Pilgrimage (12 page)

Almighty God and Father,

I praise You because Your sovereignty over this battle-scarred earth is never in doubt—and that sovereignty is always coupled with Your faithfulness and love. You are the Living Water, freely flowing, so that we will never thirst again. I look back at Your blessings to me in the past and ask Your forgiveness for trying to dig my own way out of the dark, dry places where You’ve put me. Forgive me for neglecting to build the walls of my relationship with You through prayer. Thank You that even our worst deeds and thoughtlessness can be forgiven in Christ, who suffered torture and death for my sake. Lord, please strengthen my faith as I look to You, and fill me with Your Living Water until I overflow to a thirsty world. Let all that I do be to Your praise and glory.

Amen

6
The Temple Mount

In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains . . . and all nations will stream to it. Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”

Isaiah 2:2–3

I
’m standing on an ancient paved street inside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Above me is the hill where God’s Holy Temple once stood. The area all around me has been made into an archaeological park, where tourists like me can wander through ruins from Jesus’ day. Back then, this street probably resembled a busy urban shopping district with swarms of people coming and going, ascending and descending the immense staircases that led to the Temple on the plateau above. It would have been especially busy during
the three yearly pilgrimage festivals when Jews came here to worship from all over the known world. I pass ruins of a row of shops like a modern strip mall, and I can almost hear the vendors hawking their wares and Jewish pilgrims haggling for a better price, as they still do in Jerusalem’s open-air market.

Massive building stones and pillar sections now litter the ground, many of them hurled down from the Temple during its destruction by the Romans. Our guide points out the remains of support arches for a monumental stairway and bridge that once led up to the Temple’s worship area on the top of the mount. The complex of Temple buildings and courtyards that stood above me in Jesus’ day rivaled the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The statistics are mind-numbing and can’t convey the magnificence of what pilgrims saw: a worship area that was twice the size of the Acropolis in Athens; a fifteen-story sanctuary adorned with billions of dollars’ worth of gold; a courtyard the size of thirty football fields.

The Jews have long revered this mountain as the place where Abraham offered his son Isaac in obedience to God. “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering,” Abraham had said in faith, and God provided a ram caught by its horns, sparing Isaac (Genesis 22). To this day, the sound of a ram’s horn is a reminder to the Jewish people of God’s salvation. Archaeologists found an engraved stone from the Temple that reads “the place of trumpeting,” marking the site on the pinnacle where the priests stood to blow their shofars.

King David purchased the Temple site for a permanent place of worship, and his son King Solomon built the first Temple here. The Babylonians destroyed it when they conquered Israel, but the Jewish exiles later rebuilt it in more modest proportions when their captors allowed them to
return. Four hundred years later, King Herod decided that the Temple needed to be refurbished. He began an extensive reconstruction project here in 20 BC that was still ongoing in Jesus’ day. Herod erected a huge retaining wall around the irregularly shaped mountain, backfilling it with earth and rocks and arched vaults to create a massive, level plateau on top that could accommodate a million pilgrims. The Romans destroyed Herod’s Temple in AD 70, and I see the littered remnants of that demolition all around me: massive quarried stones, hundreds of pillar parts, carved columns, paving stones.

Some five hundred years after Christ, Emperor Justinian built the Church of St. Mary on the spot where the Temple once stood, but that was destroyed, as well. The mount is now home to an Islamic shrine, built around AD 690, with a golden domed mosque standing in the place where the Jewish Temple and the Christian church once stood. Muslims consider this the third holiest place in Islam, and access to the top is restricted and carefully controlled. I can only stand at the foot of the hill, surrounded by debris from the Temple, and gaze up, imagining what it might have looked like.

Herod’s massive Temple project certainly impressed Jesus’ disciples. “As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!’ ‘Do you see all these great buildings?’ replied Jesus. ‘Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down’” (Mark 13:1–2). Jesus didn’t see the buildings as they were but as they soon would become—not one stone left on another—which is how they look today. I picture Him shuddering as He spoke, the way I do when I see a photograph of the Manhattan skyline before 9/11 with the
World Trade Center still intact. Superimposed over the towers in my mind are images I can never forget: airplanes crashing, flames and smoke billowing, steel structures crumbling like children’s blocks. As Jesus looked ahead into Jerusalem’s future, He saw death and destruction, too.

Western Wall and Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount

Herod’s remodeled Temple was finally completed in AD 64, but it stood for only six years before the Romans demolished it. I can’t comprehend the effort or the enmity that it took to hurl these huge building stones and pillar parts down from the top of the Temple mount, any more than I can comprehend the hatred that led to the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. But Jesus was right, not one stone of the Temple sanctuary remains on another. His words must have seemed unbelievable to His disciples. But to make sure
Israel would recognize that the destruction was ultimately from God, Herod’s Temple was destroyed on the ninth day of
Av
—the same day that Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. Jews still fast and pray to remember this twice-tragic day known as
Tisha B’Av
, one of the saddest days in the Jewish calendar year.

Jews are no longer allowed to worship on their Temple Mount. The Western Wall—or so-called Wailing Wall—where Jewish people pray, is not part of the original Temple structure but a remnant of the long retaining wall that Herod constructed around the mountain to form a plateau.

