I
am Andre Yousef Antone Moubarak, a Palestinian Maronite Arab Christian
from the lesser-known Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. I
was born on August 17, 1975. I grew up around the holy sites and places
of this ancient city. The Via Dolorosa was my playground, and over the
years, my life as a “living stone” has become a testimony of the pages
of the Bible.
I am a tour
guide by profession, taking people to holy sites around Israel and along
the path Jesus may have taken on His way to Calvary. I have guided many
people from all over the world. Almost every group I have had the
privilege to lead has advised me to write down the valuable information
that I shared with them. This dream has now become a book, a journey to
reality, confirmed by the Holy Spirit.
On
September 11, 2009, while I was praying alone in my Jerusalem
apartment, I was immersed in the presence of the Holy Spirit and
enjoying the Lord. Suddenly, I felt the Spirit surrounding me strongly
and a great measure of peace and love fell upon me. I was experiencing
God’s rest, and during that time, a startling thought penetrated deeply
into my soul, spirit and mind: “The Stations of the Cross.”
That
thought developed into a book about my neighborhood—the Via Dolorosa.
This “Way of Grief,” “Way of Sorrows,” or simply “Painful Way”, is a
street within the Old City of Jerusalem believed to be the route along
which Jesus, carrying His Cross, walked on the way to his crucifixion. I
have carried my own cross as part of a despised minority in the Holy
Land and the Middle East.
We
Palestinian Christians are the successors of several Christian
heritages in the Middle East. My ancestors were Maronite Christians—a
Lebanese blend of the Eastern Assyriac Church and the Latin Roman
Catholic influence, with some French undertones. The Maronite Christians
guided the Crusaders when they first entered the Holy Land, and we
still protect the western Christians visiting the Middle East, roles
that have helped to shape our faith in modern times.
Our
history dates back to the early church. Our earliest ancestors were the
Jewish disciples of Jesus and those Phoenician Gentiles who joined the
followers of Christ during and after the 1st century.
What
makes the Maronites special is that we still pray in the ancient
Aramaic language. This means that our prayers are offered to God in the
same language that Jesus and His disciples spoke every day (only in the
synagogues were the Scriptures (the Tanach) read and prayers said in
Hebrew). While the Disciples spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic, we
speak a Syrian dialect reflecting the origins of the Maronite church in
the countryside near Damascus, Syria before it spread to the mountains
of Lebanon.
The Aramaic language is similar to
Hebrew and Arabic. For example, my family name in Aramaic is MEBORAK .
In Hebrew it is almost the same: MEVORAKH ך ר ו מ ב, which means
blessed. In Arabic, it is MOUBARAK مبارك.
My
vision and heart for this book is to take the depression and sadness of
the streets of the Via Dolorosa and of the Christians living there and
to convert it to hope, victory, and abundance of life. This is the heart
of God the Father. This can happen when you arrive in Israel. We can
connect your ministry or church to meet with the living stones of
Jerusalem.
As a
sweet-natured young boy, I ran around in the dark, filthy streets and
alleyways bisecting the Via Dolorosa. My parents’ home was near the
Eighth Station of the Cross, close to the intersection that leads from
the Muslim market road to the Christian neighborhood.
I
used to play hide and seek with my twin brother, Tony, by my parent’s
house. I loved the ancient round pillars near the Ethiopian Church, and I
especially remember one particular limestone bench that Tony and I
would jump on in an effort to climb to the top of the pillars. Although
they were just outside my house, I did not know anything about their
history or significance. To me, like to any kid, they were just a pile
of old pillars that nobody cared about, that had stood for thousands of
years in the same place, abandoned and half-destroyed. But, of course,
they were so much part of a special history that only became known to me
as I grew up.
While we were
playing – hide and seek when I was little and then soccer when I as
older – I would always meet tourists, and they would always need my
help. “Where is the Holy Sepulcher?” they would ask me. “Can you take me
to Jaffa Gate? Where is Damascus Gate?” I would guide them and lead
them to their destinations.
I’ll be honest, though,
it was tiring helping them, and the frequent noise and clamor of the
many tourists passing by often made it hard to even rest in my own
house.
Even when I was coming home from school, my
services would be required. I went to a private French Catholic school
located just inside New Gate on the northern side of the Old City, and
not far from Jaffa Gate on the western side. Many Christian pilgrims
enter the Old City through these gates, which both lead to the Holy
Sepulcher (Calvary).
The
school yard was located just inside the Old City walls, so we often saw
tourists on the Ramparts Walk, which runs along the top of the walls.
As cheeky kids, we were always shouting in broken English “Hi! Where you
from? Do you want a tour guide?” When I was in class, the window of my
classroom was just two meters from the Ramparts. During my boring math
class, I preferred to sit near the window and watch the stream of
visitors constantly passing by rather than focusing on my work.
