Pilgrimage (10 page)

Whenever I’m tempted to lift up my eyes to the hills, looking for help from some other source, I want to remember that “My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth . . . the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore” (Psalm 121:2, 8).

Hezekiah’s Tunnel

The icy water takes my breath away. I wade into it, stepping down, and down again, until it reaches my thighs. But the
shivery water isn’t the worst part of this trek through King Hezekiah’s tunnel. There is no light in here, electric or natural, and the claustrophobic tunnel meanders underground as if excavated by drunkards. Ahead of me, a tall man stoops to keep from smacking his head on the stone ceiling. A heavyset woman looks as though she regrets this adventure as she squeezes between the slimy walls. None of us can turn back. There’s only enough room to walk single file.

This water system, deep below the city of Jerusalem, is man-made. The Bible tells us that “It was Hezekiah who blocked the upper outlet of the Gihon spring and channeled the water down to the west side of the City of David” (2 Chronicles 32:30). I know the story well. The first novel I ever wrote,
Gods and Kings,
was part of a three-book series about the life of King Hezekiah, who reigned in Jerusalem seven hundred years before Christ. With no supply of freshwater in the city and the vicious Assyrian army marching toward him, Hezekiah needed to find a way to safeguard the freshwater spring, located outside the city walls. His solution was to dig an underground tunnel from the spring to a new reservoir within the walls. Pressured to complete the work before the Assyrians attacked, he ordered the workers to start digging from opposite ends and meet in the middle.

“Hey, is it safe to trust a tunnel that was dug 2,700 years ago?” someone asks.

I shake my head, but no one sees me in the dark. No. I don’t trust an ancient tunnel, especially in a city that has occasional earthquakes. I can only trust God—and splash forward, shining my feeble flashlight. The chiseled floor is uneven and rough, and since we can’t see our feet below the inky water, we shuffle slowly, careful not to stumble and fall.
I’m not a big fan of caves, and this man-made one with its straight walls and squared-off ceiling is dark and creepy. The weight of the mountain above my head feels crushing.

“How much farther?” someone asks in a shaky voice. I don’t dare tell her that this serpentine tunnel will wind for nearly a third of a mile and take about half an hour to walk through. The college students in our group try to lighten the atmosphere with laughter and jokes. Then one of them starts to sing: “Fill it up and let it overflow . . .” It’s an upbeat version of “Amazing Grace” with an added refrain, “Fill it up and let it overflow, let it overflow with love.” Soon, everyone joins in.

I smile to myself, remembering the first time I walked through Hezekiah’s tunnel while researching my novel. Back then, my husband, Ken, and I were touring Israel with a group from our church in Canada, and the Palestinians had decided to start an
Intifada—
an uprising—while we were there. Hezekiah’s tunnel had been on my “must-see” list, but Hillel, our tour guide, shook his head when I asked about visiting it.

“It is too dangerous to take a tour bus to that part of Jerusalem,” he explained. “Yesterday the Palestinians attacked and burned a vehicle on the road that goes down to the tunnel. It is impossible to go there.” Having come all the way to Israel to see Hezekiah’s masterpiece, I was devastated. Late that night, wide-awake with disappointment and jet lag, I prayed, begging God to help me do the impossible.

The next morning I talked to the guide again, explaining about the book I was writing. Hillel finally agreed to take Ken and me through the tunnel by ourselves while the rest of the group toured another site. God had answered my “impossible” prayer.

Two days later, the three of us walked down the deserted road to the tunnel’s entrance. When we passed the burned-out vehicle—an Israeli Army jeep—I nearly changed my mind and turned back. Were those bullet holes in the side of it? I nearly turned around again when we reached the tunnel’s entrance and found that the gate, controlled by the Palestinians, was locked. But I decided I would trust God and keep going. He had brought me this far, hadn’t He?

Hillel, who spoke Arabic, found someone to accept our “donation” and unlock the gate. Once inside, we discovered that I was the only one of us who had remembered to bring a flashlight. It was lipstick-sized and about as bright as a lightning bug’s blink. Hillel would lead the way shining the light, and I would walk behind him clinging to his belt. Poor Ken would bring up the rear in near-total darkness, holding on to my shirttail and hoping that no one crept up behind him the way bad guys do in Saturday morning cartoons.