When the prophet Jeremiah warned about the coming destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians, the religious leaders had him arrested, saying, “This man should be sentenced to death because he has prophesied against this city” (Jeremiah 26:11). Jeremiah’s life was spared, but the Temple wasn’t, just as he’d predicted. Jesus warned that Herod’s Temple also would be destroyed, and Jesus’ enemies, like Jeremiah’s, sought to execute Him for it, twisting and misinterpreting His words, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19).

I look at this jumble of stones, and they sober me. If Jesus was right about this seemingly impossible feat of destruction, why don’t I pay closer attention to His other warnings? In speaking about the Day of Judgment and the end of the age, He said, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12).
Most.
He warned, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you unexpectedly like a trap. For it will come upon all those who live on the face of the whole earth. Be always
on the watch, and pray” (Luke 21:34–36). Am I as guilty as the people who heard Jesus and Jeremiah and ignored their warnings? If America had been forewarned about the 9/11 attacks, wouldn’t we have taken them seriously? How should we live now, with Jesus’ warnings in view?

Jesus said that wickedness would increase, which is not hard to imagine when I look at our modern world. But more worrisome for me, He predicted that our love will grow cold, meaning our love for God and for others. After forty-two years of marriage, my husband and I work very hard to continually refresh our relationship, taking care that our love doesn’t grow cold. One key we’ve discovered is to spend time together and not allow busyness to interfere. How much more important, then, to put time and effort into my relationship with God and keep my spiritual passion alive after nearly fifty years as a professing Christian? Jesus warned the believers in Ephesus, “You have forsaken your first love” (Revelations 2:4). I don’t want that to be true of me. If my husband and I plan periodic date nights, surely I can take time out for prayer and for periodic spiritual retreats—a “date night” with God.

Not only should I tend the flames of my passion for God, I also should make certain that my love for others doesn’t grow cold. Experts talk about “compassion fatigue,” which occurs when we become overwhelmed by trying to meet the needs of people affected by natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods. We simply can’t absorb one more catastrophe, and we begin to numb ourselves to people’s pain, like a shot of emotional Novocain. Am I guilty of that?

I need to examine my interactions with others to make sure I’m not so wrapped up with my own concerns that I forget to reach out. Our church is addressing this problem by
planning a local mission project right in our own community. Church members of all ages will tackle work projects for elderly neighbors who need a hand and help local families who need assistance in our depressed economy. It should be a priority for me to be part of that outreach. Again, expressing love seems to be measured in terms of spending time and not necessarily money.

Jesus ends His warning with these words: “Be always on the watch, and pray” (Luke 21:36). The foundation stone of every marriage is communication, taking time to talk to each other, listen to each other, share our joys and needs and worries. It’s the heart of our love relationship with God, too. Jesus often went to a quiet place to be alone with His Father in prayer. I know how important prayer is. Yet I’ve allowed my worries to distract me instead of drawing me to God. In my anger and disappointment, I’ve given God the “silent treatment,” just as I’m sometimes guilty of doing with my husband. I’m grateful for the time I have on this pilgrimage to begin sharing my worry and grief and fear with Him in prayer once again, grateful for the time to listen to what He’s saying to me in reply. I’m laying the foundation for a better prayer life when I return home.

This ancient, bustling street in Jerusalem is now deserted, the shopkeepers and customers long gone. But the jumbled pile of building stones that once were part of the Temple also give me hope. Jesus said, “I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will he leave it” (Revelation 3:11–12).

I want to be a pillar in the new Temple that Jesus has begun to build.

Living Stones

I climb up the sweeping set of stairs below the Temple Mount, but they are steps to nowhere. They once led to a set of doors in the Temple’s massive retaining wall and to an enclosed stairway that led to the top. But the doors have been bricked shut. If I look where the guide is pointing, I can see the outline of the ancient doors from the time of Christ and part of a stone lintel above the doorframe. At the top of the steps, I pose for a photograph beside one of the retaining wall’s original building stones, an enormous block at least eight feet long and four feet high. It must weigh several tons, yet the masons cut each stone so perfectly that no mortar was necessary to hold it in place. Directly below me are the remains of several
mikvoth
, the ritual baths where worshipers immersed themselves to become ritually clean before offering their sacrifices.

These stairs and doorways served as one of the main entrances to the Temple complex, leading worshipers up from street level to the top of the mount, high above me. Jesus climbed these same smooth limestone steps to reach God’s House. I wish I could follow Him through the now-closed doorway into the shadowy darkness, then up the enclosed stairs. We would emerge into brilliant sunlight on the vast, paved square above and see God’s dazzling Temple, glittering with gold.

Jesus walked here. I shiver as I look out at the same view He would have seen as He stood in this spot, with the Mount of Olives across the valley to our left and the City of David below us. The modern city may look different and the Temple is no longer above us, but the mountains and valleys and skies look the same as they did to Jesus. Pilgrims who come
to Israel to walk where Jesus walked are often bewildered to find themselves viewing gaudy churches. But these stairs and the view from the top of them are authentic.