CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 2
TO WALK WHERE
JESUS WALKED
For as long as I can remember I did not want to go to the Holy Land. I suppose the main reason was those monochromatic slides we used to have to look at in Sunday School. My heart would sink when I learned that somebody was going to show pictures of Palestine. All you saw were little square sand-colored houses and sand-colored camels and lots of sand-colored landscapes that were mostly desert and a lot of people dressed in long robes that reminded me of our Sunday School Christmas plays with everybody wearing bathrobes and towels wrapped around their heads. The whole thing of seeing what were called "holy places" and walking today where Jesus walked and visiting ruins failed to find a response in me.
But seven years ago, just after the Six-Day War, I was persuaded to go to Jerusalem, and now I'm going back again. Israel in 1967 was a place of tremendous excitement and tremendous sadness. There were those who had conquered and those who had just been conquered. There was rubble where the wall had divided the Old City from the New, rubble where villages had been demolished and rubble at the Wailing Wall. I do not expect to find everything sorted out and peaceful when I return. Problems persist which seem to have no possible human solution, and I know from correspondence with friends that all is not as we read in the newspapers. But Jerusalem is a city set apart, a city often besieged and often recovered, which holds at its heart certain treasures that its wars and sins have not yet obliterated.
I had not been at all prepared for the impact that Jerusalem had upon me. I was overpowered. It was in this city, inside and outside its walls, that the events took place that altered the whole course of history. The Crucifixion, said Dorothy Sayers, was after all "the only thing that ever really happened." I knew all of this before I went, of course, but I simply was not prepared for what it did to me when I finally actually stood on that ground.
Christian tourists are often put off by the commercialization of the holy places. You go into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to find that it is claimed by four different kinds of Christians who get along so badly that the keys to the church have had to be entrusted, it is said, to a Moslem family. There are guides, licensed and unlicensed, clamoring to show you around. There are priests in varied garb waiting at each sacred site with offering boxes; candles are on sale, and the whole place seems dark, dusty and crowded with the trappings of religion.
I would not have expected to like this scene, but I found myself totally captivated. There was something about the crumbling, discolored stone with Crusader's crosses carved into it, the fragrance of the incense and the dim light of the swinging oil lamps that convinced me here was the place, here was concentrated the attention and the devotion-fierce as it sometimes wasof the ages. Christians of all varieties had converged on this place, crowding into it every possible symbol of their hope and longing as well as the unavoidable evidence of their corruption; and that very corruption added its own weight to the meaning of that cross and that empty sepulcher-"for where sin abounded grace did much more abound" (Rom 5:20).
To go to the Garden of Gethsemane, across the Brook Kidron from the Old City, and to know that it was Jesus' custom often to leave the crowded, noisy city and cross that brook and go to where the old olive trees grew on a hillside, was another experience that overwhelmed me. The shape of the city, viewed from that perspective, has not changed very much, I suppose, from the time ofJesus. The shape of the hills surrounding it, the aspect of the valley, the beauty of the olive trees, would be just what Jesus knew. This was the quiet place to which He went when He knew that His hour had come. It was beneath some of these very trees perhaps (for some of them are 2,000 years old) that the Son of man struggled with His own fear of death and with the will of the Father.
Over the door of the Basilica of the Agony, which is one name for the church in the Garden, these Latin words are inscribed: SUSTINETE HIC ET VIGILATE MECUM, "Wait here and watch with me." I myself had gone to the Garden several different times during my weeks in Jerusalem, and tried to reconstruct the awful scene: Christ in an agony of conflict and suffering, while the three who had been specially chosen to be with their master at the end were not doing the one thing He had asked them to do-watch-but were sound asleep. When I was there the sun shone on the soft stone of the city walls and on the brilliant bougainvillea that grew nearby. Buses ground up the hill, taxis honked, tourists rushed by taking pictures, and a group of kibbutzniks waving blue and white flags poured out of a bus and passed the Garden without so much as a sideways glance.
It is not our experiences which in the final analysis change us, it is always and only our responses to those experiences. In any of the holy places I could have responded with cynicism, rejection or even outrage. Their mysterious power then would have been lost on me. I found it possible instead to enter in by faith, giving myself in each place to the One who was there before me and who, despite all that worldly-minded humanity had done to those places, was still there if I sought Him.
Near one of the olive trees in Gethsemane one of the Darmstadt Sisters of Mary has put up a small plaque: