The Way of Suffering

First off Wednesday held the greatest blessing: Meir!!

Meir has been our guide for the last several trips. He had a previous engagement and was only able to join us for this last day in Jerusalem. We miss Shany, but are so happy to have this time with Meir.

We drove around the city. Meir began to explain to us that until 1967, the road we were driving on was a No Man’s Land between Jordan and Israel. This road was a moat that Herod built to protect Jerusalem from the north. There is a story about a hospital that was on the edge of the No Man’s Land. There was a French nun who was standing at a window in the hospital. She began to laugh so hard her false teeth fell out of her mouth, the window and landed in No Man’s Land. There was no retrieving them without an international incident. It took two weeks of bureaucratic intervention to get them back to her.

We walked around to the walls of the city into the cemetery in front of the Golden Gate. This provides a spectacular view of the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane.

I once heard a message by Beth Moore. She went throughout the Scripture. Old Testament and New, and catalogue how God’s presence entered and left the city. It says that to the fill the Temple, the spirit of God took this route: down the Mount of Olives and up passed us into the city. Jesus came into the city the same way, was crucified and then left the city and ascended into heaven by the same route back up the Mount of Olives.

We moved on to the Pool of Bethesda/ The Church of St. Anne

As we walk past the church. There was the sweetest Irish priest who shook Meir’s hand. He look at us all and said: “Thank you for coming today. The Lord is surely in for a treat!”

Pool of Bethesda

After this meeting, we proceeded down to the pool. And some of the guys mid line, took a detour and we ended up in a cistern at bottom of the Pool. There was actually water here. James sensed the power was present to heal. So we began to pray.

We went into the Church of St. Anne for some singing.

We stepped out on to the beginning of the Via Dolorosa. Meir explained the stations of the Cross. Typically, a Roman Catholic series of events (some are not found in our scripture) there is still such an appreciation for the devotion and careful contemplation given to every step.

Meir went a little more in depth about the actual crucifixion process. The Romans did not nail through the hand. There was no flesh or bone to stop the hand from being ripped through (between the fingers) from the weight of the body. The piercing would have happened between the two bones on the wrist just below the palm so the hand would have kept them on there. The would have done the same process in the leg. Nailing the lower leg between the two bones. They would have turned the leg so as to get between those bones to the wood. We know this because in a grave near the place of crucifixion, we found a bone with the nail through it in this way. He also told us that they would have bent on leg up to cover the private parts of the one being crucified.

Pastor Taylor stood on the steps and said, “I want to make sure to give the youth group version of the place we are in. Many of us who have been a couple of times try to mine the details of every spot, but I do not want our first comers to miss the fact that we are walking the Way to the Cross. It probably didn’t look like this, but it was here that Jesus walked the road in suffering that made a way for you.”

We got to the place where the Pavement was. Archaeologists have found carved in stone the

game that would have been played to gamble over Jesus’ garments. It is here that He was stripped of all of His possessions. He was left with nothing.

We were led into a beautiful chapel. Meir told us that He had never been allowed to use this room to meet in. He always had to just point at it from the back, but never sit and share in it. Wow.

He began to speak to us about the fact that Jesus’s crucifixion was unusual. The Romans did not normally go so far. They didn’t parade people through the streets and make them carry the Cross alone. They didn’t give everyone a crown and a robe. They did this to mock Jesus.

He shared that the Cardo was like the main street of ancient Jerusalem. It means heart. Heart of the city. I pointed out that it meant that the Blood of Jesus fell on the stones that mad up the heart of the city. His heartbeat flowed through the veins that are the streets of the city. If you think of Jerusalem like a heart with arteries and veins. His blood flowed through the city.

(Side note: in this chapel the art work was very interesting. The Cross above the altar included the four spcies from the book of Daniel. If any of you have every studied the temperaments. You would recognize: the lion, the ox, the eagle and the man. Each were painted on the four corners of the Cross.)

We went down to the pavement. Pastor Kim read the Scripture:

Molly began to sing the Via Dolorosa. It was so powerful.

We spent a moment praying at the pavement. When we stood to go the guide from the group behind us came and asked to speak to the girl who was singing. Their whole group was so sweet. They wanted to know who she was and thanked her for not holding back. (We got them information on how to find her music online. Molly Keller is on itunes, Spotify and youtube. I put her album on especially when I need to find a peaceful place of worship. Check her out!)

From this point we had an interesting decision to make. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the Cross/Calvary) has been under renovations fro several years now. Today was the unveiling. This

meant it was going to be very crowded and that dignitaries from all over would be coming. (Erez who showed up at the church of St. Anne told us that it had taken him a while to get there from Jaffe Gate

because they had blockaded off sections because the Prime Minister of Greece was there. So as we do often, we had a quick change of plans.

We headed instead to the German Colony for lunch and then on to Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust museum here in Israel. Pastor Jerry had shared earlier in the week that when God loves something, there are people in this world that will hate it and try to destroy it. This is true for God’s people. There is so much information and so much devastation it is hard to express. Two things stood out to me. We walked through the Children’s Memorial. It took a very long time for an artist to be found that would be willing to tackle this feat. No one wanted to make a visual representation of the children dying in death factories (which is what the concentration camps were.) The artist they finally found was an engineer. He strategically places thousands of mirrors to reflect off of each other. He placed five candles in the room which represented the 1 million children who died in the Holocaust. Ranging from one day old to 18 years old. The mirrors catch the light of the candles and bounce around the room. The reflected lights represented all of the possibilities

lost. These children would never grow up and have families of their own. A voice over the intercom reads the names, places and ages of the children. I asked Meir how long it takes for the recording to repeat itself. “One million names? Two weeks.”

I guess what really struck me was the fact that right here, I was speaking to Meir. If he would have been born in Europe. This may have been his fate. His lineage would have been cut off. He has four children and fifteen grandchildren. There would have been none of this.

Jesus’s words: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The other thing that caught my attention while we were walking through was Ryan Teddy’s response. He asked me to walk with him through the museum because he didn’t want to be alone and he thought he might just cry the whole time with his dad, Brent. So we walked through. Ryan has just started learning about the Holocaust last year in school. I remember my

own exposure to this dark time in history at the same age. I told him to let me know if he needed to move on from one space to another. Watching him, the part that caught in him most were not the graphic images of mass graves. I mean it rips everyone’s hearts, but Ryan became overwhelmed at the sight of lists of names. He would just look at me and say, “I can’t…” I guess seeing their names side by side and the lists going on forever overwhelmed him. He asked me about the striped clothes. I had just walked by a video of a woman sharing that she and the other women were put into a room full of barbers. Their heads were shaved. She said, “All of a sudden, we could not recognize one another.” I explained to Ryan that everything was taken from these people, even their identity. They were given striped clothes and numbers tattooed and sown to their coats. Their humanity was stolen. Their names.

We stood before one list and I felt Ryan come stand at my shoulder. I heard him breathe sharply when he saw another list, but when he saw whose list, he sighed a great big sigh of relief and he relaxed a bit. This was Oscar Schindler’s list of people that he saved through his factory. It wasn’t nearly as long as the other list, but it was full of hope. I explained to Ryan that Mr. Schindler lost all of his wealth in trying to save one more Jew from the camps, from death. He grieved that he wasn’t able to save more. He has a tree planted in the garden here of Righteous Gentiles. He is also buried in Jerusalem. A great honor. People visit his grave everyday and thank him for sparing their lives and the lives of the ones they love.