A Holy Thursday walk in Jesus’ footsteps

Holy Week in Jerusalem can be very hectic, but one can find fruitful time of reflection. Fr PADDY NOONAN OFM recalls how he left a liturgical procession to walk in the path Jesus took in his last hours of freedom.

It was the millennium year of 2000 when doomsday watchers told us the world was to break up, the final Apocalyptic liturgy was to happen and the last great battle between Good and Evil was to be fought on the plains of Megiddo (Armageddon) in Israel.

Not a man for taking chances, I was in Jerusalem, just in case!

I was in the Holy Land on a journey back in time, back to the place and the culture of Christ. Coming from neighbouring Africa helped me to make the connection.

I’d been ministering for some months in the wonderful archaeological site of Capernaum, and it came to pass that I went up to Jerusalem for the solemn feast of the Passover. From Galilee I came, on a typically searing hot day, by air-conditioned bus along the Jordan River, and entered Jerusalem on the Saturday before Palm Sunday.

Jerusalem. I wanted to see it, to sense it, to savour it. I wanted to be taken over by it. Overwhelmed by it. This was the week of weeks, of all weeks.

I had checked with the Franciscans where their liturgies would be each day of the week. The church of the Holy Sepulchre, the central shrine of Christianity, was the place to go.

At the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection, there was much officious running to and fro as the friar in charge pushed and shoved pilgrims into line.

There followed the first of many solemn Holy Week processions within the dark, cramped and noisy church. We set off with enthusiasm. I was upbeat. I was in awe of the place itself—in awe of the moment too. This was a physical reminder of the history of salvation.

But the procession was very much grounded in this world. It was a liturgy to be completed within political and time constraints known only to the organisers. Pilgrims knew little of this strange backdrop governing every service at the tomb of Christ.

Maybe I was tired. I began to find the procession very monotonous and repetitive—singing 50 pages of Latin Gregorian chant at various stations symbolising the life of Christ. It felt like a job to be done, a course to be completed.

But these quiet thoughts were interrupted by a sudden unexpected movement. 

The solemn processional flow of clerics, me included (and with laity trailing at the end), was shuffling from station to station when, quite suddenly, we were intersecting the service of another Christian community. We were crossing, uninvited, the liturgical space of another church! We were walking through the “live” liturgical territory of the Coptic Church during their recitation of vespers.

It happened again. We interrupted their liturgy three times—and they could do nothing about it! Their vested bishops and priests duly stood aside while we edged past in rows of four, sometimes stopping in a closeted space just inches from their bishop’s long, patient beard.

The highly embroidered Coptic clerics wore benign if frozen smiles which lasted the full half hour of our big-brother type intrusion. It was another local eye-opener.

Later a friar explained that hundreds of years of history are being played out in these liturgies.

How could the passing pilgrim know that the Catholic Church was the original church to have processions around the tomb of Christ? How could the passing pilgrim know that the Coptic Church was then imposed on the Catholic Church by being allowed to occupy property in the sacred space here at the Holy Sepulchre?

All Christian churches here were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and were the same in the eyes of the ruling Muslim Turks. The year was 1538. Ever since then these two Christian communities have met head on in divided worship for the ceremonies of Holy Week. And it was Muslim rulers who created the problem as a political solution for that time!

There are delicate and subtle relationships between the Christian communities guarding the holy places which go back hundreds of years and are written in stone, and for the most part are unknown to the visiting pilgrim. These laws are called the status quo and they govern who can do what, and when, and where, around the tomb and other holy places.

This was the first of 11, yes 11, great processions which characterised the normal Holy Week ceremonies (including Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) in Jerusalem. The Greeks and Armenians also had their processions, often simultaneously.

One evening two different processions raced through the tail end of our procession, five minutes apart, in a cloud of jingling bells, swinging incense and flashing copes. The swish of an elaborate Armenian cope blew out my candle! I stood still, gobsmacked at the speed and timing of it all. Someone behind nudged me to move on, fearing worse inter-church liturgical skirmishes; God comfort us all!

