Heir of All Things
“They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means ‘the Place of the Skull’).” John 19:17
That palimpsest of architectural taste, a panoply of passion, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks “the unexpected … unforgettable” (Pierre Loti, La Galilée, 1895) spot. Or at least one of the spots identified as the place where Christ was crucified. It’s the most ecumenical building imaginable, shared by a cluster of Christian denominations: Armenian Apostolic; Catholic; Coptic; and Ethiopian, Greek and Syriac Orthodox. Priests and their acolytes competitively stride round, swinging incense, ringing bells and chanting loudly. Emperor Constantine the Great built the founding church in the 4th century to commemorate his conversion to Christianity. “The most magnificent of his monuments,” claim Teddy Kellek and Moshe Pearlman in Jerusalem Sacred City of Mankind (1968).
Emperor Constantine’s mother Queen Helena had identified the site based on the discovery of the remains of three crosses and a nearby tomb known as ‘Anastasis’ (Greek for resurrection). “Just the place for a basilica,” Evelyn Waugh imagines she would say in his historical novel of 1950, Helena. Adrian Wolff summarises Her Majesty’s achievements in Israel: A Chronology (2004), “327 AD Queen Helena (St Helena), a devout Christian, travels to Palestina, identifying original Christian Holy Sites connected with Jesus, constructing Byzantine style churches on these sites.” Todd Fink (Jerusalem and Central Israel, 2021) expands on Queen Helena’s oeuvre, “She helped establish the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives (currently known as the Pater Noster Church), the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” Reverend Andy Rider (Life is For Giving, 2018) adds, “God’s presence is thicker in ancient churches through hundreds of years of prayers. Step into it!”
William Thackeray gasps in Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (2017), “The situation of the tomb (into which, be it authentic or not, no man can enter without a shock of breathless fear, and deep and awful self humiliation) must have struck all travellers.” Through the centuries, battling the pedagogy of the unpredictable, the church was destroyed, rebuilt, set on fire, hit by an earthquake and finally restored by King Abdullah II of Jordan. The Rock of Calvary is encased in glass: a divine vitrine. Private tour guide Ibrahim Ghazzawi suggests, “The crosses would likely have been wedged into cracks in the rock.” There are three domes; Orthodox Christians believe church domes represent heaven’s vaults. Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going (The Less Deceived, 1955) contains the line “A serious house on serious earth”. It is what it was.
Daphne du Maurier (Not After Midnight and Other Stories, 1971) describes a tour guide’s experience: “On, on, ever upwards, ever climbing, the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre rearing above him … the Church of the Holy Sepulchre enveloped him. He was aware of darkness, scaffolding, steps, the smell of many bodies and much incense.” The church contains the final five Stations of the Cross. The earlier nine Stations line Via Dolorosa. “‘The royal banners forward go, the cross shines forth in mystic glow,’” quotes The Right Reverend Rowan Williams in God With Us: The Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection, Then and Now (2017). “To sing that hymn for the first time each successive year is for many of us the real beginning of the Passion season.”
Andre Moubarak’s 2017 guide One Friday in Jerusalem sets out the importance of Via Dolorosa, “On a narrow street only 2,000 feet long in Old Jerusalem, the storey of redemptive history drew to its agonising glorious climax. Maronites served as the first tour guides of the Holy Land for visiting Europeans – first the Crusaders, then pilgrims.”
Centre for Action and Contemplation teacher Cynthia Bourgeault believes, “The Passion is really the mystery of all mysteries, the heart of the Christian faith experience. By the word ‘Passion’ we mean the events which end Jesus’s earthly life: His betrayal, trial, execution on a cross, and death.” Reverend Jennie Hogan recommends, “Christ makes the way for us.”
Reverend Robert Willis details in The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem (1849), “The Church in its general plan may be described as a Romanesque cruciform structure, having a circular nave to the West, a north and stransept, and a short Eastern limb or choir terminated by an apse. An aisle runs through the circular nave, on three of its sides. Also there is an aisle at the end of each transept, and on the east and west sides of each transept; and an aisle passes around the apse, and has chapels radiating from it, in the usual manner.” Henry Van Dyke (Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land: Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit, 1908) mentions its “dim and shadowy” interior. Borrowing from Joseph Roth’s The Wandering Jews (1927), “Candles burn now for all the dead. Other candles are lit for the living.”
Simon Goldhill notes in Jerusalem City of Longing (2008), “The first shock to anyone used to the great cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres or Notre Dame, or ever to the vast institution of the Vatican, is just how hard it is to find the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” This unresolved siting is matched only by the architecture: what the aforementioned author calls “the irredeemable confusion of the church itself”. George Knight (The Holy Land Handbook, 2011) considers it “gangly and unplanned”.
“When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified Him there, along with the criminals – one on His right, the other on His left.” Luke 23:33
(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).
