14.09.2026
Archbishop of Dublin Preaches in St George’s Cathedral Jerusalem
Archbishop Michael Jackson is currently visiting our partners in the Diocese of Jerusalem where he will attend their Majma (or Synod) in Jordan this week.
Yesterday he was the preacher at a Service of Holy Communion, celebrated by Archbishop Hosam Naoum, in St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem. Bishop Peter Eaton of South East Florida was one of the concelebrants of the service and will also attend Synod in Amman.
Archbishop Jackson drew on the readings for the day [from Exodus 1 and St Matthew 13] for his sermon. He noted that that the story of Joseph from Exodus showed how fresh, immediate and contemporary Holy Scripture could be. He said that everyone will have experienced sudden change which results in losing our certainty and sense of direction.
“We struggle daily to connect the various moving parts with ease and to hold on to how the love of God is shown to his people. And yet somewhere deep down we can also marvel at how constant God is for us and to us in the midst of the mess of life,” he commented.
The Archbishop observed that the actions of the Pharaoh against the children of Israel drove God’s people to multiply and grow in strength and the slaves from Holy Scripture proved to be an inspiration to people suffering oppression down through the ages. God was present with them and had a plan.
“And what does this story of Joseph tell us of the nature of God?” Archbishop Jackson asked. “Because of the way the world works, because of the way people function, God has no option but to let the evil flourish in their own terms and in their own times. This does not mean that God does not care. Human history is populated by situations where God’s people have both stood up to and gone under with tyrants and regimes. The providence of God presides over the universe that God has created.”
The story of Moses was important to the people in St George’s Cathedral for a range of reasons, he said.
“The story of Moses is important for you and for us for a range of reasons. The first is that you know the geography, the ground and the land of which the writer is speaking. The terrain of The Middle East is yours. This makes it very hard because the lived reality today is brutal and it is bitter. The second is that the ideas become more and more complex as communities separate out to the point of what may indeed be irreversible division. This you also know all too well. The third is that you today experience and live through exile in your own homeland, not exile from your own homeland. And maybe the fourth, and the hardest theologically, is that this story of universal application – irrespective of colour, creed or class – comes from The Hebrew Scriptures.
“We as Christian people need to hold fast to the fact that they are also our Scriptures, however difficult that may be for us – and for good reasons. It is not solely that they contain interesting examples and interesting lessons for us, as it were on pages of Wikipedia. It is that they are ours also because we believe that the fullest of God’s revelation is to us his children of the New Covenant. From the fire of witness, from the flames of history, from the future of the past we derive inspiration more than we derive inspiration because this is how God is. And we say this with no disrespect to their first receivers. They too are our brothers and sisters as children of God. We see things differently. We agree to disagree agreeably,” he stated.
You can read the Archbishop’s sermon in full here.
