Jerusalem

I will be going to Korea early tomorrow morning to present a paper at an An Chunggun conference and I wanted to post at least one entry on our trip before going. In this entry I will focus on our second day in Israel. We visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem but so may was going on I will only discuss the former in this entry.
This is Jerusalem as seen from the Mount of Olives, which is a place Jesus often visited before his crucifixion and it was there that he ascended into Heaven.

This is the Church of all Nations (I think it's named that because of the international funding for its construction) just below the Mount of Olives where the Garden of Gethsemane is located. The church is very beautiful inside but is also very sad, which is appropriate since this is the place where Jesus was so overcome with emotion that he sweated blood. I didn't get a good picture of the inside and I think it's one of those places you really have to be there.

Here is a rock where it is believed that Jesus prayed. I'm guessing though that the identification is a bit shakey. In any case, it was very moving to be there. I always find "the agony in the garden" to be very sad since Jesus asked the disciples to stay up with him but they kept falling asleep. I think that's one of the few times in the Bible when he actually asked for anything and, I suppose to make his Passion complete, it was denied him. I always wish I could have been there with him but I'm made of much less stronger stuff than the disciples and so I probably would have fallen asleep too (or just ran away).

Station Five of the Via Dolorosa, (The Way of Suffering).

Station Five is where Simon the Cyrene helped Jesus carry the cross.

As you can see, the streets are very cramped. It was hard to keep up with our tour guide. Plus there was another problem. A few days before went to Jerusalem, at the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock some young Muslims threw stones at a French tourist group that they thought were Jews who were there to carry out some sort of political activity that they didn’t like. Because of that, when we were in Jerusalem (Friday, the Muslim day of prayers) Muslims under 50 were banned from going to the Dome of the Rock (they wanted to keep out the young people). To get to the Via Dolorosa we walked through the Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock area to the Muslim quarter where we were caught in a confrontation between young Muslims, angry that they were banned from going to the Dome of the Rock and Israeli police. A disturbance broke out that split our tour group in two. We got through it ok but it was pretty wild. Thanks be to God we got through it ok. I don't understand the complicated political situation there but I hope and pray things will improve soon. There was a LOT of tension.

This is the inside of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which was built over both the site of the crucifixion and the empty tomp of Jesus. This part marks the crucifixion. Below the altar is a stone with a hole in it where it is believed the cross was placed.
Here you can see someone praying at the stone. After praying people would walk by the man on the left and buy a candle if they wanted. I wanted to pray at the stone but we had almost no time and the line was really long. So I just went to the exit part and bought a candle.
Here is the candle I lit, it's the middle one in the back row. Dad and I always tried to light a candle for the people back home whenever we could.
The tomb of Jesus is located below this structure. PBS did a really good documentary on it: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_tomb/index.html
This is the stone of unction or annointing where it is believed Jesus's body was washed and annoited after death. I was able to pray there at last because there was no line!

The visit to Jerusalem was very moving. I find when reading the Bible or devotional materials that things often seem so abstract. One of the fruits of going to the Holy Land was seeing the physical realities of things. For example, the different places described in the Bible are actually in a lot closer proximity to each other than I had imagined. Thus, when Jesus prayed at Gethsemane he could have seen Jerusalem and where he was going to be crucified which must have made things a lot more painful.

Off to Korea soon! God bless!