Pilgrimage (16 page)

As the guide continues to explain the Passover traditions, I silently marvel at how thoroughly God has embedded the story of Christ’s salvation into these rituals: How three portions of unleavened bread are placed in a special cloth called The Unity; how the middle piece is removed and broken in two, then hidden for a time; how it is later redeemed with silver and broken by the host into bite-sized pieces that are shared around the table. “This is my body given for you” (Luke 22:19).

No one who celebrated this meal year after year could have missed this rich symbolism, especially when Christ enacted Passover before their eyes, dying on the cross at the very hour that the nation’s Passover lamb was being sacrificed at the Temple. And yet the disciples did miss it, at first. They had created their own images of what the Messiah would be like and what He would do, and when His gruesome death shattered those images, their lives seemed to shatter, as well. But how infinitely better His salvation is than the one their limited minds had envisioned.

I, too, have created images of what my life should be like and how God should answer my prayers. I confess that when I hold those broken dreams in my hands, I feel angry with God. And yet His answers to my prayers have always turned out to be better in the end than what I could have planned. Always. Even when the answer was no.

The traditional Passover meal ends with singing and prayer. We have Jesus’ closing prayer recorded for us in John 17. Surprisingly, He prayed for His disciples and us that night. He prayed for our protection and blessing and fellowship:
“May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me” (v. 23).

The Passover Feast ended. “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives” (Mark 14:26). Before that day would end at sundown on Friday, one of His disciples would betray Him. The rest would scatter in fear. Peter would deny three times that he even knew Jesus, much less was His disciple. Jesus would die on a cross.

I sit uncomfortably at the low table, unaccustomed to the hard floor and the even harder lessons. In a room much like this one, on a night that celebrated freedom and God’s miraculous deliverance, Jesus taught what it means to truly be His disciple. We are to serve one another—and that means swallowing my pride and self-sufficiency and allowing my church family to see my hurts and doubts and fears. We are to trust His plans when we pray instead of dictating how we want Him to act. And we are to be one in mind and heart as a witness to an unbelieving world.

Judas ate the covenant meal. He called himself a disciple and allowed Jesus to wash his feet. He even kissed Him in greeting as a faithful disciple would. But his actions betrayed his words. The other disciples also promised to follow Him, but when the crucial moment arrived, they scattered and denied knowing Him. At Communion, I also drink the cup of the new covenant and call Him Lord, but do my actions betray Him or disown Him?

We leave the shadowy room and file down the stairs, emerging into the sunlight. My feet may be clean, but I feel painfully exposed. It seems much too easy to glibly call myself His disciple—and more difficult than I realized to live up to that name.

Gethsemane

When Jesus’s Passover meal with His disciples ended late that night, He walked with them down the hillside from the Upper Room and across Jerusalem in the dark. As they passed other houses along the way, they probably heard laughter and singing spilling from the open windows as Jews all over the city celebrated with their families. Outside the city walls, He crossed the narrow Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives.

A large church dominates the traditional place of Jesus’ agonized prayer on the night before His crucifixion, but our tour guide leads us to a private olive grove behind the church. An Israeli gardener, pruning shears in hand, opens the gate to the walled enclosure for our group, then closes it behind us, muffling the noise and rush of modern Jerusalem. It’s easy to imagine that the garden where Jesus prayed was peaceful, too, as the hushed city and His hapless disciples slept. Their sleepiness is understandable. They have just eaten an enormous meal and have drunk the four required cups of wine in a celebration that rarely ends before midnight. I would be drowsy, too.

Olive trees have flourished for centuries on this western slope of the Mount of Olives, as they do to this day. The ancient trees are not very tall, about the height of an apple tree, but the gnarled trunks of some of the oldest ones are as big around as a barrel. There is no fruit on the branches this winter day since olives are harvested in the fall, but the trees’ slender silvery-green leaves remain on the branches year-round.

