Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb...
John 20:1 NRSVue
Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
This will be the call and response in churches around the world today, or variations on this declaration. This year is unusual in that Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Christians will be celebrating Easter on the same Sunday. Because of the vagaries of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, with the phases of the moon thrown in, Easter is truly a moveable feast.
The bleak irony is that this year a relatively small number of Christians who have lived their entire lives in the land where Jesus was born, carried out his ministry, was crucified and raised from the dead will be able to visit holy sites in Jerusalem. Palestinian and Arab Christians who have a history of peaceable coexistence in Israel and the Occupied Territories are restricted in their movement and often harrassed by the military and ultra-Orthodox Jews. The official stance of the Israeli government is commitment to religious freedom but the influence of those on the political and religious right belies this. According to an article in The Guardian:
..religious intolerance and antichristian sentiment has been made mainstream by Israeli political leadership – the ultra-hardline national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, described Israelis spitting on Christians as “an old Jewish tradition” – and old suspicions have escalated into brazen, all-out violence. There have also been growing incidences of settler groups attempting to seize Christian land in Jerusalem. In 2023, the Holy Land Roman Catholic patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa accused the government of establishing a “cultural and political atmosphere that can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians”...
Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian Christian political analyst and the author of Rooted in Palestine: Palestinian Christians and the Struggle for National Liberation 1917-2004, said that despite the mounting harassment they faced, the diminishing numbers of Christians left in the West Bank and the unrelenting horrors of the war in Gaza, he still viewed Easter as a time of hope and “the timely message that life defeats death”.
“As Palestinian Christians, we know that this generation will either make it or break it,” said Abu Eid. “So making clear to the Israeli occupation that we are going to stay, that we will celebrate the same religious events that we’ve been celebrating for centuries is both a national mandate and a religious mission that we have. Keeping our Christian traditions alive, praying – they have become an act of resistance.”
Two years ago we were in Jerusalem on Easter weekend and attended Sunday worship at the Garden Tomb site. Despite tensions in the city we moved about with relative freedom even though we were visitors from a distant place.
In a few hours we will gather in celebration with other Christians enjoying a freedom I won't take for granted. And I'll say a prayer for brothers and sisters in Christ who desire that same freedom.
Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
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