We descended the stairs and waded into the water. Within moments, the tunnel took a sharp turn and all outside light disappeared. My head skimmed the grimy ceiling, my shoulders scraped the walls. I could barely draw a breath as I sloshed through ice-cold water in suffocating darkness. Panic pumped through my veins. If Hillel hadn’t gone to so much trouble to get me here—and if the restless Palestinians weren’t waiting right outside—I would have turned around, trampled over Ken, and fled this awful place. But I shuffled forward, taking tiny baby steps, panting like an overheated hound on a hot day. Soon the water level passed my thighs and reached my hips.

“I-is it just my imagination,” I asked, “or is this w-water getting deeper?”

“You’re not imagining it,” Hillel replied. “The little Arab children like to dam up the water when there are tourists inside, so that the tunnel will fill all the way up to our necks.”

Fill it up and let it overflow!

I stopped walking. I could no longer breathe at all. We were trapped, with no way out! But then Hillel laughed out loud and told me he was only joking. “This water comes from a spring,” he explained, “and it surges naturally every now and then.” I would have pushed him underwater and drowned him, but he was clutching our only flashlight.

Now I join the students’ song as I remember that first tour. The tunnel is less claustrophobic with more flashlights and more people. We reach the middle and stop to see the spot where the two tunnels met. Here, chiseled into the rock, was the oldest Hebrew inscription ever discovered, written by Hezekiah’s men to explain how they had broken through after digging from opposite ends. The inscription is in a museum in Turkey, not here. We shine our flashlights on the wall and see where it once was, and also how the chisel marks slant from opposite directions at the meeting point.

This tunnel is an engineering marvel, especially when you consider that it was dug in 700 BC. Experts still aren’t sure how anyone could dig two meandering tunnels that began a third of a mile apart and get them to meet up in the middle, deep underground. Impossible! Everyone who hears the story and sees the tunnel is impressed with King Hezekiah and his men.

But God wasn’t impressed. He sent the prophet Isaiah to rebuke the king for all of his plans, saying, “You saw that the City of David had many breaches in its defenses; you stored up water in the Lower Pool. . . . You built a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the Old Pool, but
you did not look to the One who made it, or have regard for the One who planned it long ago” (Isaiah 22:9, 11). In other words, Hezekiah was relying on his own preparations instead of trusting God.

Fifteen minutes later, a pinprick of light in the distance tells us we are almost to the end. I have a new respect for that old cliché about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I hear a lot of grateful sighs, including my own, when we wade out into the blinding sunlight. As we sit in the sun to warm up and let our clothes dry out, I’m still thinking of Hezekiah.

The city of Jerusalem was saved from the Assyrians, but not by this tunnel. When the most powerful army on earth surrounded Hezekiah, demanding surrender, he knew he’d reached the end of his resources. Facing an impossible situation, he went up to the Temple and knelt before God, placing his hope and trust in Him: “O Lord Almighty, God of Israel,” he prayed, “You alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. . . . Now, O Lord our God, deliver us from [the enemy’s] hand, so that all kingdoms on earth may know that you alone, O Lord, are God” (Isaiah 37:16, 20). That night, the angel of the Lord walked among the sleeping Assyrian warriors and put to death 185,000 of them. At dawn, the horrified king of Assyria gathered up his few surviving soldiers and bolted for home.

It’s okay to make plans, but the lesson of Hezekiah’s tunnel is that when we put our trust in God, not only is He victorious, but He is glorified. I think of the struggles I’ve experienced lately as life has veered out of my control, the times when I’ve panicked as the water has crept higher and higher until it seemed to reach my neck. In spite of all my feverish plans and schemes, the enemy has besieged and surrounded me, leaving me trapped with no way to escape. But as I sit in the
sunlight outside Hezekiah’s tunnel, I think of God’s promise from Isaiah, the prophet in Hezekiah’s time: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you” (Isaiah 43:1–2).

