The Rock (15 page)
Authors: Kanan Makiya
A flight of steps led up to an atrium surrounded by a portico held up by pillars bigger than any the Arabs had ever seen before. “Here, under one roof, over the mountain we call Calvary,” Sophronius said, “are gathered all the places, which, together, have witnessed the providential history of salvation first set in motion by our father Abraham.”
“All?” asked Umar. “But what of the Sanctuary of David, where the king of Israel begged the Lord for forgiveness? I want to go there.”
“Forgiveness was granted to David by virtue of what Jesus did in this place,” said Sophronius, waving his arm in the direction of the three massive doors that had mysteriously been thrown open for the party, revealing a long five-aisled Basilica of breathtaking sumptuousness. The walls were encrusted with colored marbles that shone like mirrorwork. The sculpted coffering of the ceiling presented itself as an endless wave. The ceiling coffers crested like a gently rising swell down the middle two-story nave, divided from the neighboring aisles by a forest of columns. A brilliant gold sheen followed in the wake of the coffering, growing denser and more brilliant still down the nave where the light came spilling through clerestory windows, causing the whole temple to sparkle with a thousand reflections.
“Please.” Sophronius motioned to Umar. “You are my guest. I will explain inside.”
“Do not go into that Sorceror’s Temple, good Umar!” Ka’b suddenly whispered fiercely. “Do not approach those pillars by the entrance, for they are idols. The prayers of him who passes through them will be as if naught. A curse upon these Christians for not seeing the things to come!”
“Calm yourself, my friend. You are fencing with shadows. We have nothing to fear from this priest.”
Sophronius observed them with an artificial smile and, looking down at Umar from his position on top of the steps, said, “You are having to contend with two Jerusalems. His crucified Christ,” he said, pointing at Ka’b, “while ours worship Him in this blessed place. It is our greatest wish that you join me inside for prayer.” And then he turned slowly, deliberately, to genuflect in front of the open doors.
M
y father’s confrontation with Sophronius took place inside the great Basilica. The crowd having finally been shaken off, the Patriarch and the Caliph were looking at a natural outcrop of gray-speckled rock contiguous with the floor of the apse of the great church. The raw rock spread incongruously out of the ornately decorated floor, reaching a span’s height above the floor at its highest point.
“What is this?” asked Umar.
“The summit of Calvary, upon which our Lord died,” replied Sophronius.
“A slot has been cut into the tip,” Umar remarked, pointing at a rounded protuberance like a skull cap which marked the rock’s highest elevation.
“It was cut by the Romans in order to prop up the cross upon which our Savior offered Himself,” replied Sophronius.
“You make it sound like a sacrifice, not an execution.”
“Because it was,” said Sophronius. “Jesus died during Passover, at the very hour of the Paschal offering. Like Isaac, who carried the wood for his own sacrifice to this rock, Christ carried his cross.”
The leader of Christendom dropped to his ancient knees, genuflected, and kissed the sinuous protrusion neatly framed by marble moldings set into the floor. “Thus do we touch Jesus,” Sophronius
said, speaking so softly he could barely be heard, “at the moment at which he endured the agony that redeemed us.” Then to Umar and Ka’b’s evident discomfort, he began to intone words of mourning and praise as though they were not there.
Tears were in the old man’s eyes by the time he had finished. Umar looked away. No one said anything—except Ka’b.
“Did you say that the son of Abraham was sacrificed on the rock of Jesus’ crucifixion?” Ka’b asked, breaking the silence.
“I did,” replied the Patriarch. “Unlike your forefather Ishaq, however, the Son of God died on the cross, slowly and terribly. At the moment of His greatest agony, he cried out, ‘I have overcome the world.’ By which the Son of God meant that He had offered Himself up for those sins that the blood of bulls, goats, and sheep cannot wash away. His death is the true Passover, fulfilling and terminating all the forms of sacrifice that used to take place in the old Temple.”
“How can an offering meant to expiate the sins of the world,” exclaimed Ka’b, “originate in one who called for the destruction of God’s House? Did not Jesus say,
I will destroy this temple that is made with hands
,
and in three days I will build another not made with hands
.
“Three days! If he were truly God, then it would be over and done with in the blink of an eye. And if he were not God, his purpose would have been to delude men. If the blood of such a man was indeed spilled on this rock, then it is wasted blood.”
“You are lying, Jew, confirming the curse that was laid upon your entire race!” Sophronius retorted, having regained his composure. “Your own most holy Isaiah recognized this curse when he declared how his own children, raised and exalted by their father, had sinned against him. He said:
An ox knows his owner, and an ass the manger of his master
,
but my people did not know me. Israel did not recognize me.”
“It was your prophets who first spoke about our Messiah. Yet you did not understand the words that foretold the coming of Him who wondrously shows His steadfast love and who is our rock of refuge. Jesus foretold the destruction of which you speak, but He never called for it. Your kind bore false witness against Him then, as they continue to bear false witness against Him now.
Not one stone will be left upon another
, were the actual words of Christ;
all will be thrown down
. And so it came to pass that the old Temple was destroyed, and a new one has arisen in its place.”
“You mean this building,” interjected Umar in an attempt to calm things down but keep his distance.
“I do,” said Sophronius.
