Our Lady of Sorrow: The Collected Essays from the Holy Land by Israel Shamir

Author:Israel Shamir
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2019-07-18T07:00:00+00:00

Gibson’s Passion

I

Three incredible days passed in Jerusalem. On Friday night, burial processions carried out the shroud of the Lord from the small ancient church of St James into the parvis of the Holy Sepulchre. Yesterday, tens of thousands of native Christians and pilgrims flocked into the great edifice of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate the annual but always new and surprising miracle of Holy Fire coming of the Tomb of Christ. It is a beautiful and colourful feast, when processions of various denominations march in and out, while young Syrian and Armenian boys throw wild and inspiring dances full of manly power. After hours of chants and prayers, Holy Fire burst out of the empty Tomb to encourage us at this most frightening Saturday of the year, the Saturday when the Lord was dead. During this godless Saturday Christ fought the gates of Hell, and its outcome was far from obvious. The Holy Fire was a sign of life from the Tomb. And with sunrise on Easter Sunday came a beautiful day, a day of new hope and new promise.

This year, the Old City of Jerusalem was full of CDs and videos of the great modern Passion Play by Mel Gibson. It was also screened in semi-privacy of hotels and clubs, for no cinema in Jewish-controlled Palestine wished to show it. There was no clear reason as reason goes. The Passion of Gibson is quite similar to his Braveheart; both films contain long and heart-tearing scenes of torture, flogging and agony. But no Englishman objected to the Braveheart being screened claiming it will inspire anti-English sentiment. The Passion reminds in a way even The First Blood, but no policeman tried to block Rambo saying it inflames hatred to cops. If the Jews were an ethnic group, they would be able to watch the Passion as easily as the English watch the Braveheart. Indeed, our friend Gilad Atzmon was right: Jews are not killers of Christ, but those who identify with killers of Christ.

For Palestinians, this story of a kind Palestinian man tortured and killed by the brutal lookalikes of Israel’s Border Police at the shouts of ‘Yiztalev’, ‘Crucify Him’, is a story of their daily life brought to the level of Faith. And they can find respite and hope in its message of Resurrection. For the immigrant ‘Jewish’ population of Palestine, there is a plain message: identify with Christ, not with his killers.

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