Directly across the narrow Kidron Valley from us is the mountain where God’s Temple once stood. If Jesus had looked up from His prayers, He might have seen the Temple’s
golden roof glowing softly in the moonlight. Jews from all over the known world gathered there to worship and to watch the priests sacrifice lambs every morning and evening. Since the altar fire burned continuously throughout the night, Jesus might have smelled the aroma of the evening sacrifice as He prayed.

Our guide explains that Gethsemane means “oil press”; Christ prayed in the Garden of the Oil Press. Old Testament worship required large quantities of olive oil to accompany the sacrifices and to burn continuously in the sanctuary’s golden lamps. To extract the valuable oil, the olives were first bruised and crushed, then squeezed and pressed beneath heavy stone weights. Our guide picks up a discarded olive from beneath one of the trees and crushes it in his hand. The first juice that oozes out is the reddish-brown color of blood.

On the night that Jesus prayed here, He was about to be broken and crushed, then placed beneath the tremendous weight of our sins. His sweat was as great drops of blood as He prayed beneath the rustling branches of the olive trees, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). After reading this Scripture passage to us, our guide invites us to find a quiet place alone in the garden to pray. We scatter, and I find a large rock to sit on.

While our guide was reading Scripture to us, I was watching the gardener quietly going about his work, pruning the trees in his care. But he wasn’t simply removing a dead twig or two, snipping gently here and there. This man has been chopping ruthlessly. As I’ve watched him mutilate these poor trees, I’ve been tempted to stand up and shout, “Stop! That’s too much! You’re going to kill them!”

Admittedly, I know little about gardening. When I prune the greenery in my yard back home, I’m much too compassionate, fearful of damaging an expensive tree or shrub. Perhaps that’s why the crab apple tree outside my office window looks tangled and overgrown, and why my lilac bush hasn’t bloomed in years. Even so, this gardener was going too far in my opinion, chopping as if he had a grudge against the trees. The pile of discarded branches accumulating on the ground looked larger than the volume of branches that remained on the stumps. Maybe he intended to pull up the stumps when he finished, then raze the grove and plant a different crop. But no, this was a typical winter’s pruning, our guide assured me when I asked him.

An hour or so before Jesus prayed here on the night of His arrest, He had shared the Passover Feast with His disciples. The lengthy meal gave Him an opportunity to teach His final lessons—the last cramming session before the big exam when they’d be left on their own. One of those lessons was “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (John 15:1–2). As I watched, this Israeli gardener demonstrated Jesus’ lesson. True, the dead, fruitless branches deserved to be cut off. But he also pruned the healthy, fruit-bearing branches so they would bear even more fruit—assuming that the trees lived through this massacre, I thought to myself.

So often in this past year, I have questioned God as I faced losses and changes that seemed to cut too deeply. Even some of the fruit-bearing branches in my life had been ruthlessly chopped off. I have felt as wounded and mutilated as these truncated trees as I lost parts of myself. “Stop!” I have wanted
to shout. “You’re cutting too much! I’ll have nothing left!” But now I see that God, like this gardener, knows what He is doing. These olive trees will bear even more fruit next season. And so, in faith, will I.

The gardener stoops to gather the fallen branches and carry them away to be burned. I know that if I returned to this grove next fall, the harvest of olives would weigh down the remaining branches. This isn’t the first season that the gardener has radically pruned these trees, and it certainly won’t be the last. The cycle is meant to continue, season after season: pruning, growing, bearing fruit, producing oil, pruning once again. “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples” (John 15:8).

The stripping away that God does in our lives only looks harsh to our untrained eyes. He asks us to bear it patiently, for our own good, trusting that abundant fruit will follow to His glory. May my prayer be, “Not my will, but yours be done
.
”

The High Priest’s House

The view from the High Priest’s house is stunning. Caiaphas had the wealth and power and influence to situate his home on one of the city’s many hills where he could survey the surrounding mountains and valleys. The creamy limestone of God’s Holy Temple would have glowed in the distance, its golden roof gleaming in the sunlight. We have traveled here from the Garden of Gethsemane by bus, but after His arrest, Jesus would have been forced to walk all this way in the dark of night, bound and shackled and prodded forward by bullying Temple guards. His faithful disciples had scattered and run.