“And what is it founded on?”
“The body of Christ.”
“I take it you mean his burial place.”
“The Holy Sepulchre is empty,” Sophronius patiently explained. “I mean His body, literally. When God came to dwell among us in the person of Jesus, the Word became flesh, the Father became the Son. The Apostles were witnesses to Him speaking of the temple of His body. True believers rallied around Jesus. They believed in Him, and by so doing became a community. Thus did His body become a Church, which is our Temple; the stone spurned by the old builders became a new cornerstone.”
“However you want to put it,” exclaimed Umar, “the point is you worship at the site of the death and burial of Jesus.”
“And His resurrection, on the third day,” Sophronius added. “You mustn’t leave that out. For only at that moment did the New Temple come into existence—after the body had risen. We worship at an empty tomb, not a full one. God’s people were judged, destroyed, and restored in the shape of the Risen Body of Christ. The New Temple may not be what the Jews expected at the time of Jesus, but it is the long-awaited Temple nonetheless. And it owes its existence to His agony and death, and, above all, to His resurrection.”
“So that is what Jesus meant when he said he would build
another Temple not made with hands!” exclaimed Ka’b, thinking he had found Sophronius out. “He meant he would personally replace the Temple he wanted to see destroyed. Those whom you have so unjustly accused of bearing false witness said as much!”
“This is not the time for bickering,” Umar said in an aside to Ka’b. He looked confused and irritable as he turned to address Sophronius. “In simple terms, exactly how was your church, or temple, or whatever you wish to call this building, built?”
“From the stones of the ruined Temple,” replied Sophronius.
“The same stones!” exclaimed Umar.
“The very ones,” said Sophronius. “We have traditions to that effect.”
“So you wanted to keep a connection with the old Temple?” Umar asked.
“Not any longer,” replied Sophronius.
“But I am told,” Umar went on, gesturing in the direction of Ka’b, “that you celebrate the consecration of your Church on the same day that Solomon consecrated his Temple. Also, that in this very Church you have put on display the ring of Solomon and the horn that Jewish priests used to anoint the kings of Israel. Why?”
“The priests who tried and crucified our Lord Jesus on this spot forfeited their right to offer new sacrifices in the old Temple,” said Sophronius. “Their hands were thus forever defiled. The holy artifacts that you mentioned, and many others besides that I could show you, had to be transferred to that place sanctified by His blood.”
“But what about the Rock that was the first direction of prayer of true Believers?”
“That,” replied Sophronius, “could not be moved. And besides, it no longer had a purpose after our Savior sacrificed Himself. From Calvary, where the head of the human race was held and death itself was destroyed, there began to stream the water that was the source of a new salvation. The Rock upon which the old altar rested used to mark the spot where the world’s thirst was quenched. On the evening of the final day of the Feast of the Tabernacles,
priests would so signify by pouring a golden flagon of holy water down the shaft at the side of the altar. But it is no longer that spot. Not after God revealed that
Out of His heart shall flow rivers of living water
. Henceforth the center and source of life was no longer a place, but the person of Jesus himself. His flesh became our Temple.”
S
ophronius told Umar that Calvary contained “the head of the human race,” and by that he meant that our father Adam, the first man, was buried underneath the protrusion of exposed rock in the Basilica, in an underground crypt that the Christians call Adam’s Chapel. The three men were standing there.
“As in Adam all die,” said the old man, citing his Holy Book, “even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
“But I thought our angel ancestor was buried under a different Rock, the Rock of Foundation,” Umar said, expressing his confusion.
Whereupon the Patriarch made the strange remark that it could not be otherwise, seeing as how “the origin of death was destroyed” in the place where Jesus had suffered. The sacrifice of Jesus, he was trying to say, had somehow overcome Adam’s death, changing the essential nature of sin.
None of this made any sense to the Caliph. To illustrate his meaning, Sophronius turned to a mosaic that depicted Adam rising from his grave at the foot of the cross, holding a chalice to catch the precious blood of Jesus. The blood, having fallen upon Calvary and then run down its face to his grave, had recalled him to life. “The blood of Jesus, the new Adam,” Sophronius explained, “is in this cross overcoming death even as it washes away the old Adam’s sin.” Then he sang these words:
We think that Paradise and Calvarie,
Christ’s Cross and Adam’s tree,
Stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
Such smooth words! Even my father had to admit they were inspired. The old man, he said, was full of such words; was it any wonder men called him honey-tongued? But were they true? And if they were, what about what Ka’b had said to Umar in Medina, about Adam’s fall and burial underneath the summit of Moriah?
During Umar’s week in Jerusalem, Sophronius and Ka’b could find nothing on which to agree other than that the first man was originally buried on Moriah. This, remarkably, Sophronius took for granted. How then did the body get moved from Moriah to Calvary, some six hundred paces away?
Sophronius told Umar a story that began more or less where my father’s story of the first man and his fall from the Garden had left off.
A tradition handed down to the Church Fathers, Sophronius said, told of Solomon finding Adam’s skull in the cleft of a small rocky knoll that rose bare amidst a lush garden of palms, olive trees, and flowering plants. Solomon called the delightful place, including the bald protuberance of rock in its midst, Golgotha—the name by which the People of the Torah referred to Calvary.