Lenten Post 7 – A Night in the Holy Sepulchre Part 1

When I was a young man, I received a phone call from Fr Kenneth Campbell, a Franciscan Priest whom I first met after a talk he gave on the Holy Land. He was born on the Island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides but spent many years working in Palestine and Jordan. He had arranged a pilgrimage for Gaelic-speaking Catholics from the Outer Isles to visit Judea and Galilee, however, the Israeli government suddenly asked Fr Kenneth to escort the Catholic Canadian Foreign Minister and show him around the Holy Places. Could I therefore act as a stand-in because he could not get back in time to meet the pilgrims at Luton airport? If I could, then after the formalities, I could board the ‘plane with the pilgrims and so have a free holiday in the place I always dreamt of visiting.

The Authenticity of the Holy Places

On the first day, I did the grand tour of all the major shrines in style with Fr Kenneth and the Canadian foreign minister. There are more Gaelic speakers in Canada than there are in Scotland and, as the foreign minister was one of them, he and Fr Kenneth spoke to each other in their common tongue knowing full well that the official car was bugged. When for my sake, he reverted to English whenever we left the car, I was amazed to hear the evidence for the authenticity of the Holy Places. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70 they built their own pagan shrines over the place where Jesus was crucified, and over the tomb from which he had risen from the dead to try and obliterate their memory. However, their action did exactly the opposite, guaranteeing their preservation until they were returned to Christianity when Constantine became the first Christian Emperor in AD 312.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

It was the church of the Holy Sepulchre that impressed me most, not its architecture, but because it was built over the place where Jesus died and over the tomb from which he rose from the dead. The whole atmosphere of the place touched me more deeply than I could have imagined.  Fr Kenneth, who had lived and worked in the Holy Land for most of his life, seemed to have a key to every place that you really should see, and even to places that you should not! On the night before we left, his famous key opened a door that seemed closed to everyone else and opened to me an experience that has affected me deeply to this day. Although the doors to the Holy Sepulchre are closed every night and cannot be opened until the next morning no matter what, I was given permission to remain inside for the whole night, with a room to myself in the Franciscan friary within. I spent little time in that room. Instead, I spent my time before the midnight office at Calvary, and the time after, alone in the empty tomb.

I was so overcome to realise that I was totally alone, the only person praying, within a matter of metres from the place where Jesus had died and from where St John and Our Lady had stood. There was a New Testament open before me at St John’s account of Christ’s death. The passage that told of the water pouring from the side of Jesus was underlined in red, for this was the key moment in his narrative. Once glorified he could immediately send the Holy Spirit whom he promised to send at the Last Supper. An outpouring of this mystical life and love has long since been likened to an unprecedented effusion of living water by both the prophets in the Old Testament and by Jesus himself.

The Feast of Tabernacles

Not long before his life came to its abrupt and agonising end, Jesus celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles with his disciples in Jerusalem. On the final day, they were gathered at the pool of Siloam outside the city gate for a key moment in the ritual. A priest walked from the temple with a golden bowl full of water. Then, while it was being poured out into the pool in memory of the rock struck by Moses to give water to his people in the desert, a prophecy was read out. It promised a new and massive outpouring of the Holy Spirit when the Messiah would come. This was the moment when Jesus chose to cry out in a loud voice, “If any man is thirsty let him come to me. Let the man come and drink who believes in me.” However, St John who witnessed the whole event said, “He was speaking of the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for there was no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (John 7:37-39).

On that day the promised Kingdom of God finally came. The Holy Spirit burst out, onto and into the world like an unstoppable supernatural sea of love. Like a spiritual tsunami, he would sweep out over and into all things, drawing all who would not resist him, back through Christ into the ocean of God’s infinite loving. In the Risen Christ, in his glorified but human body, they would be drawn into the life and loving that flowed between the Father and the Son from all eternity.

Since the first Pentecost day, the love of the Holy Spirit has been, and still is, endlessly flowing between the Father and the Son, drawing all who are in Christ into that loving. He is the means by which we are adopted into the family of God. By family, therefore, I mean that we have been taken up into Christ together with all those others, who like us, have been drawn up into the life of the Three in One.

When the friars came into the Church for the midnight Office, I joined them but when they left I went to the Holy Sepulchre itself to spend the rest of the night in Prayer. I will tell you what happened next, in the following week.

Please continue to follow my free course on Prayer during this Lent on essentialistpress.com