Holy Sepulchre a magnet for dispute

In Israel, as in all countries that contain archeological sites of deep religious significance, there tend to be three levels of authenticity and holiness.

First, those that are almost certainly not genuine but are soaked in prayer through centuries of devotion.

Second, those that may or may not be the real thing but inspire believers.

Third, those that are certainly or almost certainly the original places of world-changing events. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is regarded by virtually every serious archeologist and historian as the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and buried and where the Resurrection took place.

So it’s particularly tragic that monks from various Orthodox factions have made coming to blows over who owns the place something of a, forgive me, dirty habit. In 2008 the police arrested two clergymen who were punching and kicking each other as part of a brawl between the Armenian and Greek Orthodox contingents in the church. The Armenians had been taking part in an annual procession that commemorates the finding of the true cross 17 centuries ago.

In 2004, during another Orthodox festival, a door to the Roman Catholic chapel was left open, almost certainly by mistake. This was regarded as being disrespectful and a fight ensued. Another brawl occurred on Palm Sunday when a Greek monk was thrown out of the church by clergy from a rival group. When the Israeli police arrived they too were attacked, in a rare case of Christian unity, by everybody present.

It’s all extraordinarily bizarre but not quite beyond comprehension. Ancient, dark and layered in shrines and compartments, the Holy Sepulchre is nothing like a conventional church and more a building constructed piecemeal over what was originally an outdoor execution site and a tomb built into a cave. Western pilgrims tend to be shocked by the overwhelming gaudiness, the sheer confusion of the place and often clumsy juxtaposition of the profoundly holy and jarringly superstitious.

But this is still the centre of Christianity, surviving in the middle of a world dominated by Islam for more than 1,000 years. That it exists at all is a miracle; that it is a magnet for dispute is the sadly inevitable within that supernatural. Attend a dawn Mass on the very spot where Christ was placed after His death, however, with the first light of Jerusalem’s sun sliding through the massive doors of the groaning building and the chants of the devout and gentle all around, and grace still breaks through the clouds of fleshy brokenness that characterize contemporary Jerusalem.

Six denominations control the church and their internecine disputes can be absurd to the point of surreal hilarity. A ladder that was put over an entrance in the 19th century has yet to be moved because the sects cannot agree who has the authority to touch it. Some of these groups are aggressively ethnic in their foundation and are still fighting battles that have more to do with atavistic geopolitical claims and grievances than with the teachings of Christ.

As for the Protestants — not one of the six who control the church’s Status Quo — many prefer to think of what is known as The Garden Tomb in another part of the city as the authentic place of the crucifixion. It isn’t, but it looks like it should be. And what is significant of course is that Jesus is not in either of these spots any longer.

So it’s fallible, challenging and sometimes embarrassing. People claiming to be Christian acting in a non-Christian manner in the name of Christ. Nothing new there and it proves nothing.

I prefer to recall one of my many visits to this conduit to the holy, during the height of the bloody and costly Hezbollah war, when I sat with a Franciscan priest in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and asked him to hear my confession. The two of us communicated in shattered English, French and Hebrew. His smile, God’s forgiveness and the shadows of Jesus, triumphed over even a left hook from an angry Greek monk.

There is beauty beyond compare in the Holy Sepulchre, if we are able and prepared to look between and beyond the human chaos.