Happy Hannukah

I sitting writing this in the quiet of an early morning in Jerusalem at the guest house of Christ Church, the oldest Protestant church in the Middle East.  It’s been hard to sleep.

I opened up my MacBook to write this post, and even as I did my screen cover photograph popped up as a reminder of what I am about to write.

The photo is of Bondi Beach, a photo I had taken from the vantage point of the large, sloping grassy hillside, so often packed with locals, tourists and visitors.

I had taken the photo back in July when an English friend insisted we go to Bondi there for a swim so that he could tell his children back home that he had swum at this famous place. That day – even in winter but as always, the grass is populated with families, young people, lovers, their pets. It’s almost a secular pilgrimage for tourists.

The winter clouds in that photo swell large.  But it was a balmy day back then – there are so many balmy winter days in Sydney – so my friend wasn’t exactly braving the waters. The Pacific Ocean is much warmer in winter than the Indian Ocean waters of my home town some four thousand kilometres from Bondi.

My friend had had to brave a possible rebuttal from the long-suffering lifeguards in the lookout tower, so that he could take a photo with a lifeguard.

The English love the Bondi Rescue TV show, documenting as it does the hapless ineptitude of so many foreigners who end up in trouble in the beguiling waves. The lifeguards are sick of the attention!

The early morning here in Jerusalem has been in a stark contrast to the late night. Once again, for a boy from Perth, seeing so many people – families, young lovers, old couples, filling the streets well after 10pm, is strange. Perth is a windswept parking lot after 8pm.

I had attended the six o’clock communion service at Christ Church, tired though I was (it went for two solid hours), because I have been missing church with so much travel.  It was a modestly attended service in a modest-sized, but simply stunning building.

Yet this is the body of Christ, right? This is the body of Christ meeting in the city that longed for Messiah for centuries. That – for most people in the city – still is longing.

And as we opened up in song I was immediately swept up by the wonderful, mournful music and singing of the Third Week of Advent. The rich liturgy of an ache for salvation in the midst of darkness hit me especially hard.

Christ Church’s acoustics are simply astonishing. And as our voices – accompanied by a gifted handful of musicians and singers – rose for the first time, I felt my heart pound. How could forty or so voices sound so heavenly?

And then there was the gentle joy – the almost inaudible crack – as the wafer was deliberately broken by the priest. Again a deliberate crack for each participant, as he pressed it into our hand kneeling at the railing. Christ’s body given for us.

Communion had followed a wonderful sermon – John the Baptist languishing in prison, his disciples asking of Jesus “Are you the one we are expecting, or should we wait for another?”

Can we sit in the prison of our longed-for expectations, still trusting that the Messiah who opened the eyes of the blind, made the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and the dead to rise, will open the prison doors too, just as the prophets promised?

Yes, yes he will, but maybe, as for John the Baptist, not today. But keep trusting. Keep expecting. Keep hoping. One day those prison days will fling open, maybe not this side of the Parousia – which is after all, the point of Advent – but one day!

We had just arrived in the city from the famed site of Qumran, that location of such zealous expectations of Messiah. For some, Qumran is a twenty minute bucket list item, but for the thirteen of us from around the world – Kenya, Canada, the US, France, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, and me – Australia – it was so much more.

We lingered for several hours in the stark mountainous beauty of Qumran , guided in our reflections as we have been all week, by the gentle voice of the Christ Church rector, David.  As he explained the story, the technicolor reality of this ancient place soaked over us.

David had named this tour “Streams In the Negev” – a desert journey to the difficult places that push us ever deeper to dependence on God and his promises. God does his best work – his deepest work in us and in his people, in the desert. No one in the Bible who is part of his salvation plan escapes the desert. Don’t avoid the desert. Lean into it.

Jesus – after returning from the desert – had stepped into a world of hopes and fears, – a world of promises – and fulfilled and personified them all.

Yet, despite the rigour and purity of the many groups awaiting Messiah at places such as Qumran, it is meek souls who receive him. The dear Messiah enters into relationship not with the zealously self-righteous, but the downtrodden, the broken-hearted, the poor in spirit, those who know they are are dead and need raising.

And then the news from Bondi. As you may know, my family moved to Sydney last year, and we are still getting our bearings. Sydney is a breath-taking behemoth of a city, a dazzling jewel that snakes and wends its way across a topography that a family from flat, dry, desertous Perth have both enjoyed and endured traversing.