We can step into the deep water, the darkness, the unknown—and trust God. At the end of the tunnel, we will emerge into dazzling sunlight.

The Pool of Siloam

At the end of Hezekiah’s tunnel, in the oldest inhabited section of Jerusalem, we stop to rest at the Pool of Siloam. King Hezekiah built the original pool about seven hundred years before Christ to collect the runoff from his tunnel. But what I’m looking at now is the pool that existed in Jesus’ day, recently unearthed by archaeologists. King Herod, that egomaniacal master builder, expanded the original Pool of Siloam to make it larger and grander, in the Roman style that he loved. Today, Herod’s huge, public pool has been only partially excavated; it’s dry and weed-filled and peppered with litter. But as we sit at what was once its edge and sip from our water bottles, the Pool of Siloam’s former grandeur is evident nonetheless. About the size of a typical community pool, it was paved with creamy golden Jerusalem limestone. Wide stone steps on all four sides led gradually down into the refreshing spring water. An artist’s rendering of the site shows crowds of well-dressed people wading in the clear water, lounging on the bleacher-like steps, and strolling in the shade beneath the pillared colonnade.

Jesus sent a blind man here to wash and regain his sight. As the man groped his way down the steps and into the water to splash the mud mixture from his eyes, his miraculous healing would have occurred before crowds of onlookers. For a rabbi who shunned publicity, Jesus seems to have chosen a very public place to send someone for a miracle—especially on the Sabbath. Once news of this miracle spread, I imagine a stampede of sight-impaired people rushing to the Pool of Siloam, thinking that the water was the source of the cure when the true source was Jesus.

This pool was part of a very important ritual during the Feast of Tabernacles, which included prayer for rain for the coming year. As crowds of worshipers followed and watched, a procession of robed priests drew water from the Pool of Siloam, then carried it up the hill to the Temple and poured it out around the altar. There the crowd listened in hushed silence as a priest read the prophecy of Zechariah, who had promised that living water would one day flow out from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:8).

Imagine the priests’ shock when, in the middle of this sacred ritual, Jesus suddenly stood up in a prominent place and interrupted the proceedings, shouting in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 7:37–38). I wonder which made the priests angrier—the fact that Jesus disrupted their finely rehearsed ritual with His invitation, or that He dared to compare himself to living water?

“Living water” flows from a natural, God-given source such as a stream or a spring. Only living water may be used for ritual baths and purification ceremonies, which is why John
baptized in a flowing river and why the priests drew water from the spring-fed Pool of Siloam. But Israel’s leaders had rejected Jesus, the Living Water, and relied instead on their own lifeless rules and rituals for their righteousness. God told these leaders, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13).

Cisterns are man-made holes, plastered and filled by hand. The water they hold is not “living.” Cisterns must be patched and repaired and refilled or all the water will disappear. The loss might start with a small crack or a fissure; add on months of neglect and the water slowly trickles away. But a “living,” moving source originates with our bountiful, life-giving God. Living water not only purifies; it doesn’t run dry.

Our endless rushing and Pharisaical good works cannot bring righteousness any more than a ritual, without God, can bring rain. Any more than the Pool of Siloam, without Jesus, can bring healing. Yet we insist on using God as a magic charm, trying to do everything just right so our lives will be blessed. The Christian walk isn’t about blessing, as I’m learning, but about a relationship—and that relationship is built and established with prayer. It’s about obedience, even when I don’t understand, even when it means a cross.

If I’m empty and dry, maybe it’s because I have tried to satisfy my longings from man-made sources instead of allowing the Living Water to fill me. How foolish to expect a church service—with my preferred style of music, of course—to satisfy my soul when spiritual wholeness and healing come from a relationship with Christ, not a ritual. In my loneliness and loss, I have foolishly dug a lot of cisterns and started a
lot of useless projects that eventually ran dry. But when my thirsty soul longs for water, my empty heart for healing, I can go to the true Source in prayer and be made whole. And God will freely give, never chastising me for trying to quench my own thirst.