“In the Footsteps of Jesus”: Christian Zionism and Living Stones in the Holy Land y Meghan Johnston Aelabouni

Part II of a 3-part series

In the summer of 2019, my family and I moved from the U.S. to Jerusalem, where my spouse and I serve as missionaries with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, accompanying our partner church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land—an Arabic-speaking community of Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Jordan. Even now, more than two years later, it can be a surreal experience to see Bethlehem and Nazareth listed matter-of-factly on road signs; to hear church bells and the Muslim call to prayer sounding daily in the air; or to walk the Old City’s narrow streets, worn slippery-smooth by millions of visiting feet on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, or Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Since the COVID pandemic arrived in the Holy Land in the spring of 2020, those visitors have been largely absent. There have been many days when the Old City was empty: the metal doors of shops and cafes shut and locked, the streets silent and deserted. For months on end, there were no milling crowds with matching lanyards and headsets, dutifully listening to their tour guides; no cacophonies of multiple overlapping languages explaining historical sites, rising in prayer or song, or arguing over where to meet the bus.

I never would have predicted that I would miss tour groups—but I do. The lack of visitors has left a deep emptiness, far beyond the fleeting novelty of peaceful quiet. The cessation of almost all tourism has been devastating for the many people whose livelihood depends on the business of hospitality: guides, bus drivers, shopkeepers, artisans, restaurant and small hotel operators, and workers, including many Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem and the West Bank. In this strange time, I have often been reminded of what our Palestinian Christian partners say: that the true life of faith here in the Holy Land is not in the ancient stones of buildings and streets, but in the living stones of the people.

 

It is this reality—the living stones of Israel/Palestine—that I want to address in this essay, as a way of reflecting on how Christian Zionism affects the everyday lives of Palestinians living in the Holy Land, and particularly Palestinian Christians.

To be clear, I am neither a Palestinian nor an expert on Christian Zionism; although I do sometimes say, tongue-in-cheek, that I am a Palestinian-in-law. My husband is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, born and raised a Christian in a small town in Galilee; our three children are also dual citizens of Israel and the U.S., blessed to live only two hours away from their Arabic-speaking grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

My own understanding of Israel/Palestine growing up was fuzzy, at best. I was baptized, confirmed, and ordained as a pastor in the same church family—the ELCA—with whom I now serve. I had only a vague sense of where the biblical stories took place, and my congregations never emphasized “stand with Israel” campaigns. As mainline Protestants, my church did not teach Christian Zionism: there was no Rapture, no prophesied future Armageddon that relied on the establishment of the state of Israel to bring about the prophesied end times.

I did, however, absorb the sobering history lessons of the Holocaust, including the dismaying realization that the anti-Judaic polemic of my own church’s founder, Martin Luther, was employed by the Nazis as a rhetorical weapon, and that the majority of German Lutheran churches supported Adolf Hitler. I also experienced the unearned grace of hearing one of the English professors at my Lutheran college, herself Jewish, share her thankfulness that the ELCA had issued in 1994 an official renunciation of Luther’s anti-Semitism and committed to active dialogue with and support of Jewish communities—and that we were one of the few churches to take responsibility, as a church institution, for our part in the long and terrible history of Christian anti-Semitism.

I came to a knowledge of Israel/Palestine only as a young adult: with no knowledge of the contemporary state of affairs in the Holy Land, no special sense of spiritual draw to the place where Jesus walked, and no awareness whatsoever of Palestinian people—including Palestinian Christians—until I met my first-year seminary roommate, a Lutheran from Ramallah, and our mutual classmate from Galilee, who eventually became my spouse. It was during this time that I first learned about how Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have lived under Israeli military occupation for decades: tightly and arbitrarily controlled by military checkpoints run by armed soldiers, scrutinized and intimidated as criminals (even as children) and subject to witnessing or experiencing violence, with little recourse.

I came to the Holy Land for the first time to meet my spouse’s family and see where he grew up—and later, we traveled here with our children, and with groups from our congregations. On these trips, we passed through the separation wall, with its murals (on the Palestinian side) of hope, despair, and bleak humor; and we visited some of the vital ministries of our Palestinian Lutheran partners, including prestigious K-12 schools open to all Palestinian children regardless of religion, a university, an environmental education center, and a Meals on Wheels program for seniors. We learned the Arabic concept of sumud—of “resistance through existence,” as our Palestinian Christian partners resisted the occupation by continuing to live, thrive, create, and care for their communities.

Twenty years after first meeting real Palestinians, and seventeen years after my first visit, I now live here. In those years, I have come to know much more about the history of Israel/Palestine, the rich and diverse cultures of its people, and the deeper injustices and power imbalances of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands that underlies what is sometimes called “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, the most valuable thing I have learned is that there are complexities and nuances to this context that I will never understand. As a white American Christian, one thing I know for certain is that this land is not all about me. The Holy Land is more than just an instrument of a divine plan to rescue only Christians—and only a select few “real” Christians, at that—from a tribulation that will consume all others, including the Jewish people of Israel with whom many Christian Zionists claim to stand. It is not only about the ancient stones, as the geographic coordinates of God’s revelation, appearance, and promises about the future. It is about the people who actually live here, work here, worship (or don’t), and raise families here: the living stones who make the land holy.

