From the book Jerusalem Today edited by Ghada Karmi with a contribution by Edward Said
The sacramental principle in Christianity means that the land is hallowed by (association). History signifies because of what it contained: geography is sanctified because of what it housed.
“I will be there”, said the voice in the bush to Moses, “as whom there I will be”. The event of exodus gives the only feasible clue to the God whom exodus pledges. What happened became definitive of what had to be recognized. The actual event enabled- and warranted- a mythology about its meaning, a meaning meant to be, for all generations, a reliable disclosure of “whom they had believed”. How “all our fathers passed through the sea” became a theme of memory. Exodus had sacramentalised their status as “the people of God”, and Passover simply transacted the meaning in annual experience. Apostolic Christianity was heir to this perception of theology, only that the Cross of Jesus had become the epic theme. Jesus, in the meaning of his wounds, became for founding-Christians “the place of the Name”, where God could be known in how he had “been there” in the dimensions of the love that suffered.
This sense of things inherently hallowed the physical place where all had transpired, the Galilee of his words and ministry, the Gethsemane of his sorrows. It was a sense of things which subsumed, if it did not supersede, all other sanctifying aegis having to do with land and story. In a sense the significance of the Temple as “the place of the Name”, the expression of divine identity, passed over for Christians into the person and the work of Christ. The Pauline phrase “in Christ” came to mean a spiritual domicile in which peoplehood-in-faith became “the body of Christ” was thus ‘dis-enlandised’ (if we may invent the term) while remaining in fond and gentle love, by association, of the “where” and the “when” of the eventfulness that made it so.
Before pursuing this essential theme more fully in the first Christian mind, it may be well to reflect briefly on the centrality of the basic concept of the sacramental. Despite the word’s Latin origin, the idea has deeply Hebraic sanction, though Christian faith had its own welcome for it. The term is initially simple enough, namely that things physical embody and express things spiritual- a frown, a smile, a handshake, flowers, a kiss, an embrace. All these do not merely inform, they transact. They indicate relationship but they also effectuate it. Two realms combine. I put my sympathy into a gesture, I write my anxiety on my face.
These devices are bound to have theological counterpart. The Aaronic blessing tells of “the face of the Lord”, the prophets asked of “the arm of the Lord”. All faiths need these measures of speech. Without some inter-penetrability of the divine and the human all thought of God, even more all worship, would be null and void. Even mystic silence must return to some sort of conceivability. Christianity grasps this secret full-handedly with due, but not crippling, compunction. It is faith in incarnation where “Word is made flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth”. Even faiths that demure over that conception necessarily turn on some measure of divine condescension to the human, or human agency for the divine. For, otherwise, faith and love and truth would be vacuous for lack of medium and meaning.
