Monday, May 7 ~ Dana Wright

Mar Elias English students

Today was a day for all of us Pilgrims of Ibillin to be touched by the hearts of young people in modern Israel. We spoke with young teenagers at the Mar Elias school in the morning, allowing them to practice their English on us and us to practice our Arabic on them (no contest!). Then we drove to Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph grew up and where Jesus spent the bulk of his childhood.

Nap time at Al Tufula

There we visited the Al Tafula Center for Women and Children founded by Nabila Espanioly. We saw young toddlers tossing and turning and twisting their little bodies into impossible contortions during nap time. We listened to Nabila tell of her work with these dear ones and their mothers, whom she helps inspire and empower by affirming their native wisdom (what Nabila called their “heritage knowledge”) and connecting that wisdom with scientific insights.

Having lunch at Liwan, hosted by Sally Azzam and her partners in the Culture Cafe

In the afternoon we visited the Liwan Cultural Cafe and lunched on frekhey (green cracked wheat) and met owner Sally Azzam. Sally grew up in Nazareth largely ignorant of and sheltered from knowing what her Palestinian identity meant under subtle forms of occupation in Israel. But as she grew into womanhood she learned what it meant to be oppressed by the 50 laws that keep her and her people second class citizens in her own land. After years of activism she founded her cafe as an experiment in cultural subversion, providing a space for all people to engage in conversations that really matter about improving life in Nazareth.

Later in the afternoon we visited several churches built over important excavation sites related to the common lives of Nazareth’s most famous family (to put it mildly!). We visited (1) the excavations that may be the remains of the houses of Mary and Joseph at the Sisters of Nazareth Monastery (where the sisters did the excavating!); (2) the Church of the Annunciation at the site at which the Angel Gabriel announced the Good News to an unsuspecting young girl; and (3) remains from the kind of workshop Jesus’ father Joseph maintained excavated under Saint Joseph’s Church, where perhaps Jesus learned his original trade as a carpenter.

For me it was a day to reflect on what it meant for the Creator to became a small human creature-a baby, a child, and a young person. Jesus was not a humanoid or a generic human who came to earth fully formed as an adult. Jesus was a full blooded Palestinian Jew who was born and who grew up in a concrete place and time-just like all genuinely human beings. He cried like a baby when he was hungry, like the babies at Al Tufula do. He wet his diapers and threw his food on the floor. When he learned to walk he stubbed his toe and fell down (and cried only if he saw that his parents were watching!). He felt the wind and the rain and the burning sun as we did today. He ate food with his fingers. And he no doubt smashed his little finger with a mallet on more than one occasion as he painfully learned his father’s trade (and as his father winced and laughed at the sight of it all!).

But the Incarnation means even more than that Jesus knew human experience as an individual Palestinian Jew. To be fully human means that Jesus felt the full forces of economic, political, and religious oppression that surrounded him all his life. Even as a baby he must have felt deep down in his bones the anxieties that his mother and father felt continually in their bones under Roman occupation. The very historical experience of oppression was in their DNA and had to be passed down into Jesus’ DNA (at least through Mary!). In other words, the Incarnation began before Mary got pregnant and before Jesus got born! Jesus was fully human!

And what about their forced emigration to Egypt?  Did not this devastating experience make an impact on the Christ child? Even coming back to Palestine under the potential threat of Archaelus left its mark (potential threats can be more fearsome because they are always threatening). Jesus’ coming of age in Nazareth meant that he also witnessed uprisings and crucifixions and the imperial propaganda that were commonplace to Rome’s oppressive modus operandi of control. He would have suffered as a child from the plight of many families drained by overtaxation, defeated by the lack of opportunity, and dominated by the pall of military presence everywhere. No doubt the children we met today have been deeply impacted by the form of oppression they and their families experience day to day in Ibillin and Nazareth. Meeting them and contemplating Jesus’ life in Nazareth under occupation gives all of us a truer sense of the amazing truth that God became human precisely in a place like Nazareth. The Incarnation was Nazareth imbued.

Throughout today I kept thinking of what one ancient church father (Athanasius or Irenaeus?) once noted: “What Jesus has not assumed he has not saved.” More positively stated, one could also say: “What Jesus has assumed he intends to save.”

As we spoke to students in Ibillin in the morning and toured through Jesus’ boyhood home Nazareth in the afternoon, this ancient theological insight regarding the profound significance of the Incarnation took on new meaning for me. Jesus must assume our full humanity if he fully saves us. And his full humanity included his experience of oppression. Jesus assumed the whole of human existence (including oppression) because Jesus intends to redeem human experience in its entirety!  Jesus will not just redeem individuals. He will redeem heritages. He will redeem traditions. He will redeem history. He will redeem every aspect of what makes human beings what they are. He will redeem economics and politics and language. He will redeem human relationships to land and to non-human creation. He will redeem cities and nations and corporations. And he will redeem all of it because he himself became fully human. And what he has assumed he will save. Sola Deo Gloria.