Eventually,
I realized that the tourists who were all around me, everywhere I
looked, where a part of my being. I have come to understand that I did
not choose to become a tour guide, guiding chose me and it soon became a
way of life, my vocation and destiny; one from which I could not
escape.
The path of Via
Dolorosa, which was developed by the wonderful Catholic tradition into
14 Stations as a way to prayerfully remember what Jesus has done for all
of us, speaks of the hard, but very real moments of Jesus’ life as He
carried the burden of humanity from condemnation to the Cross.
The
Via Dolorosa is a testimony of human brutality, inflicted upon the only
sinless man to have ever lived, but it is also about how God’s love
conquered and cleared away the darkness, obtaining salvation from the
bondage of sin. My own life was saved from the bondage of sin through
Jesus Christ, and I have lived this path of redemption from my childhood
to this day.
My heart’s
desire is to help bring peace, reconciliation and hope, through the
gospel, to this land of conflict and war. This is the same message Jesus
delivered to the Jews living under Roman occupation two thousand years
ago, a message that is still fresh and alive today. I wish to present
the Via Dolorosa as a real story, one that I live every day in the
streets of the Christian Quarter. It is this story that increases my
faith and gives me hope when life is difficult.
My
committed Christian walk of faith has matured into deeper levels because
I have lived and grown up here. I feel deeply connected with Jesus
Christ, and I find my faith growing stronger every day. The way of the
Cross is so much a part of my identity and life. In a way, I feel that I
am living in continuity with Biblical heroes.
As
a tour guide, I feel that I share nearly the same culture, customs and
context as Jesus, with a mindset that sees Jesus differently to the way
in which He is viewed by the western world. This is what I teach to the
groups I take on tour—to see Jesus as a Jew. He was born as a Jew in
Bethlehem, He lived his childhood learning the Torah as any other
religious, Jewish child did in Nazareth, He had His ministry as a rabbi
in Galilee, He was sacrificed as the Lamb during Passover in Jerusalem,
and He will come back as a Jew, the Lion of Judah.
The
Holy Land is the source, the place of origin, where the events of the
Old and New Testament Scriptures took place. This is why the Old City of
Jerusalem, the Via Dolorosa, and the land in which I live are so
valuable and important to me. Together they have shaped my heart, my
identity, and my Faith.
For those of us who come
from the Middle East, our land and place of birth are important in many
ways. We are intrinsically connected and they are very significant to
our well-being. This is different from the thinking in most western
cultures, where people often travel and migrate from one country to
another and the land of their birth has much less value to them.
One
of the goals in this book is to explain the Bible stories that took
place here from a Middle Eastern way of thinking. Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, the three monotheistic religions originated in ancient Middle
East, so to really understand the meanings of the stories that took
place here, we need to learn about the way of life as it was, to begin
to see it all from an Eastern mindset. When the culture, customs and
context of the Middle East are viewed from the Hebraic traditions rather
than western interpretations, the scriptures become alive.
Most
of the Bible translations we have today came from a western mentality,
one heavily influenced by the Greco-Roman theology that has pervaded the
church since the early centuries. The western church today is an
inheritor of the early church’s anti-Semitic teachings, from Emperor
Constantine onwards. As a tour guide, my purpose is to reawaken the 1st
century way of thinking, to return to the origins and beginnings of the
early church.
I believe we
have to go back to these Jewish roots to understand our Christian faith.
By looking at Scripture from a Middle Eastern point of view, three
things will happen to you.
First, what you already
know will be Confirmed and more details will be added. There will be
confirmation of what you already believe took place in Scripture.
Secondly,
what you already know will be Clarified and expanded, as yet more
details are added to the story, and as a person you will understand the
story much more clearly.
Thirdly, there will be
times when the Middle Eastern point of view Corrects what you thought
you knew from Scripture, revealing that your perspective may be biased
or incomplete. The Hebraic point of view can challenge those erroneous
impressions.
When you look
at the Bible from this perspective, the result will always serve to add
more confidence about Jesus’s dominion and divinity, on earth as in
heaven.
Where was Jesus born? Where did He grow up
and play? Where did He die? Let’s adjust and develop our spiritual eyes
and ears to 1st century sight and hearing.
I
have much in common with Jesus through the culture, geography,
landscape and archeology that we share. After all, the exact locations
in which Jesus’ story took place is where I was born, grew up and
played.
To learn more about
Jesus and the Via Dolorosa, we can study the land and also the culture,
the customs and the context of that time. By coming here, by visiting
the land in person, we gain a deeper understanding. This is my specific
theme – it drives every tour and is the foundation stone of my
teachings.
So let us step
together on to the path that Jesus walked. Perhaps you will find, as I
did, your own Stations of life and become transformed by Jesus and the
Holy Spirit.
The term
“living stone” is used only in the Middle East, and conveys the idea
that although Israel is rich in archeology (dead stone), the indigenous
people are still there. These people are part of God’s story, thus a
“living stone.”
