A celebration to mark the sense of listening and friendship. Bethany, also known as al-Azariyeh (“the place of Lazarus”), is where the Gospel provides one of the most intimate images of the life of Jesus. Here, on the eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives, Christ had His place of refuge: the home of Martha, Mary and Lazarus. A place where friendship and a sense of human warmth reigned. The home of a family far from the clamor and intensity of the days of preaching in Jerusalem and which granted Jesus a space of rest and serenity a few kilometers from where He would experience the Passion.

It is in this place that, as every July 29, the Custody of the Holy Land decided to celebrate the memory of those three saints who represented so much in the earthly existence of the Savior. The rites began at dawn, where in a Bethany barely illuminated by the Sun rising from the desert, the secretary of the Custody, Fr. Alberto Joan Pari, celebrated a private mass in what tradition identifies as the Tomb of Lazarus. The service held in the crypt, which was attended by some friars and faithful, was then followed by the Solemn Mass in the church of Saint Lazarus and presided over by the vicar of the Custody of the Holy Land, Fr. Ulises Zarza.

In his homily, Zarza invited those present, lay faithful and religious, to think of Bethany as the home of the “friends of Jesus”. A choice that must make us reflect. Because the Gospel reminds us that the Lord “did not want only disciples or collaborators: He wanted friends”. Recalling Saint Augustine, the vicar of the Custody emphasized an almost paradoxical aspect of Christ's life. The Creator, in fact, like every human being, sought a home in which to be welcomed and nourished. Gestures that He Himself performs, but with His existence and His Word. In this home, however, there is also something else. There are not only friends, but, as Fr. Zarza explained, three dimensions of Christian life. Three inseparable aspects of the existence of every faithful person that are identified in the character of the three friends of Jesus. Martha teaches the sense of service, a central value in everyone's life, but one that must always be rebalanced so as not to lose sight of the Lord. Mary, on the other hand, reminds us that listening to the Word is the pillar of everything, even of service. A warning that, as the vicar of the Custody recalled, applies even more “in a society like ours, full of noise, activities and emergencies”, where instead “Mary reminds us that the first duty of a Christian is not to do, but to listen, to place ourselves at the school of the Master”. Finally, there is Lazarus, who first with his silence and then with his resurrection becomes himself a testimony of the power of the Lord. And precisely because of this inseparability of these three figures, Fr. Zarza invoked the Lord to give every faithful person “a heart like Mary's, busy hands like Martha's and a transformed life like Lazarus's”.

At the end of the celebration, as is tradition for the Custody of the Holy Land, the community then made the pilgrimage to the Holy Places linked to Bethany and the Mount of Olives. The first stop was the tomb of Lazarus, that crypt carved into the rock, where a long staircase followed by another small series of stone steps leads the pilgrim to the place of the resurrection of Jesus' friend. The second stop on the itinerary was the sanctuary of the Ascension, on the mount overlooking Jerusalem, and where tradition recalls the last meeting of the Risen Christ with His disciples. After reading the Gospel, the friars, always preceded by the “kawas”, the guard of honor who opens the procession by striking a metal staff, went to the sanctuary of the Pater Noster. The church, also on the Mount of Olives, is the place that recalls the teaching of the Lord's prayer. Here, the friars and the faithful concluded the pilgrimage by reciting the Lord's Prayer, thus entrusting the Custody, the Church and those who walk the path of the Gospel to the intercession of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus.