Days 7-8
Wow! So many things these last two days.
Our excursion in Israel shifted to Jerusalem on Friday. We started the morning in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed the night before his betrayal, and where his friends fled from him in fear of his captors. We saw olive trees in this garden that are so old that they would have been there when Jesus prayed. It was a sobering experience.
From Gethsemane, we made our way to the Garden Tomb. There are two places that are thought to be the place of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. The Garden Tomb is my favorite. We’ll visit the other, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher tomorrow. But I love the Garden Tomb because it is unspoiled. There are no massive and overly ornate buildings obscuring the view or interfering with the atmosphere of the site. It’s just a garden, as it was 2,000 years ago. This tomb is exactly as Jesus’ tomb is described in Scripture as. To see it empty, as it also was in Scripture the day Jesus was resurrected, is an amazing experience. Jesus’ tomb is empty. He is alive!
We then visited the traditional site of the upper room. We know this room was not the actual room that Jesus shared his last supper with the disciples, because that building was destroyed by the Romans when they sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD. But this building was built just a few hundred years later, and there is good reason to believe that it is located just above where the original upper room was located. From there we walked through old Jerusalem and made our way to a very ancient wall that was built by King Hezekiah about half-way in time between King David and Jesus.
Friday evening is the start of Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath), so we made our way to the western wall of the Temple compound to watch the receiving of the sabbath by Jewish young adults, dancing and singing, rejoicing in God’s gift of rest. There are many aspects of Jewish culture that I love, and this is one of them. Many of us also prayed for Israel at the wall.
On Saturday morning we drove to the top of the Mount of Olives, another favorite place of Jesus, and the site of his promised return. After reading Scripture together, we walked the very same path that Jesus walked from the top of the mount down to the Garden, as Jesus did on Palm Sunday.We spent the afternoon in Bethlehem. It is a bustling city that is jammed with traffic today, but it was a tiny village when Jesus was born there. We visited the Church of the Nativity, and entered the cave below this church, that 
as been venerated by Christians as the site of Jesus’ birth since the second century. Though we cannot know for sure that it was, the fact that it was, at the least, very close by, reminded us of Jesus’ humility in entering the human race in such an insignificant place.It was a long day for sure. It didn’t end until after we attended a sound and light show in David’s Tower complex, where the history of Jerusalem was put on display in a beautiful artistic presentation.Tomorrow is our last day, and the schedule is packed full. I’ll tell you about it on the airplane trip back home.