Poor Jesus, who prayed for unity not far from here, is very patient with the churches scurrying around his tomb, each still claiming their bit after all these years. But for sheer possessive touchiness the Greek Orthodox monks, when roused, are known to provide the most outrageous spectacle—sometimes even fisticuffs—in defence of their perceived turf. 

By Holy Thursday I was beginning to wilt. I needed something else. I wanted Holy Week in the Holy Land to be special, to challenge my biblical imagination. I knew I could have the ritual anywhere, in any country in the world. I needed time for reflection, silence to absorb the proximity, the immediacy and the living history of it all.

 

This was, after all, the greatest week on the Christian calendar, reliving the greatest story ever told. And the Holy Land, the site of the Incarnation, was God’s stage props for the history and indeed geography of our salvation. That was big enough for me.

I felt I must go beyond myself to savour this unique time, to grab the moment. Why had 120 of my Franciscan brothers died as martyrs over the centuries while ministering in this land?

No doubt I needed to connect with these special days in a quiet place away from the formal ceremonies, but without necessarily excluding them.

So after supper on Holy Thursday I slipped out of the Franciscan monastery and made my way through the dimly-lit alleyways to the Upper Room on Mount Zion where the Last Supper took place. All was quiet and still in that part of the city.

From there I retraced the footsteps of Jesus as he made his lonely way for the last time down into the bowels of the dark silent Kidron Valley on his way across to Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. I remember that stark valley well.

I climbed over the low road wall you pass leaving Jerusalem for Bethany and immediately was lowering myself carefully down a steep rocky incline.

The blue-grey moonlight gave a certain eeriness to the desolate, rocky surroundings, casting shadows of uncertainty and menace. There was a hint of those bizarre, bluish, fantasy landscapes that you find in the Lord of the Rings films.

I tried to rest my mind, to slow it down…I began to feel I was somehow in the presence of the ages.

A heavy, ominous silence hung over the hollowed-out tombs of the prophets which Jesus passed after his final memorable meal with his apostles.

Christ would have passed this point with some confused disciples at that moment, lost in his own thoughts and terrified about what awaited him in the next few days. I could almost hear the clamour of the soldiers coming to arrest him.

The place of The Kiss. The place where Old and New Testaments collide…a place where present time pauses and a premonition of eternity is sensed.

You let your mind drift back in time.

In the enclosing dark, I pondered the path from here to Gethsemane and see what he saw in the deadly, deathly gloom. Between the two olive groves I looked over at the large, shadowy tombs of Absalom and Zechariah—as Jesus would have that night when he passed, perhaps in deepening depression.

Nothing stirred. Directly behind him, and now behind me, was the towering pinnacle of the Temple, the pinnacle which the devil had referred to in his temptation of Jesus in the desert.

That Holy Thursday night, in their churches across the world, countless millions were contemplating this very valley.

Just north of where I was now sitting at ease, St Stephen was stoned to death, in a form of execution still practised in some Muslim countries today.

 

But now it was just shadows and black crevices, and stillness, and white boulders—and spiritual energy. Ironically, there is friendliness in the darkness, a tranquil presence, a certain echo of Christ’s encouragement: “Do not be afraid.”

I lingered for some time enjoying the living stillness, leaning against a large rock and savouring the sacred silence supercharged with global history.

It was memorable; and it was right for me.

Then it was time to move on. I wandered slowly up the far side of the dark valley glancing back at times to see something of what the disciples must have seen on that devastating night.

I was still thoughtful, and with gratitude for the experience. It was a strangely memorable, joyful and peaceful darkness that I was leaving behind.

I eventually joined the Franciscans and others to celebrate Holy Thursday at the beautiful church in the garden of Gethsemane, the church of All Nations, with its Rock of the Agony.

The visual, visceral and meditative walk through the lonely Kidron Valley had become the first part of my Holy Thursday liturgy, followed and enhanced by the more ritualistic, cerebral celebration in the church.

Fr Noonan is an author and Franciscan priest in the archdiocese of Johannesburg.