Of course a church now occupies this site, but the long set of stone steps leading up the hill from street level dates from the first century. I can walk where Jesus walked with certainty—if indeed I want to arrive at the place of His unjust trial, hear the false accusations hurled at Him, witness the unfair verdict of “guilty and deserving of death.”

Inside the church, we descend another set of stone steps leading down to a dank, cold dungeon, carved into the bedrock beneath Caiaphas’ house. Iron rings imbedded in stone walls once shackled the prisoners to prevent escape. Again, I am aware of the authenticity of this place. I am following in Jesus’ footsteps as He sat imprisoned here, awaiting trial before the Sanhedrin. Without warning, our guide extinguishes the lights, leaving us in darkness. Jesus, the light of the world, sat in this darkness, chained and beaten. For me.

I am glad to return outside to the courtyard, but my relief lasts only a moment. This is where Peter, once a faithful disciple, denied three times that he ever knew Jesus, swearing an oath. As he huddled around the fire with the others to escape the dark, uncertain night, he had no idea how this crisis in his life would end. All he could see was that the man he had followed and trusted as his Messiah now sat in a dungeon. The religious movement he had believed in and sacrificed his career for had come to nothing, and there was a very good chance that Peter would also face arrest. Jesus had said that He would be betrayed, that He would suffer and die, then rise again on the third day. But promises have a way of vanishing like smoke, driven by the strong winds of fear when we’re facing trouble and uncertainty. Peter must have forgotten Isaiah’s prophecy, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).

Like Peter, I have uttered words of betrayal as my fear shouted louder than my faith, saying in effect, “I don’t know Jesus!” As darkness extinguished the light of His word, I’ve doubted that His promises would ever come true for me. I may not have screamed my denials in a public courtyard, but whenever I give in to fear and worry, my soul denies Christ’s power and promises. Yes, I understand how Peter felt when he stood here that night.

I hear singing in the distance, and a moment later, a tour group from Africa emerges through the church doors wearing colorful
dashikis
and turbans. They are singing, clapping, praising God, and though I don’t understand their language, I recognize praise and joy and the name
Jesu.
Could Peter have imagined on that dark, hopeless night that one day the praises of his African brothers and sisters would fill this courtyard? I don’t think so. Our imaginations are too limited, our faith too small. But here they are, men and women of God just like Peter, disciples of Jesus from a distant continent.

One of Christ’s last promises to Peter—and to us—was “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). When the only thing I can see is a dark night and a shadowy courtyard, when fear begins whispering words of betrayal, I can hang on to Christ’s promise. With Him, things are never as they seem.

Calvary

Our journey through Passion Week continues as we wind our way through the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City. The
Via
Dolorosa
, or Walk of Sorrow, is marked out for us, showing the route that Jesus walked to the cross. It’s hard
for me to think about what that final journey may have been like as I maneuver to avoid the crush of people and vehicles. Scripture says the chief priests first forced Jesus to climb up the Temple mount to the Antonia Fortress at dawn and stand before Pilate. By 9:00 a.m., He had been cruelly flogged and mocked and beaten and led outside the walls to be crucified. At the time when He was being nailed to the cross, the Temple priests were sacrificing the morning Passover lamb for the sins of the people. As His lifeless body was being taken down before sunset that day, the priests would be offering the evening Passover sacrifice at the Temple.

And so we come to Calvary. According to traditions that are thousands of years old, both the hill where Jesus was crucified and the garden tomb where He lay until His resurrection are housed within the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The site was outside the city walls in Jesus’ day but is now within the walls of the Old City, near the Arab bazaar. The shapeless, windowless church appears very unpromising from the outside with its stained, mismatched stones, not at all like the soaring cathedrals I’ve seen in Europe. Its antiquity and the fact that men have fought over this church for centuries are probably to blame for its appearance, causing the fortress-like buildings to be built and razed, won and lost numerous times.