The first I heard was a social media post from my friend Daniel, sunning himself on the beach, and having to flee from a gunman not more than fifty metres from him. The next two hours were too-ing and fro-ing online with my family, scanning the online papers, updating in “live” time, and cursing the dead spots between the mountains as we drove.

Over a dozen dead at a Hanukkah celebration on the beach, slaughtered by the same darkness that had slaughtered over 350 young people at the Nova Festival site, where we had been just a few days before near the Gaza border.

What struck me about the Nova site was the manner in which it had become an organic shrine – relatives erecting beautiful pictures and memorials to their loved ones. It’s gut-wrenching. And how were we to know that a few days later, Bondi will be bracing itself for similar memorials.

This will change Australia. Or it will reflect that Australia has already changed. For two years there have been warnings to our government that the dreadful anti-Semitism that has been an embarrassing scourge across Australia, will end tragically. Yet to little avail. And now here we are.

I took that photograph at the top of this post last night, when I wandered out the gates of Christ Church to get my first feel of the place. I bought some chocolate and wandered over to the wall.

There were digital projections all over the conveniently large and blank walls that make up this part of the city. The place was buzzing. Lights, noise, laughter, Christmas decorations.

And “Happy Hanukkah” projected onto the walls.. And now Hanukkah in Australia will never be the same again. How long oh Lord? That’s the cry of Advent.

And oh the deep irony! I kept this trip under wraps as I was preparing to go, worried of course about going to a country that has just seen the end of a war. Will you be safe? Should you post anything on socials? Should you put your much anticipated runs  up on Strava?

My wife was concerned. My son was concerned. My newly-married daughter over in Perth too. But they wanted me to go. It’s been a long, arduous year, with too much travel and I had mixed feelings as I boarded at Sydney. But it’s been wonderful, a healing balm of Gilead. But more of that for another day.

I had sat with the son of the rector of Christ Church having lunch just two days ago and he said this:

“If Western progressive nations feel so strongly about Jews not having a nation of their own they’ve done a pretty poor job of making the diaspora an attractive option.”

So what strikes you speaking to Jewish people here is how “meh” they feel about the return of open anti-Semitism across the world. It’s not like they’re shocked. Why should they be?  They have had several thousand years of history to deal with this. They assume it.

Westerners need to know this: Jews are not sitting around Tel Aviv or Beersheba wringing their hands and wondering why young, queer people studying second-rate anti-colonial humanities degrees taught by third-rate anti-Semitic professors are snapping and snarling at them and spitting out the word “Zionist”. No. They’re simply getting on with life in the knowledge that it has ever been so.

And now that the diaspora option is even less attractive, Israel is ironically more attractive. Sydney has been, sadly, like so many other Western cities, hostile, casually anti-Semitic over the past two years. Jewish people feel safer here.

The deep dismay to me has been watching modern, licentious types who lack any deep ethical narratives – and who for all the world have zero in common with a death cult such as Hamas – side with such a death cult. They are unfurling the first shoots of that ancient dark seed that until now, was lying dormant within them.

I was doing my usual run around the bay, near our Inner West Sydney home, a few months ago and two middle-aged women, well dressed walked past, one carrying a colourful umbrella in the drizzle. As I ran past, I read the words “From the River to the Sea”. “What river? What sea?” I wanted to ask. But why bother?

So now, here I am in Jerusalem for four days – very much a newbie. Don’t take from this that I am some sort of expert!  But the deep irony of feeling safer here in Israel than in the supposedly new world that was supposedly designed to put behind the ancient prejudices has struck me.

Australia’s growing anti-semitism is a global embarrassment. And now a murderous reality. Though as I said, there’s time enough to sharpen the tongue, the pencil and the focus. Today is simply a day of mourning.

I stood last night in Christ Church Jerusalem, repeating the liturgy of longing, standing alongside an Ethiopian missionary to Muslims in Kenya, an American pastor, a Canadian film maker. Men and woman from across the globe.  One of the Kenyans on our trip is a bishop. He was invited to come to the front and announce the blessing as we left.

Here is the hope of the world. A specifically Jewish Messiah for a global people. For “all” have sinned –  Jew, Gentile alike. And all are justified not by piety, or intensity or religiosity, but by grace.

A specific Saviour for a universal deliverance. And while I have much to say and respond to about Bondi, here we are ten days out from Christmas Day, when the Prince of Peace himself arrived, the very one who is our peace.

Happy Hanukah and Happy Christmas.

Messiah has died.

Messiah has risen.

Messiah will come again.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.