On Sacred Spaces, or I Went to Israel and Nothing Supernatural Happened

“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine look forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills?”

William Blake, Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1804)

I mean, don’t get me wrong, Israel was a brilliant time. I’m unequivocally chuffed that I got to go, and especially that I got to go with some excellent people whom I love a lot and basically consider to be my academic siblings. We had eight full days there: three at a conference, five seeing the sights. And boy, were there some sights. We explored Magdala and Capernaum and Caesarea;¹ we swam in the Sea of Galilee and roamed the rooftops of Jerusalem; we traced the route from the Mount of Olives through Gethsemane to the heart of the Old City and the remains of the western wall of the Temple; and yeah, I spent a good deal of time staring at ancient texts trying to read them, because what can I say, my job is also my hobby.² This post isn’t intended as a travelogue, so I’m going to spare you the details, but suffice it to say that the trip was an epic one. The place was just absolutely swimming in history and it was great.

 

View eastwards from a random rooftop at roughly the intersection between the four quarters of Jerusalem. The highest tower you can see in the background is on the Mount of Olives; Gethsemane is quite close below that.

But people had been telling me that something supernatural would happen. They had been telling me that it would be a life-changing experience, that walking where Jesus walked would bring me closer to him, that the very air is different in the Holy Land, that the impact on my faith would be profound. And, as I’d suspected, none of that proved true. If anything, I was less focussed on God than I usually am at home, because, as other experiences have also taught me, having both a) a packed schedule and b) a roommate does not exactly help one maintain a decent routine of personal prayer. I walked the ground that Jesus did, and as it turns out, it didn’t feel any different to any other ground. I saw sites mentioned in the scriptures, and it was really cool and all, but I enjoyed them the same way I enjoy any historical site: lapping up all the facts about the story of the place; grinning at little bits of realia, hints of the lives of the real people who inhabited it; staring at any inscriptions present trying to read them. And granted, it’s even cooler when the stories and realia and inscriptions pertain to matters that are of especial interest to me because of their relevance to the scriptures in which I believe God has revealed himself, but there’s nothing about that that goes beyond the natural. People get particularly excited about stuff they particularly care about; that’s just a perfectly normal, logical, expectable thing, and indeed so fundamentally obvious that it hardly bears stating. But it means that when I pretty much jumped up and down with excitement in the Shrine of the Book because a brother in Christ and myself found and read the bit of the Great Isaiah Scroll (or technically its facsimile, I think)³ where it says they shall call his name Immanuel,⁴ it wasn’t because God filled me with some kind of supernatural ectasy, or was any more tangibly present than usual. It was because this was a prophecy about the one to whom I consider myself to owe everything worth having, and we were reading it off a facsimile of a scroll written many years before its fulfilment, and, you know, that’s pretty blooming amazing.

As you can tell, I’m making a distinction here between a natural feeling and a supernatural feeling. We all experience the former; that’s just, you know, feeling stuff. But I gather that some people also experience the latter: they perceive, react to, feel things that are not discernible on the natural level. They feel, in whatever manner, the presence of God. And that’s, you know, cool and all. I don’t begrudge them it. But it doesn’t happen, or at least hasn’t yet happened, to me.

Funnily enough, I don’t think this situation is without its advantages. I mean, I’d love to feel God’s presence in a tangible way, I’d be well up for that, but the fact that I haven’t surely makes the faith he has given me all the more remarkable. I have no dramatic personal encounter with God on which to lean my trust in him. He has never opened heaven to my eyes; I have seen only earth, and yet somehow he has still granted me to walk in faith that heaven is my true homeland. If those who have not seen and yet have believed are blessed, ⁵ then blessed must I be. I don’t say this to elevate my own faith as purer or realer or better than anyone else’s; faith is a gift of God, so that no one might boast, and my point is that it surely glorifies him that he can put that gift into effect without revealing himself to a person in any supernaturally spectacular way. That I believe in the gospel, that I understand and am changed by the scriptures, that I am increasing in obedience and holiness, that I am learning to place my hope in an inheritance I have no proof of at the expense of gain in the here and now – these things are supernatural enough in and of themselves. God is glorified in one way when he manifests himself to someone in a tangible way, and in another when he manifests himself by shaping her after his likeness despite her never having perceived his presence directly.

So I didn’t mind that I went to Israel and nothing supernatural happened. I was expecting as much. It was enough to experience what I did on a natural level. And again, neither do I begrudge anyone who has had a supernatural experience during a trip to Israel. The thing I don’t get is the suggestion that Eretz Yisrael is some kind of special zone where access to the supernatural is readier than elsewhere – a sacred space, in other words. Because I was under the impression that, as Protestants, we don’t believe in sacred spaces.

