Israel in Pictures

I'm back from Israel. It's a place of great contrasts. I'll try to capture them with a few pictures I took along the way...

Old and New
In the foreground of the first picture is Herod's Palace in Caesarea, complete with his own private swimming pool - which now melts into the sea. The second picture, of course, shows Herod's Temple wall.












Promise and Menace
It's a place where the best and worst elements of humanity are on display - hopes and visions, alongside prejudice and fear. The first picture is from coastal Caesarea, the second from the Palestinian side of the wall that emphatically divides Israeli territory from Palestinian territory.












Achievement and Failure
The first picture includes part of Herod's Temple foundation - an astonishing achievement, being easily the size of a couple of football fields side by side. The second picture was taken in the Garden of Gethsemane.












Glory and Hiddenness
The Dome of the Rock is surely the most impressive building in Jerusalem, with its famous gold-topped roof. The second picture shows a little-known room hiding in the back of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - a dark, tiny, largely empty room in which a couple of empty tombs dating from the Second Temple period can be found, just metres away from the location which is widely agreed to be Golgotha...











"We have seen his glory..." John 1:14

blessed are those who do not see

Why was Thomas in a less favourable position to ourselves? Why is it a blessing to believe without seeing? Again, this is related to the opening questions in this blog...
I think it all has something to do with this: God wants us to know him as the one who gives sight to the blind, and life to the dead - and so he withdraws the risen Jesus from our sight, offering us only the testimony of the cross and resurrection, delivered by followers of the hidden Lord.

So is our positive reception of this message effectively a nullification of all of our previous contemplations and searchings and ponderings? Does grace, in this sense, destroy nature - or does it come as the corrective perfecting of our previous groping for God? Of course, there is a long and heated theological debate. Luther and Barth are often thought of as being the key representatives of the idea that grace destroys nature, in opposition to Aquinas, who represents the idea that grace perfects nature.

I wonder if it would be fruitful to think about it like this: Grace resurrects nature... that is, the grace of God is not continuous with any human foundations - it crucifies human pride... on the other hand, the grace of God does enliven and bring to fullness the genuine personhood that had been crudely existent before the coming of salvific grace. In this sense, grace genuinely destroys and perfects.

crypto-theology

Here is a crucial question: Why did the ascension happen? Why was it "better" (John 14-16) for Jesus to leave the disciples with only his indirect presence - via Spirit, Word, and Sacrament?
And why did he picture the Kingdom of God as something which is hidden until the climactic harvest?
Here is a parallel question: Why was Saul of Tarsus struck with blindness as his fundamental experience of the risen Jesus?
And one more related question: Why were the Corinthians so emphatically wrong to act as though they could see clearly in the present (1 Cor 13)?

Perhaps one way to express the Corinthians' problem is "over-manifest spirituality" - an error at home in the pre-parousia age, in which Jesus can only genuinely be known and celebrated as the Crypto-Kurios... the Lord who is hidden from the world's esteem by the disgraceful curse of the cross. Consequently the cruciform hiddenness of the Crypto-Kurios is witnessed to by the cruciform mission of Paul, the original Crypto-Theologian.