Tuesday – The Way to Jerusalem

continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea

The way to Jerusalem is paved with great expectations.

Jerusalem is after all the city of the great King, the joy of the whole earth. It is Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest. It is the place where the living God has chosen to put his name. It is the city where David built his own house and then planned God’s house. It is the city of dreams, the Holy City, the ultimate place of pilgrimage. It was and is the city of breathtaking beauty up in the Judaean mountains, encompassing in itself steep hills and deep gullies, with stunning views and gorgeous buildings, honeycombed with twisting alleyways, shafts of sunlight into beautiful courtyards, full of smells and spices and olives, fresh bread and sweet wine, and the sound of many languages, many voices raised in prayer, many cocks crowing.

It is also a place of great pain. David captured Jerusalem from the Jesubites 3000 years ago and David too destroyed it by force. Since then Jerusalem has been besieged, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, besieged, and fought over, again and again. The joy of the world and the pain of the world, side by side and somehow intermingling. “We are going up to Jerusalem,” said Jesus, “and the Son on man will be handed over to suffering a death.” The message they wanted to hear and the message they didn’t want to hear. They came together.
It is often said that Jerusalem is a focal point for three great religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it is actually a focal point of four, because we must add another “ism” name Tourism. Tourism is the modern secular version of pilgrimage, in which we go to famous places to see well known sights, not to meet with God or to receive healing of blessing, but to see what our culture tells us what we ought to see, to expand our own horizons and experiences, to buy souvenirs that make us feel good when we get back home, to take photos and videos so that we can steal something of the reality of the place and make it our won private reality. Perhaps you go to Jerusalem to worship the God of secularism, the god of a liberal culture that tells you to observe from a critical distance, but not get involved. To sense the magic of the place, and then to buy the postcards. To say a prayer perhaps if that’s your kind of thing, but not to stay on your knees all day. We’ve to get back to the museum or back to the hotel for tea. Our reality must remain undisturbed. Take no notice of that cock crowing in the background.

In Jewish history and scripture there were two main reasons in particular for going to Jerusalem. You went to enthrone the King, or to pay homage. And you went there to meet God, to offer sacrifice, to celebrate his love, his salvation, his covenant. It was never quite that easy of course. To be near the king was to be in the danger zone. The way to the presence of God remained dark and mysterious, assisted and sometime blocked by priests and well intentioned stewards. And for long periods of Jewish history, ancient and modern, it was rumoured that God had abandoned Jerusalem, at least temporally. Enthroning the king and meeting God that was what Jesus was inviting his followers to do with all its multiple ambiguities.
But the disciples with their home spun bravado were not ready for the sort of enthronement that Jesus has in mind. When the Son of man goes to Jerusalem he must suffer many things at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and scribes and is killed and on the third day is raised. The disciples are not ready to see their hopes crucified. They are not ready to see their great expectations turned upside down and inside out in order to be fulfilled. They want the kingdom of God the way they’ve always wanted it. They expect it to be tough, they expect it to be challenged, it’s going to be hard, you may have to suffer, and you’ve not going to like it.

The disciples perhaps don’t penetrate the innermost meaning of the challenge. If anyone wants to come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross, for anyone who wants to save his life will loose it, and those who want to lose their life for my sake will find it. What will it profit someone to gain the whole world, but forfeit their life, their soul; and their heart? The kingdom is coming and sooner than the disciples think. Their expectations will be more than fulfilled. But the only way for that to happen is for them to be first dashed to pieces, broken in fragments on the dusty floor, so that God can make a new jigsaw of them, one that conforms to his sort of, kingdom. Skilled craftsmen take months to make a conventional throne; it took the soldiers only a few minutes to construct one for Jesus.

When we think of Peter with his blustering confidence, his attempt to order Jesus about, we are bound to think also of the cock crowing in the early morning near the governor’s palace in Jerusalem. And we learn – and perhaps this is part of the lesson of all who would venture to a holy city, a holy shrine, to listen to the cock crowing every time we allow our own great expectations, in whatever field of sphere we may cherish them, to dominate our horizons and blot out the call to suffer, the call to lose our life, the call to take up the cross. We all have lessons for wanting to be enthroned, our private way of distorting his kingship so it suits our own aspirations and ambitions. Alas the way to Jerusalem must always be the way of thwarted expectations.

And the test of whether this journey to Jerusalem is genuine is to ask the questions whether you’re prepared for God to remake you and lovingly break the brittle you you’ve so carefully constructed. To be like soft clay in his hands, ready to be remoulded so that God can make of you what he had in mind all along. Jerusalem, that great city is a symbol of God’s great expectations, which will by no means coincide with our own. The only true way to enter Jerusalem is perhaps to go, like Abraham, no knowing where you are going, or what it is that you will meet there, perhaps to suspend a clinging and anxious belief, may be a sceptical unbelief, to simply to be, be open, to be still, to wait in silence for the strange God who still comes to those who wait in silence.

The way 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 those who like us are learning the pilgrim way, learn to listen, in scripture and sacrament, in silence and suffering for the voice of the one who loves us more deeply than we love ourselves. And that, whether or not we ever make the geographical journey to Jerusalem itself, is the journey to which we are all summoned.

Psalm 17 v1-8; Luke 19 v 28-44