 

In my own time in the Holy Land—as a visitor, tourist, and resident—I have been consistently amazed at how Christians from all over the world (whether Christian Zionists or not) have come for centuries to the Holy Land, hoping to connect their present-day faith to its ancient origins. Even the name, “Holy Land,” suggests that the quality of the sacred is linked to a specific location. Perhaps, we imagine, God will draw nearer to us in the Holy Land, as we draw nearer to God in the land where the events of the Bible took place.

Christians, in particular, come to be physically present in the places where the gospels tell us Jesus lived, ministered, died, and rose again. We come, as is often said, to “walk in the footsteps of Jesus.” What astonishes me, and frustrates many of my local colleagues, is how many Christians manage to spend weeks in the Holy Land visiting biblical sites, praying and worshiping, and stocking up on mementos, without ever interacting with Palestinian Christians, their fellow members of the same body of Christ. Tour buses do cross the checkpoint into Bethlehem, where visitors hop off at the doors of the Nativity Church and hop back on again afterwards; tourists buy olive wood crosses and other souvenirs crafted by Palestinians; and they eat hummus, falafel, pita, tabbouleh, and baklava, staples of Palestinian cuisine. Yet many of these same pilgrims go home and share meaningful stories of “my trip to Israel,” not even realizing how their own experience intersected with the experiences of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, their fellow Christians born in Palestinian towns cannot make the same trip from Bethlehem to Jerusalem easily—or sometimes at all. Permits must be acquired from the Israeli government and presented at checkpoints, where many Palestinians wait in line for hours beginning in the early morning in order to enter: to visit family, to receive medical care, or to work—even to work on their own lands, which the separation wall has cut off from their homes. Permits are difficult to acquire and can be accepted or denied at will; there are no guarantees. All the while, smooth highways carry Israeli settlers past the checkpoints into the many and continually increasing settlements within the West Bank: brand-new neighborhoods and cities consuming land that has been set aside by international law for an eventual Palestinian state. And even if Palestinians shrug and remain at home, their water, electricity, and imported resources are all completely controlled—and periodically restricted—by the Israeli government. In all the American Christian cries to “stand with Israel,” I have rarely, if ever, seen any acknowledgment that there are Christians among the Palestinians who suffer the daily indignities of the occupation—or that, Christian or not, this collective treatment of an entire people runs contrary to the gospel Jesus proclaimed: good news for the poor, liberation for the oppressed. Our Palestinian Christian partners, colleagues, and friends know these gospel promises well—and what it means to wait and hope for God’s promises to be fulfilled for all of the people of Palestine and Israel, for all of the children of Abraham.

 

My intention in writing this essay is not to shame Christians who have taken Holy Land trips, or to ask Christians not to come. On the contrary: by all means, as soon as you might be able, please come! As international travel begins to resume, your siblings in Christ in the Holy Land—and their Muslim and Jewish neighbors—are longing to welcome you here, to offer you a culture of hospitality that is authentically biblical, offered by the descendants of the people of the Bible. I do not even mean, as a pastor and theologian, to suggest that such Holy Land pilgrimages are not an authentic way to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

Rather, I invite you to consider: what does it really mean to walk in the footsteps of Jesus? While this idea often emphasizes traveling to the historical location of Jesus’ footsteps, it is also worth thinking about this idea in another way: not only as where we walk, but how we walk. When we say we are walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, for example, we’re typically thinking less about route and destination than about orientation and perspective.

In the same way, walking in Jesus’ footsteps does not only mean going to the places he went. It is about emulating the way Jesus encountered and interacted with the world. The gospels are clear that wherever Jesus walked, the primary focus of his life was human connection: proclaiming, and embodying, the justice, compassion, and mercy of the “kingdom of God.” Even his walking on water on the Sea of Galilee, his transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, and his painful steps toward his crucifixion were actions that reverberated with meaning not for his own sake, but for the sake of how it revealed the divine incarnation: God with us, entering space and time to share our human experience—and to redeem and transform it. In the Jesus of the gospels, I do not see the Christ of Christian Zionism: a Savior only of some people, at the expense of others. In fact, I see the Jesus of the gospels most clearly these days in the faith of the Palestinian Christians who respond to injustice by striving to make their world more just; who respond to a lack of freedom and opportunity by working to offer their communities education, imagination, and vocational opportunity; who defy what often looks hopeless by creating hope in and through their daily lives. And the path they walk is not toward abundant life for Palestinians at the expense of Israelis: but toward truth, and toward peace with justice for all of the people of the Holy Land.

Those footsteps are worth following, because they walk in the way of Jesus. Following the steps of the living stones of the church in the Holy Land is changing my faith and my life, every day. May God lead me, and the whole church, in this way, too—for the sake of all of the people of Palestine and Israel, and every land made holy through God’s presence.

 

Meghan Johnston Aelabouni is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, currently serving as the ELCA Theologian in Residence for the Middle East and North Africa desk. Meghan received her M.Div. in 2006 and served as pastor to congregations in Illinois and Colorado before completing a Ph.D. in Religion, Media, and Culture. A frequent contributor to Gather and Living Lutheran magazines and other church publications, Meghan lives with her spouse and three children in Jerusalem.