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Archbishop Mark - Memory becomes hope…
20th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark -
The island of Rhodes has a long and colourful history, much of which is on show as you stroll through the town and visit its monuments as we did today. In places like Rhodes, you realise that the ancient world didn’t vanish. It may have been demolished in a sense, but the bits and pieces were all gathered up and reconfigured in later times. We have no idea, for instance, what happened to the Colossus of Rhodes after its destruction in an earthquake well before the Christian era. It was so huge (and even huger if we includes pedestals etc) that it couldn’t simply have vanished. In all likelihood, its many fragments were reincorporated in various ways into the town we now see. It’s the same with the pagan gods. They didn’t vanish; they were reconfigured.
At every Aegean port in the ancient world, for instance, there was a shrine to the sea-god Poseidon very close to the water. Now there is a shrine to St Nicholas who has become the Christian Poseidon. There are endless examples of this kind of thing.
Many of the cults of Our Lady in Greece and Italy look back to pagan goddesses; and in Rome there is a church called Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which was built over a temple to Minerva. The word “sopra” means not only above physically, but also superior theologically and morally.
The Rhodes we now see preserves most of all the memory of the Hospitaller Knights of St John of Jerusalem, who became the Knights of Rhodes before they became the Knights of Malta as we now know them. They controlled Rhodes from until shortly after the fall of the Latin Kingdom when they were expelled from Jerusalem by Saladin until 1522 when they were driven from Rhodes by the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. They were in control of the island for something less than three hundred years, but in that time they built stupendously as they had in the Holy Land. The Grand Master’s Palace and the Hospital are still extraordinary buildings, and the fortifications are both formidable and beautiful. When the Ottomans finally prevailed in the battle for Rhodes, Suleiman was so impressed by the way the Knights and their Grand Master had conducted the battle that he granted them free passage to leave the island. This was an amazing gesture at the time and one which Suleiman lived to regret. It was he in later life who decided to finish the Knights off once and for all. He sent a massive fleet to lay siege to Malta which they now held, only to have the Knights hold out triumphantly against all the odds and to inflict upon Suleiman and his Empire one of the most humiliating defeats they had ever suffered.
What does all this have to do with St Paul? Where do the Knights and the Apostle converge? Well, Paul certainly touched down at Rhodes - on his way to Jerusalem we are told in the Acts of the Apostles. But he would have seen nothing of what the Knights built later. Where he and the Knights converge is in their sense of the symbolism of Jerusalem. The Knights came to Rhodes as they left Jerusalem; Paul visited Rhodes as he returned to Jerusalem. For both the Knights and Paul, Jerusalem remained the navel of the world, the city of ultimate defeat and triumph. Like the Knights, Paul had left Jerusalem, but he was always keen to make gestures of communion towards the Church in Jerusalem, even if he insisted that he didn’t depend upon the mother Church. That was why he way on his way to the Holy City when he touched down at Rhodes. Nor did the Knights depend upon Jerusalem for their survival. Like Paul, they flourished elsewhere. But, as the Psalmist urges, neither Paul nor the Knights ever forgot Jerusalem. Yet their remembering looked less to the earthly city which was past but to the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, which was and is still to come. For both Paul and the Knights, memory gave birth to hope.
Tags: Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, footsteps of saint paul, pilgrimage, st paul, video blog
Posted on: June 20, 2009
Filed under: Archbishop Mark's teachings, Sights and Sounds
1 Comment
Denis Matthews
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 am
What a fantastic experience the pilgrims are sharing. Thank you Mark and the others who have arranged for us all to share through this site. Greetings to Sheila and Pieter
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