November 8 -- Jerusalem

After a very early arrival at Ben Gurion airport (Tel Aviv), the group spent the day visiting Christian sights in Jerusalem, mostly churches build at places believed to have been sites of Jesus’ ministry and passion.

We visited the pool were Jesus cured a man ill for 38 years; the place where he looked out over Jerusalem and cried, the gate that he may have entered on a donkey with the crowds cheering on; the place where he may have taught the Lord’s prayer to his disciples (now over 100 translations of the prayer are displayed there on beautiful tiles, I even found a Malayalam and Telegu translation); the olive garden where he prayed, was betrayed by Judas, and arrested by Roman soldiers (2,000-year old olive trees there!); the stairs on which the soldiers brought him to the Jewish authorities (yes, I walked up a 1st-century flight of stairs!); the place believed to have been the palace of Caiapahs, the Jewish high priest (including grain silos, soldiers’ quarters, and dungeon prison cells), Via Dolorosa with its many stations that remember the Catholic stations of the cross; and, finally, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the places believed to have been Golgotha and Jesus’ tomb.

Most remarkable to me about this first day were:

(1) The brutality of punishment during the first century (the dark, claustrophobic dungeon cells at Caiaphas’ palace still show the holes through which the prisoners’ chains were tied to the wall). Whether or not this truly was the site of Jesus’ trial, is less important to me than seeing what human beings are capable of doing to each other.

(2) The craziness of one of Christianity’s holiest places, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Crowds waiting in line, pushing, shoving, and punching each other while waiting for their turn to see the “attractions”; angrily gesturing priests standing guarding the entrance to the tomb, obviously so absorbed and carried away by the weight of their responsibility that they shout and argue with worshippers; the intimacy of worshippers lighting candles. This is where the hunger for forgiveness and the thirst for help in carrying life’s burdens that brings people to God felt most tangible to me.

(3) The Israeli flag flying from houses in the midst of Christian Palestinian areas. More and more homes have been stolen from their rightful owners by fanatic Jewish settlers, breaking into the homes in the family’s absence, changing locks, and putting up barbed wire. These houses are everywhere, from the Mount of Olives to the Old City right next to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.