Week 26 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Zechariah 8:20-23; Psalm 87; Luke 9:51-56

The city of Jerusalem is the geographical centre of salvation history. A place of infinite sorrow and immeasurable joy, its history is characterised by a fierce and uncompromising character, not only in the centuries before Jesus, but also in those that followed, right up to the present day.

In today's Gospel, we are told twice that Jesus 'set his face' towards Jerusalem. The holy city is the site of Mount Zion, the site of the Temple Mount, and had become the symbol of the people and their relationship with God. The city is Israel, and God's relationship with Zion, the place of his dwelling, is God's relationship with Israel, the people he has made his own.

Jerusalem encompasses all the joy and all the pain that have accompanied that covenant relationship over the centuries. It was the place where God had revealed himself most fully 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 God's wisdom and guidance were to spread to all nations.

It is not right for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem, says Jesus, and so when God finally sent His Son, the Son turned his face towards Jerusalem. The first devastation of the city, with the loss of the Temple and the experience of exile, had ultimately led to a new freedom in the people's understanding of God and a new intimacy in their relationship with God. The great prophets of the exile helped them to reach this understanding and this new intimacy. God became at once more universal (Creator and Lord of all the earth) and more local (all nations will come to Mount Zion), more transcendent (my ways and my thoughts are very high) and more intimate (I will establish a new covenant written in the hearts of men).

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 place of God among men. He is destroyed in Jerusalem. His decision to turn his face towards Jerusalem was not a political strategy, but a theological necessity: he had come to do the Father's will, and that meant walking towards Jerusalem.

Jesus already lives in complete freedom and total intimacy with the Father, things he wishes to share with his disciples. On his journey towards the earthly Jerusalem, he already lives in the city that is to come. With his death and resurrection in Jerusalem, he established a new and eternal freedom, a new and eternal intimacy, in the relationship between his people and God: this is the grace of the New Testament, a new dwelling place for God among us, the grace brought in the earthen vessel that is the Church.

With every loss of the Holy Place in the course of the people's history there is a fresh appreciation of God's otherness and God's closeness. With every entry into the darkness of God's absence there is a deeper understanding of how God has identified with his people. God dwells now in his people, wherever they live in the world, for they dwell in Him who is always near, always close, with his face always turned towards His people.