The city of Jerusalem is the geographical
centre of salvation history. A place of endless sorrow and unmeasured joy, there
is something fierce and uncompromising about its history, not only in the
centuries before the time of Jesus but in the centuries after him, continuing
even to our own day.
We are told twice in today’s gospel that
Jesus ‘set his face’ towards Jerusalem. The holy city is the place of Mount
Zion, the place of the Temple mount, and had come to symbolise the people and
their relationship with God. The city is Israel and God’s dealings with Zion,
the place of His dwelling, are God’s dealings with Israel, the people He has
made His own. Jerusalem encapsulates all the joy and all the sorrow that have
attended that covenant relationship over the centuries. It was the place where
God revealed Himself most completely through the words of His prophets. It was
the place of liturgy and sacrifice, offered in the presence of God. It was the place of royal power from which the
wisdom and guidance of God were to go forth to all the nations.
It is not right that a prophet should
perish outside Jerusalem, Jesus says, and so when God finally sent His Son, the
Son set his face towards Jerusalem. The first devastation of the city, with the
loss of the Temple and the experience of exile, had eventually led to a new
freedom in the people’s understanding of God and to a new intimacy in their
relationship with God. The great prophets of the exile helped them towards that
understanding and towards that new intimacy. God became at once more universal
(Creator and Lord of all the earth) and more local (all the nations will come
to Mount Zion), more transcendent (my ways and thoughts are far above) and more
intimate (I will establish a new covenant written on human hearts).
The final destruction of Jerusalem is the
killing of Jesus. He is Israel, the people called to be faithful. He is the
Temple, the dwelling of God with human beings. He is destroyed in Jerusalem.
His decision to set his face towards Jerusalem was not a political strategy, it
was a theological necessity: he had come to do the Father’s will and that meant
journeying towards Jerusalem. He is already living with complete freedom and
total intimacy the relationship with the Father in which he wishes his
disciples to share. As he journeys towards the earthly Jerusalem he is already
living in the city that is to come. Through his death and resurrection in
Jerusalem he has established a new freedom and a new intimacy in the
relationship between His people and the Eternal Father: this is the grace of
the New Testament, a new abiding of God with us, the grace carried in the
earthen vessel that is the Church.
With each loss of Jerusalem there is a new
and deeper understanding of God. With each loss of the Holy Place there is a
new appreciation of the otherness and closeness of God. With each entry into
the darkness of God’s absence there is a more profound realization of the way
in which God has identified Himself with His people, abiding now in them
wherever in the world they live as they abide in Him who is always near, always
approaching, God’s face always set towards us.
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