Footsteps of Jesus Pilgrimage Day 8 - We Enter Holy Week

Day eight began with a lecture from Rodney as he helped us begin our journey into and through Holy Week. These last three days were all about the places and stories of Holy Week, and he invited us to reflect on our own experience of that as we journeyed through this time.

Then we boarded the bus, assumed our normal seats, and headed off through the Separation Wall to Bethany, a bustling Palestinian city struggling under occupation. Here John’s version of Holy Week begins with the raising of Lazarus. Here we begin the walk to the crucifixion. We walked up the steep street to a small entrance and steep steps down into a small antechamber. In the floor are cut steps down into a tomb that tradition teaches us was Lazarus’s first resting place. It is not as it was in Lazarus’ time as the Crusader Church built over the top
resulted in masonry blocking much of the original tomb. The entrance we entered by is a “new” entrance – the original came from the Byzantine and then Crusader church. But this was blocked when a mosque was built on that site to honour Saint Lazarus. A church was built by the Franciscans on part of the original footprint in the 1950’s, and an Orthodox church nearby. Same architect and mosaic style as we had encountered in so many places, with white Jesus to the forefront.

After climbing back up we went into the crypt of the Franciscan church where Andrew led us in a reflection. Here Holy Week begins with new life from death, faithful women – one serving and one breaking new ground finding a place as a disciple. It is here that Jesus left on his journey on a donkey with his small rabble on a route we would trace the next day.

One of my regrets from this time was not buying an icon of The Great Martyr – George. It would have made a nice gift. More importantly it would have supported those desperate people whose lives has been made much more desperate since then.

After lunch we bussed to the Dun Gate by the Southern Wall of al-Haram al-Sharif. Here we went to the Davidson Centre in the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, located near the Western Wall, where we were introduced to archaeological finds and displays from the First & Second Temple periods. This included a model of Temple Mount as they call it, and the walls as they are now which allowed us to see how that differed from Jerusalem in Jesus time. Most importantly it helped us see how pilgrims would come to the pool of Siloam at the bottom of the ridge near the Kidron Valley, where Hezekiah’s tunnel comes out. This was where Jews at the time of Jesus, including Jesus and his disciples, would wash to ritually cleanse themselves before ascending up the hill and up the steps into the Temple Complex. When I was here in 2005, I did not understand this and could not work out why David’s city was outside the city walls. Short answer – it wasn’t. The city of Jesus time went down the hill to the pool. The Temple for a lot of time was the highest point.

We spent time in the heat experiencing Herod’s temple from the outside, including the steps Jesus and all those other Passover pilgrims would have walked up, and the Huldah Gates that allowed those pilgrims to enter the complex and go up ramps on inside into the temple by Solomon’s Colonnade. You get a better sense of all this here.  We walked back and along the Western Wall, along the street that in Jesus’s time was lined with shops that went up the Western side of the Temple and allowed access through other steps, like the Robinson Arch. It was
astounding to stand on those steps that Jesus and his disciples would have climbed 2,000 years ago. And it helps me understand the geography of these stories, just as our time in Galilee and Nazareth did.

Then we went through security and spent time praying at the Western Wall, men on one side, women on the other. I prayed for peace in this troubled land.

Bonnie and I then did something a little controversial. We paid for and went on a Western Wall Tunnel Great Stone Route tour. It was an amazing tour, but Palestinians who live above where the excavations have occurred, and I think continue, are not so keen, with buildings being destabilised by the process. When I was in Jerusalem in 2005, I thought about doing the tour but didn’t get around to it. So, I wanted to this time. But it came with that question. It also came with the unexpected and sudden jolt out of Palestinian society and into Jewish Israeli society.

When the Mamluks conquered Jerusalem in 1260 and ended Latin Christian rule for the last time they set about rebuilding the city. Al-Haram al-Sharif is built on a hill. There is the Kidron Valley to the East, and to the West there is another valley. So, there were steps up onto the Al Aqsa compound from that side. The Mamluks wanted to make that easier and so they built up the Western side up using arches that allowed streets to be built across the valley and directly into the compound. They disguised this geographic feature in doing do and you lost the sense of the compound being on top of its own hill, rather than on the hill the Old City is built on today. Since the 1980’s archaeologists have been excavating beneath these arches revealing the walls of Herod’s Second Temple and Mamluk ingenuity.

coming out of the Damascus Gate

That night we were blessed by two members of Musalaha - a faith-based organization that teaches, trains and facilitates reconciliation mainly between Israelis and Palestinians from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, and also international groups, based on biblical principles of reconciliation. They talked about their work creating space for Arab/Palestinians and Jews to meet, and the enormous difficulty of that. Those spaces do not normally exist. Palestinians – Muslim and Christian – speak Arabic, Jews speak Hebrew. They live in separate places, and for non-Israeli Palestinians on the West Bank with the separation wall between them. Palestinians experience Jews as pointing high powered weapons towards them which they use too frequently. Israelis mostly experience Palestinians during their time in the IDF as people to fear who are hostile towards them, and so often meet them down the barrel of their guns. So often they are seen simply as terrorists. Even when members of both groups are on programmes together, they struggle to talk to each other. These programmes look to help people from all sides (there are other groups as well like Druze) see each other not as the other or as the enemy but their fellow humans. They offer hope. But the work was hard. And after the events of 7 October 2023, and the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and across the West Bank, that work has become even harder. It has fractured interfaith relationships in this country. I cannot imagine what it is like in that part of the world. We catch a glimpse of it in how people have unquestioningly lapped up the anti-immigrant propaganda from Trump. But as they say on their website “We do not believe that our peoples are doomed to make the same mistakes; nor do we believe that we are forever locked in cycles of violence and political impasse… We must look at our past and our present in light of our hope for the future.” — Through My Enemy’s Eyes.

We began the day standing in the story of Jesus bringing life in a place of death, standing with Jesus in that upper antechamber calling forth Lazarus. We began with two faithful women creating space for a story of hope when all seemed lost. From that point we journeyed with Jesus up into the temple and to the rigid worldviews that led to violence and Jesus’s death and the destruction of that same temple in 70CE. We experienced the divides that shape Israeli society today between Jew, Christin, Muslim, Bedouin, and Druze. We ended the day again listening to two faithful women, one Christian one Jewish, who look to their stories of faith to anchor their identity in hope and the need to find new ways of resolving old conflicts. I might way they stand with Jesus in the antechamber calling forth life from the dark gloom of death. We had truly entered Holy Week.