drama of coming
in the midst of tumultuous events within the fishbowl politics
of Jerusalem. Last year, the combative Greek patriarch Irenaeus
broke part of the delicate status quo that governs relations between
the seven big players with a presence in the church – the Greeks,
Armenians, Russians, Latins, Syrians, Copts and Ethiopians – by not
allowing the Armenian patriarch in to part of the holy fire ceremony,
setting a dangerous precedent that the Armenians were determined to
reverse this year.
They succeeded, but only partially: The Armenian patriarch reclaimed
his access to the Edicule, but arguments persist as to how he was
treated behind the closed doors of the ceremony.
To compound the situation, alleged secret property sales from the vast
holdings of the Greek Church in the Holy Land to Jewish groups have
infuriated many local Palestinian members of the Church, who accuse
it of betraying the holy trust that it has as custodian of ancient
properties. Efforts are underway within the Church to have Irenaeus
removed as patriarch, and there have been threats on his life. And
on this tense Easter Saturday, he was heavily protected by bodyguards.
It struck me, as I wandered around the church, that despite all the
pomp and ceremony, it is the common pilgrims who make this day such
a powerful event. As dawn approached, I came across one pilgrim who
to me seemed to represent, perhaps even more than the high church
officials, the spiritual and physical passion of the day. She bore
the stigmata, wounds that develop on the body of certain persons that
correspond to some or all of the wounds of Christ. Skeptics say they
are self-inflicted, others that they are induced by auto-suggestion,
but believers see them as a genuine miracle.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, I came across a crowd of
pilgrims quietly but busily tending to the woman, who was sitting
on the church’s cracked and ancient floor. She was slumped against a
6th-century Byzantine pillar as drops of blood fell from her forehead,
and her blue cotton shoes were also soaked from a profuse bleeding
from the uppers of her feet. As pilgrims filed past her, they gently
touched her wounds and muttered incantations – to have physical contact
with a stigmata-bearer is, for a believer, a rare honor. For the most
part, she seemed in another world, barely noticing what was going on
around her.
And so, another Easter has passed. The violence of the Passion, the
ceremonial dignity of Holy Week, the ecstasy of the pilgrims, have all
re-confirmed Jerusalem’s status as the city of fervor par excellence.
My mind goes back to the inscription upon a Crusader tomb back in rural
England. The tomb can be found in the Templar crypt under a tiny church
in the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, in the county of Dorset.
“He who has not seen the Holy Fire of Jerusalem has not lived.
Blest are those who bless Jerusalem.”