Explanation

1. Even after two millennia, the Holy Land still beckons. The call to go and see is powerful. Today’s Holy Land is at the center of the faith of most people of the world, followers of the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. For Christians, to make pilgrimage in the place where Jesus lived out his life and ministry and among the very people who are his spiritual descendants offers a completely unique way to encounter his teachings and make them real. 

2. Holy Land pilgrims encounter a place that has not been frozen in time. Today’s Holy Land is so much more than stones and stories of ancient history. It is comprised of distinct political entities, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the state of Israel, that are often at the center of world news headlines. There, the past 100 years have been fraught: the end of a world war and an empire; decades of Mandatory rule by a colonial empire; immigration of settler colonists seeking shelter from harm coming up against the inhabitants of centuries; United Nations intervention and partition of lands and peoples; a bloody protracted war resulting in a new “Jewish state” built on conquered and confiscated lands that rendered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced, dispossessed and made refugees; and the imposition of the longest military occupation of one people by another in today’s world, now in its 56 th year. Inevitably over decades, there have been death; injuries; loss of human rights; family disruption; loss of homes, jobs, and educational opportunities; forced evacuation from long-held lands alongside the restricted personal movement enforced by military occupation; and poverty, hunger, and illness.

3. The circumstances of today’s Holy Land, then, are compellingly redolent of Jesus’ own time under a Roman military occupation. The conditions are right for authentic pilgrimage that seeks to see, understand, and be transformed. The stories, parables, and narratives of Jesus’ ministry that comprise our liturgical worship tell of encounters with the oppressed, the poor and ill, and the marginalized. Surely then, pilgrims to the Holy Land today should seek the same by traveling not to sites long since fallen silent, but to checkpoints, refugee camps, prisons, hospitals and clinics, and encounters with people living in conflict and under occupation and oppression. The few Christians remaining in the Holy Land are Palestinian. Let them be our guides and companions, not those who ignore the very places and conditions where Jesus would be found today.