Israel Day Seven

Today was a very emotional day for us. We began the day at the Mount of Olives, traveling down the “Palm Sunday Road” as they call it. It goes from Bethany to Jerusalem, and overlooks the whole city. From atop the Mount you can see the place where the devil took Jesus in Round Two of the temptation story, the corner overlooking the Kidron Valley. The valley is much deeper and narrower than I imagined. The Mount of Olives is also very, very steep. When you walk, you have to kind of lean back a bit to hold back your momentum. This is the place where Jesus wept over Jerusalem. They had missed the “perfect timing of God’s coming to them” (Luke 19:44) and Jesus knew they were going to be destroyed in 70 C.E. only a generation later.

May our hearts weep in compassion for those who don’t know that God has come to them in the person of Jesus Christ.

At the bottom of the Mt. of Olives is the Garden of Gethsemane. Gethsemane simply means “olive press” because that was where they would take the olives to be pressed for oil. This was the place where Jesus would have been spending time with his disciples before Judas came because it was down in the ground in caves, out of the elements. Some of the olive trees I saw were 2000 years old. (!) We had some time on our own to reflect and pray, which was nice because there are just so many tourists that come.

We then stopped by Caiphas’ house where Peter denied him three times. At this point we are looking back across the Kidron Valley towards the Mount of Olives. It is not a far distance at all. Here we saw the caves where prisoners were taken as well. Dark, alone, and helpless, Jesus would have recalled Psalm 88.

At lunch we ate at a place where we could see the fields where the angels announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds. In the distance, there is a mountain built by Herod the Great, and he built it up so that it looked like a volcano, so people would be afraid to come attack him!

Our final stop was the Holocaust Memorial. I just have to shake my head at the atrocity of what happened to these Jews and the amount of evil that occurred (and is still occurring) against these people. I don’t know how many groups of people began their history 3500 years ago and are still around…

We closed off today’s activities with a talk given to us by a woman named Frida Keet, who is the “Voice of Israel.” She gave us some more perspective on the political aspects of the nation’s history. Too much to go into now, of course, but an interesting and hard plight these people have gone through.