I don’t deny that the land is special – a chosen and designated inheritance for the children of Israel, and of profound importance of God’s plans not only in the past but also in the future. In that sense, I suppose, it’s sacred. But that isn’t my covenant, and it isn’t actually as good as my covenant either. Even when God’s presence really did rest in a physical building in Jerusalem, the quality and intimacy of the relationship that that enabled wasn’t a patch on what I – Gentile sinner that I am – enjoy now. In England. Where we can safely say those feet in ancient times did not walk, whatever you might find in certain Arthurian legends.⁶ Think about it: God himself dwells within us by his Holy Spirit; and when we meet together in his name, we stand in congregation with all saints, present and departed, and with all elect angels, in the heavenly throne-room; and we are commanded to boldly approach the throne of grace, God’s own heavenly mercy-seat – the reality that the earthly mercy-seat in the Holy of Holies reflected – confident in the knowledge that we are righteous and deserving through the blood of Jesus shed on our behalf, that as our High Priest he carries our prayers as incense, that we are adopted as his brothers and co-heirs and nothing could separate us from our Father’s love. The veil is torn. We are beyond it.⁷ You think any site on earth could even begin to claim to be a fraction as sacred as that? If you’re a temple of the Holy Spirit, then it follows that you yourself are the most sacred site that currently exists on the earth. So, you know, there’s something to add the CV.

 

The model of Herodian-era Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. Spot the Temple. Back then, it really was a sacred space where there was special access to God, but not so in the Church age.

It’s easy to apply this stuff in contempt of the people who queue up to kiss altars at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or whatever, but I don’t think that considering the land of Israel to have some special power to bring the Christian closer to her God is very far from that. If there are, in this the Church age, no sacred spaces, then there are no sacred spaces; it isn’t just that those Other Christians are honouring the wrong sacred spaces – church buildings rather than the land as a whole. No space of any size or nature can provide better-quality access to God than we already have.

This isn’t to say that it’s automatically wrong or not from God if someone experiences something on the supernatural level that’s ostensibly triggered by being at a site of significance in the Biblical narrative. After all, it’s quite likely that being there might prompt one to a focus on God and a reflection on the wonder of what he did in sending Jesus to walk among us in real, physical, mappable existence, and I imagine that that’s the sort of thing that might provide fertile ground for supernatural feeling. But anything supernatural that does happen is not the result of some inherent property of the site itself. The site is not, after all, magic.⁸

I went to Israel and nothing supernatural happened. But then, there was no reason it should. There was a lot there that was extremely cool and interesting, and I feel very privileged that I had the opportunity to visit, but even as I sit at home in my pyjamas typing this,⁹ the space I occupy is more sacred than any site I visited during my week-and-a-bit in the Holy Land. And if that sounds like too bold a claim, then I suggest we need to take a more careful look at what God claims to have achieved in making us the Church his Temple, the site of his holy presence, in the current era.¹⁰

Footnotes

¹ Caesarea was a particular highlight, especially given that I started out as a Classicist; here’s a quick description of the place: https://www.britannica.com/place/Caesarea.

² I was quite pleased that my palaeo-Hebrew skills proved sufficient to read slightly more of the Tel Dan inscription than was already specially pointed out in the display. The Tel Dan inscription is a huge deal, so if you don’t know about it already, here’s your chance to learn: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/.

³ The Shrine of the Book is dedicated to the first of the manuscripts discovered at Qumran, what you’ll know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can browse the archive online, hooray: https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/.

⁴ Isaiah 7, if you need a reminder: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=is+7&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Which they are; check John 20:29.

⁶ Yep, William Blake’s famous poem had its basis in preexistent traditions about Jesus having spent some time in Cornwall. On the grounds that Joseph of Arimathea was actually his uncle, and took him on a business trip to buy tin. It sounds pretty mad, but there are people out there who are prepared to argue the case: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8380511.stm.

⁷ In this section, I riff mainly on the book of Hebrews. Too many references for me to be bothered to footnote them individually. Go and read, and decide whether I’m handling the text legitimately.

⁸ I say this with some hesitation given that the conference I mentioned was on late-antique magic, and the academic consensus is that magic and religion cannot be meaningfully distinguished. But nonetheless, the scriptures oblige me to distinguish them, and that forces me to put an awful lot of stuff that goes on in the Church and in my own heart into the ‘magic’ box. More of my thoughts on this are in ‘The Magic Word’, under November 2016 in my blog archive.

⁹ I recently got some new pyjamas from PJ Pan, and I love them because they are a) actually long enough, b) really comfy, c) super cute, and d) made in Britain. Only downside is the price, but hey, I get paid now: https://www.pjpan.co.uk/.