Jesus Wept…

Today was a day when we visited some of the sites of Jesus’ grief.

We began the day at Bethany, at the tomb of Lazarus were Jesus wept for his friend. Of course, you guessed it, there is a church that’s been built on the spot! just above the tomb. Ironically the weight of the churches over the years has caused the tomb below to collapse and so the tomb that you can now go in to is shored up with modern stone and there is little of the original left!

From Bethany we went to the Mount of Olives were of course Jesus wept for Jerusalem. You get really great views over the city from here and from this angle particularly you can really appreciate just how vast the temple complex would have been. For travellers who approached the city they would have crested the hill to see the city laid out before them dominated by this vast temple complex at the centre of which was the Holy of Holies. This was totally sheaved in Gold leaf, shinning so brightly that trying to look at it was like trying to look at the sun. It must have been totally awe inspiring!

We walked down the mount following the road that Jesus would have taken. It was pretty steep in places and I was grateful for the tarmaced surface and stout walking sandals. It was very moving to be walking down the route that Jesus himself used. Though of course it would have been rocky then and he was on the back of an untrained colt – literally trusting his life to the sure footedness of that animal. At the bottom of the hill we entered the Garden of Gethsemane a place where again he trusted his life another. I had such a sense this afternoon of how perilous his life was and yet how much he trusted – it was a humbling.

The garden was lovely – the olive trees were about 1000 years old and there was a real sense of history and antiquity there. Sadly you can’t go into the garden – how wonderful would it be to sit in peace under one of these trees but you could sit around the edge in the shade which was a lovely place to reflect.

Next stop was the pools at Bethesda. For some reason I had always imagined that these were fairly small, sort of like a large garden pond – don’t ask me why! But in reality these pools were vast. There were two main pools which served as resevoirs for the temple, each incredibly deep and wide. The current church on the site is a lovely simple church with the most amazing echoes. We sang “Amazing Grace” in the church and it sounded wonderful – apart from the verse where we all mumbled because we couldn’t remember the words! Its funny how natural doing such things seems, normally I would be embarrassed by doing such things in public but here, in the Holy Land, these things seem somehow very normal!

From Bethany we went to the Garden Tomb – the second site that claims to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus. The guide we had was well versed and was incredibly passionate about the garden and it clearly meant a great deal to him that this was the place. In many ways I wanted this to be the place as this fitted my stereotype of what I thought the tomb should be, a peaceful place, a hill, a garden an empty and un-adorned chamber that has been left in its natural state. Was this the place? It doesn’t have the following that the Holy Sepulchral has that’s for sure and its “pedigree” is much more recent but does this mean its not? and does it matter anyway? Whether this was the tomb or not it certainly gave us a better idea of how the place that Jesus died would have looked, something that isn’t possible at the Holy Sepulchral church.

So we have four contenders for the shepherds fields and two for Golgotha, thank goodness there is definitely only one Sea of Galilee!