16th May, 2021

​My dear friends,

The explosion of civil violence in Israel over the past week has come as a great and disturbing shock to all of us. Our thoughts go out to all who suffer, and we are especially concerned for the well-being of the staff and patients of St John Eye Hospital. As well as the main Eye Hospital in Jerusalem, there are also St John clinics in other parts of the Holy Land and a brand new clinic in Gaza City. St John Eye Hospital is a Christian foundation, but prides itself on treating Christian, Muslim and Jewish patients, irrespective of faith, ethnicity or ability to pay.

As you will imagine, the situation in the Holy Land is fluid and fast changing. We received the following message five days ago from Dr Ahmad Ma’ali, the Chief Executive Officer of St John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem:

The news of the violence in Jerusalem and Gaza is being covered by the news channels all over the world.  The current crisis has been going on for almost one week and  started as result of potential confiscation of Houses and eviction of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. There have been also clashes around and at Al Aqsa Mosque and Damascus Gate.  However, the level of violence was intensified yesterday after rockets were fired from Gaza  to Jerusalem and also southern parts of Israel . There have been subsequent air strikes on Gaza by the Israeli Army.  Until now, more than 25 people died in Gaza and hundreds were injured.  In Jerusalem, the violence has also continued with hundreds of injuries. Some 20 casualties sustained eye injuries most of which resulted in severe irreparable damage to eye tissues. Our clinical staff have responded to this crisis in the most professional and extraordinary manner.  Our doctors have received and managed casualties at the Hospital and also worked with their colleagues at other East Jerusalem Hospitals to provide ophthalmic care to those who are physically unstable to be treated at the Eye Hospital.
I would also like to assure you that all our staff and their families are safe and our staff have been able to report to duty.

Please join me in praying for St John Eye Hospital, its staff, patients, and their families, as well as for an end to the violence.

​            Once peace returns, St John Eye Hospital and its clinics will doubtless have to undertake a degree of reconstruction and there will be patients in desperate need of eye operations and medical help. Could I appeal to you, all my readers, to send a donation to help St John Eye Hospital. Could you do something to raise money? Be sponsored to do something, raffle a cake, or put on a coffee morning? Every penny helps. The Holy Land is a very dark place at present and St John Eye Hospital is an important ray of light and hope.
With my continued prayers and all good wishes,

​                                             The Rev. Dr  ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
EASTER 7 – 16th MAY 2021.
​
Gospel: St John, chapter 17, verses 6-29
If you visit Jerusalem and toil up to the top of the Mount of Olives, you reach a little octagonal chapel, surrounded by an old stone wall. It is the Chapel of the Ascension, rebuilt several times, and marking the spot from which Jesus is said to have ascended back to heaven, forty days after his Resurrection. Indeed, inside there is a stone that is claimed to bear the imprint of his foot – ‘enriched’, I suspect, by some Byzantine or Crusader stonemason. The Church celebrated the feast of Christ’s Ascension last Thursday, forty days after his Resurrection.
​
            As I stood there, looking around the inside of the little chapel, I wondered to myself, ‘How do they know it was there?’ The same thought passed through my mind when I stood inside the Church of the Annunciation in Bethlehem, and gazed down at the spot where the Archangel Gabriel is supposed to have appeared to Mary. The answer, which I offer as a historian, is the persistence of folk memory. It might not have been exactly on that spot, but from somewhere nearabout, Jesus Christ ascended back to Heaven.

            When I was a vicar in Colchester, I had a lovely old priest as the incumbent of the neighbouring parish, Canon Richard Handescomb, who had been a Commando in the war and was one of the kindest and most humorous priests I have come across. I met him one day and he told me he had just conducted a school assembly on the theme of the Ascension of Christ. I asked him how on earth he had managed to convey the Ascension to a bunch of primary school children? It is, after all, somewhat complicated theology. “Easy,” he replied, “I just told them about Star Trek” – do you remember Star Trek on the television? – “and I told them about ‘beam me up, Scottie’” –  when Scottie, a member of the crew, hearing those words, would ‘beam up’ other members of the crew from wherever they were back to the Starship Enterprise.
            I probably groaned, but actually it was quite a good point. We don’t know the manner in which Jesus ascended back into Heaven – just as there are lots of other aspects of Christianity we don’t really understand, and must simply accept in faith – but “Beam me up, Scottie” is as honest and faithful a starting point as we are likely to get.

            If we don’t really know how the Ascension happened, we can work out some of its implications.

            Jesus was born a baby, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the power of the Holy Spirit. He was the Son of God, and also completely divine. This meant he was a normal baby: he needed his nappy changing, and burping, and feeding. He grew up to be a normal man, just like us, except he alone never sinned. He earned his living as a carpenter, until he began his three years of public ministry, aged 30.

            When Jesus ascended back to Heaven, he took his accumulated human, earthly experience with him. This means that God is now a bit different. Beforehand, God knew what it was like to be a man or a woman from the point of view of the Creator looking at, and caring for, His creation. Now, after the Ascension, all Jesus’s experiences on earth have been taken into the Holy Trinity. This is very important. It means that when we pray, we address a God who knows what our life is like. To have a pain in your tummy. To love your family; or be grief stricken when one of them is very ill, or dies. To be happy; or tired; or anxious about work; or pleased that some project has worked out all right.

            The message I try to get across over and over again in my work – in ministering to the sick and anxious, in Baptisms, and weddings, and funerals, and in a 1,001 aspects of parish life – is that Jesus is our friend. He is many other things too: present at our Creation, our redeemer, our judge, our high priest, and much else besides. But above all, I try to say to people, he is our friend. We mustn’t be frightened of him, whatever we may have done. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and despite, or because of everything, he offers us his friendship.

            And you know what? When we get to Heaven, we shall find that there are not words enough – or concepts and ideas adequate enough – to express just how much Jesus loves us