Simon Sebag Montefiore's remarkable book, Jerusalem: The Biography, tells the epic story of that city so holy and brutally human. From its Canaanite roots and Davidic birth, it has been claimed by Jews, Babylonians, Romans, Maccabees, Christians, Muslims, Crusaders, Ottomans, Pilgrims and Europeans. And yet it seems always to elude possession. It is a city strangely schizophrenic, the place of dreams and nightmares. Apparently, it is easier to sing about Jerusalem than it is to live there.
How can a place so holy to so many also inspire such violence, brutality and oppression? Well, I guess the question itself holds the answer. That which is most holy and revered can also inspire our most vile possessiveness. Jerusalem, it seems, is a city of clashing absolutes coexisting in explosive tension.
This Sunday, as we continue along the Lenten road with Jesus, we will hear his lament-"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" If you look closely, even as we survey its streets from afar, I believe we will recognize our own humanity-our hunger for the holy and our devotion to ourselves. We are the huggers of the status quo offended by Jesus, and we are the disciples who follow him. We are with the crowd that praises him on Sunday and the mob that mocks him on Friday. We are the women weeping and the men fleeing. We are the sinners for whom he died and the saints he calls.
Jerusalem is our home, all beauty and sordidness, all possibility and disappointment. And it is for the sake of such a city that Christ came. He walks our streets of poverty and worships in our holy temples. He comes to us in all our hypocrisy and offers the transforming power of God's grace.
And if we continue to follow, we will come to that place just outside the walls where the holy and the human collide like atoms. We come to the cross, where truth is revealed and violence spends itself in futility. "I will take the worst you can give," Christ says, "but I will not return it." Here in the city of contradictions is revealed a purity of purpose and the power of mercy.
In that moment that is the cross is judgment and forgiveness. In that moment that is the cross is the death that brings life. In that moment that is the cross is an end and beginning. In that moment that is the cross is the greatest hope our weary Jerusalem will ever know.
