Day 3: Not a cheery parade
Because of the war, there are almost no other guests at our hotel in Bethlehem. In the dining room, which can seat hundreds, usually there is no one at the tables but us, the group from Sabeel. The staff at the artists’ co-op outlet where we shopped today told us we were the first group to visit them this year, and forty artist families depend on this co-op for their livelihood. In Jerusalem, where we also went today, in the corridors and narrow streets near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, usually crowded with visitors, most of the little stores were dark and shuttered, and almost none of those that were open had shoppers.
Jerusalem, corridors and narrow streets near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the little stores were dark and shuttered.
The war is devastating merchants and their families–Israeli and Palestinian–who are just trying to make a living.
We walked down the Mount of Olives, along what tradition says was the route of the Palm Sunday procession. Usually, we imagine ecstatic followers waving palm branches and celebrating Jesus. But Luke says that Jesus stopped part way down, looked across the valley to the wall and the Temple Mount, and wept at the violence and disaster he foresaw. Suddenly it was no longer such a cheery parade.
We stopped at Dominus Flevit, the chapel built on the site traditionally viewed as the place of Jesus’s tears. Then we continued, as Jesus did, to the Temple Mount (though he didn’t take a bus). Luke says that same day he took a whip and drove away the traders and money-makers exploiting the helpless pilgrims. Mark reports this as the day after. Jesus must have meant to demonstrate to all those wanna-be disciples that there is more to his way than prancing and waving greenery. We must resist those with power who build their empires, manipulating things for their own benefit while the others suffer.
Many Palestinians find ways to kick at the tables of the economic system that systematically oppresses them. We see these strategies daily. In Jesus’s time, no doubt the Temple money-makers were back at their tables the very next day. But what we remember now is his angry gesture. Millions of people of faith since, Palestinians included, have gone and done as Jesus did, and will do as long as empires last.
*About the author
Bill Butt is retired after writing for CBC Television, teaching at Western University in London, Ontario, and thirteen years as Overseas Personnel for the United Church of Canada, based primarily in Angola and Mozambique. He is a member of the CFOS Communications Committee. Along with a dozen other Canadians, he participated in a Solidarity Pilgrimage, November 11-21, 2024, hosted by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Each day of the pilgrimage, he wrote about his experience