Holy Land Pilgrimage: Day 9

Tuesday, May 9, 2023

We visited Jerusalem's Mount Zion today, seeing more sites related to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We began at the Hall of the Last Supper, also the site of “King David’s Tomb” (which doesn’t contain King David but has been a place for revering his memory and significance for millennia). There’s good reason to think the location for the Last Supper is accurate; it’s been honored at this site since the first pilgrims came. But this is a top contender in the category of attempting to honor a spiritual reality while actually undercutting its power. What remains there is a Crusader building that amazingly wasn’t destroyed when the Muslims kicked the knights back to Europe because the site was associated with King David, who is also revered in Islam. 

But the actual “upper room” where Jesus washed the feet of his friends and asked them to re-member him in bread and wine – that space would have been like the kataluma, or guest house, on the hill above the cave we saw in Bethlehem. I love the idea that Jesus was born in a place like that and chose to give himself away on Maundy Thursday in a place like that – and that the Church was born on Pentecost in this same upper room, according to tradition. It’s too bad we don’t usually bring that sense of intimacy to our abstract understandings of Incarnation, Eucharist, and Pentecost.

The interrogation room, where Jesus was strung up
and beaten.

Then we went to the nearby Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, which is certainly more than just another church. Here, the Holy Week action shifts to Thursday night into Friday morning. After Jesus was arrested at Gethsemane, the authorities took him first to the headquarters of Caiaphas, the high priest (located under the present church), where Jesus was interrogated and tortured. What remains of that moment is the torture room and an underground holding cell – a pit carved in the rock. The ropes laced into the stone makes it clear what happened in the torture room: The prisoner was strung up and beaten, then dumped into the pit of the holding cell. It was intensely real … as was the faith of the hundreds of pilgrims lined up to walk through those spaces and stand where their Lord had suffered. As we stood at the top of the stairs, waiting to enter the holding cell, the voices of the group just ahead of us rose up from the pit. They were from an African nation, though I didn’t learn where; and as they stood in this place where the battered Jesus sat bleeding in the darkness, they sang “Hallelujah, What a Savior!” Here’s the verse that sticks with me:

Jesus' holding cell (imagine it without the lights).

        Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
        in my place condemned he stood,
        sealed my pardon with his blood:
        Hallelujah, what a Savior!

But without the rich, slow, soulful harmony of those pilgrims, praising God in the pit of darkness, you’ll have to imagine their sound that made us weep.

The church is named for St. Peter “in Gallicantu” – St. Peter and the crowing rooster. Emerging from Jesus’ pit of darkness, you pass by this church that remembers Peter’s ultimate failure, and the failure of all of us – the times, large and small, when we succumb to the temptation to deny Who we know. The statue in the courtyard captures the moment, as the woman recognizes Peter’s Galilean accent and identifies him in front of the soldiers. Peter chooses not to join Jesus in the pit, so he denies him – but the cock’s crows remind Peter that Jesus had told him this would happen, even though he’d insisted that he’d never abandon his Lord. And so, Peter finds himself in a different pit, where some of the rest of us have been, too.

Temple Mount in the model of Jerusalem during Jesus' time.

Then we made a quick visit to the Israel Museum to see the display about the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was a bit disappointing in that what you see are reproductions. The scrolls come from the community of the Essenes, a quasi-monastic Jewish sect at the time of Jesus who isolated themselves in the desert, by the Dead Sea, seeking to live purely and piously enough to be worthy of the Messiah’s coming (and living as a protest movement against the corruption and worldliness they saw in the Pharisees and Sadducees in charge). At the museum, we also saw an outdoor model of Jerusalem in its Second-Temple glory – the Jerusalem Jesus would have seen – following Herod the Great’s building program and Temple improvements. It was a great way to get our bearings in a city that seems to specialize in having more than one name for everything, honoring the same thing at multiple locations, and remembering multiple people or events at a single site.

Ritual bath (mikvah) in the Essene community
at Qumran.

Having seen the display about the Dead Sea Scrolls, we then headed down to the Dead Sea and Qumran, where the scrolls were found. In about 45 minutes, we dropped 4,000 feet of elevation and rose 18 degrees in temperature. The scrolls were stored in jars in the caves that dot the cliffs of Qumran, and they sat there for 2,000 years, miraculously preserved by the climate. In 1947, a goat, especially skilled in scaling rock walls, made his way into a cave, and his Bedouin goatherd tossed in a rock to scare the goat out. Hearing something break, the Bedouin climbed in; and the rest literally is history. Over the next nine years, goatherds and scholars found more than 900 manuscripts (many fragmentary) of Biblical books, apocryphal works ultimately not included in the Bible, and documents outlining the Essenes’ rule of life. Looking up at that cave and standing in the midst of the Essenes’ ruined community – with its cisterns, ritual baths, dining hall, pottery kiln, and other markers of daily life – you’re struck by the haphazard nature of both tragedy and joy. The Essenes weren’t the cause of Rome’s war against the Jewish people from 66 to 70 CE, but they were its last casualties, dying by mass suicide in the fortress of Masada. By the same token, if it hadn’t been for a stray goat, their community’s scrolls might still be treasures in clay jars suspended in time.

The Dead Sea, 1,400 feet below sea level.

And then, since we were virtually across the road from the Dead Sea, we stopped there for lunch and a float. The exercise in super-buoyancy was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. You float on your back, and your feet just don’t sink. It’s even a little hard to make them go underwater enough to stand on your feet. It was cool … but, as more than one pilgrim said, getting back on the bus, “That’s something I don’t have to do again.”

The day ended back at the hotel with a presentation from two men who helped found the group The Parents Circle – Families Forum (take the time to visit). It’s a reconciliation movement of Israeli and Palestinian parents who’ve all lost children in the occupation and uprisings over the past decades. These men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, both lost young daughters to the violence but came to see their common humanity, grow in respect, and ultimately become like brothers. But this is not just a feel-good story. It’s a call to do whatever one can, wherever one is, to point out the absurdity of violence as a cure for violence and to question the underlying assumptions of policies we’ve been taught to support unquestioningly. For us pilgrims, on a day we began by standing in Jesus’ torture room and prison cell, it’s hard not to think about what he might have to say. The point isn’t which is the “right” political side to back – and as soon as we start thinking that way, we’ve bound ourselves to “the way it’s always been.” Instead, I think Jesus might just look at us intently, as he locked eyes with Peter once the cock crowed the second time, and say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).