It was at the Wailing Wall praying for close friends that I realized the wisdom of N.T. Wright’s words. We do not come to the Holy Land to have a deeper experience with God or, as he puts it, “to look for selfish refreshment, to top up our own spiritual batteries while forgetting everyone else. We are called to discover the other side of pilgrimage: not only to go somewhere else to find God in a new way but to go somewhere else in order to bring God in a new way to that place, not by tub-thumping evangelism or patronizing, well-meaning but shallow advice, but by our presence, our grief, our sympathy, our encouragement, our prayer.”

This is what I wrote for the blog this week. However, now that I think about it I am wondering if I didn’t have my own expectations for the time there. Maybe I’m not as objective as I thought? I may not have gone to walk where Jesus walked but I went with some personal expectations – just like everyone else. Still, I agree with N.T. Wright who writes in “The Way of the Lord: The Other Side of Pilgrimage” that we should go to worship and not to “top up our spiritual batteries.” Isn’t that the same for church or Bible study? We go for the wrong reasons and instead of worship we come to them with what we can receive out of it. Or, we go as tourists, anxious to add another stamp to our passports and photos to our collection. “You go to Jerusalem, or Athens, or Venice, or anywhere else, to worship the god of secularism, the god of a liberal culture that tells you to observe from a critical distance, but not to get involved. To sense the magic of the place, and then to buy postcards. To say a prayer perhaps, if that’s your kind of thing, but not to stay on your knees all day. We’ve got to get on to the museum, or back to the hotel for tea. Our reality must remain undisturbed.”

“Jerusalem is a place where it’s very easy to sense the presence of God, or at least the warm place in the bed where he once was, and also very easy to distort that sense so that God gets remade in your own image, to serve your own ends, to bolster your own ambitions or to underwrite your ideologies. And the test of whether pilgrimage is genuine is therefore the question, whether you’re prepared for God to remake you instead, lovingly to break the brittle ‘you’ that you’ve so carefully constructed, to soften the clay in his hands until it’s ready to be remoulded, and then to make out of you what he had in mind all along, which may be quite different from what you wanted or expected. Jerusalem is a symbol of God’s great expectations, which will by no means coincide with our own. The only true way to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem is to go, like Abraham, not knowing where you are going, or who it is that you will meet when you get there; to suspend a clinging and anxious belief as well as a skeptical unbelief, and simply to be: to be open, to be still, to wait in silence for the strange God who still comes to those who wait in silence. The road to Jerusalem stands for the deeply inviting, yet deeply threatening, journey into the presence of the one true God, where all is known and all is unknown, where all is asked and all is promised. And that, whether or not we ever make the geographical journey to Jerusalem itself, is the pilgrimage to which we are all summoned.”

This is all part of a longer discussion! Here are a few things I thought about during the visit to Israel.

1.  Two-thirds of Jesus’ ministry is in a relatively isolated place that would not attract the attention of the rest of the world. He lived out of the mainstream. He did his “works” where they were least expected. We might be tempted to think the same about where we are. “If only I were closer to the center of things” we sometimes say and think that our geography determines our influence or ability to accomplish anything for God. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was only when Jesus had finished the majority of his “works” that he turned toward Jerusalem to finish his real work.

2.  When you visit Megiddo you realize you are standing on the most recent of 25 layers of past cities. People did not always start in a new place. They took the existing materials from the former city and used them to build a new place. If you want to find the original civilization you dig down through all that came after it. Again, it gives one a sense of perspective to know that we are just one more layer of people and others will come to build on what we might think is the last layer. It’s not just cities that hide the “original” place. We build traditions, beliefs, ideas, and values out of the rubble of what came before us. Everything that came before is material for what is next. Every new layer re-shapes the old.

3.  Masada is one of the places I wanted to see the most. It is in many ways a testament to the fortitude and indomitable spirit of the Jew. Instead of being captured and made slaves, they chose to die on their own terms. Today, at the end of their training, Jewish soldiers climb to the top and shout “Masada shall not fall again.” The surrounding hills echo the shout and it feels like the voices of their history repeating it over and over again.

4.  Qumran was the desert home of the Essenes – a sect that removed themselves so they could pursue righteousness and purity. They lived there for hundreds of years in a detached society that focused on piety, self-control and the reproduction of Scripture on scrolls that were then preserved in sealed pots. They had an obsessive regard for accuracy and the task of passing along to future generations what had been their traditions. Caves (both discovered and undiscovered) contain the pots and the Scriptures that have survived for thousands of years. I suppose any society that chooses radical separation will have some unique values and practices. You might have read about the “Benedict Option” recently. People are moving away in order to retain the values that are important to them. The Amish are one of the fastest growing religious communities in the world.

5.  Jerusalem is the most religion saturated place I have ever been. Because it is said to be the sacred place of three religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – religion permeates everything. Churches, mosques, sacred sites, and traditions are everywhere. There is no other city in the world I have been that has this feel.

6.  We were planning to travel to Bethlehem but since that was cancelled we had the opportunity to go to Yad Vashem – the holocaust museum in Jerusalem. That was a gift to me as I had wanted to go there but knew there would be no time. It is something of a book-end to Masada. One is an illustration of the determination to face the worst on their own terms and the other is the story of 6 million people being slaughtered because they were Jews and for no other reason.

However, on the next to last night something remarkable happened. There was an Orthodox wedding at the hotel. I’ve never seen such joy, lightness, music, tradition and happiness in the midst of being surrounded by people and whole nations who only want to completely eradicate Israel. Maybe that is one of the sources of their strength. There is always tradition and hope. There is always light and a future. Willing and expecting to die for the survival of what is most precious.

Finally, let me recommend four books I read:

Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour. It is the story of a Palestinian Christian working for peace in Israel.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Dale Hanson Bourke

American Evangelicals & Modern Israel by Frederic M. Martin

The Way of the Lord: The Other Side of Pilgrimage by N.T. Wright