Explainer

Creed

Israel

Middle East

23 March 2024

6 min read

The most contested real estate on the planet

Can contradictory views about how God connects to Jerusalem ever be reconciled?

Peter Walker

Peter is a rector, writer and theologian.

A gold-domed, blue-walled octagonal mosque seen through a row of arches.

The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

Andrew Shiva via Wikipedia.

It was Saturday 14 October last year. BBC Radio were about to play a pre-recorded interview with a spokesman for Hamas and needed to explain to listeners something in advance: “the reference you will hear in a moment, stating that one of the causes of the Gaza conflict is the desire to preserve the freedom of ‘Al Aqsa’, is a references to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem—regarded as the third holiest site in the Muslim world”.

That was it in a nutshell. The Hamas spokesman was making it plain that, behind all the many political causes of the conflict erupting so tragically in the Holy Land, there was an essentially theological issue. Yes, as in other conflicts around the world, there are strong human desires in both Israeli and Palestinian communities to live in a place of security and to have their aspirations for some political independence to be adequately met, but here in the Holy Land there is an irreducible ‘God-component’ to the conflict.

The heart of the conflict

It’s not just that the conflict is predominantly between two major monotheistic religions—Judaism and Islam. It’s that those two world-religions have conflicting theological views—derived from their respective scriptures, the Hebrew Bible and the Quran—about physical places in the Holy land. And, even more particularly, they are have essentially contradictory views about the piece of land which Christians now often refer to as the ‘Temple Mount’: namely, the place where the former Jewish Temple stood, but which Muslims refer to as Haram Esh Sharif (‘the noble sanctuary’), because it is now the site both of the Dome of the Rock and the above-mentioned Al Aqsa mosque.

This is the most contested piece of real estate on the planet. The same site is, on the one hand, revered by Jews as the site of Solomon’s temple centred on the ‘holy of holies’ and, on the other, is revered by Muslims as the place from which Muhammed went on his mysterious ‘night journey’ up to heaven and back, as recounted in the Qu’ran. So, for both religions the site is not just of historical interest but rather is invested with theological weight—as a place associated like no other, with God himself.

The Hamas spokesman was thus helpfully laying bare the irreducible theological crux at the root of this conflict. Secular politicians and humanitarian agencies might want to take this ‘God-component’ out of the equation, but it will not go away. For this conflict is based on essentially contradictory views about how God connects to Jerusalem and especially to the Temple Mount.

Enter Jesus

The familiar story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is remembered on Palm Sunday every year. It is an event with layers upon layers of meaning. At its heart, however, is the conviction of the Gospel writers and of the early Christians that Jesus had entered Jerusalem as the human embodiment of God himself.

A hint of this may be found in the way that Jesus, when criticised by the religious leaders for the extravagant claims the crowds were making for Jesus at that moment (especially haling him as the ‘Messiah’), himself claims that “even the stones would cry out” in honour of him, if they could—presumably because they know that their Creator was passing by at just that moment!

Yet this conviction—that Jesus had been the human embodiment of God—is perhaps best sensed when we note how Jesus’ coming over the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem can, arguably, be seen as the return of the Lord’s Shekinah glory into the Temple. This comes through noting a highly significant passage in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. The prophet, writing from exile in Babylon, had seen a vision about the ‘glory of the God of Israel’: ‘the glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain to the east of it’ — in other words the Mount of Olives, the hill to the east of the city of Jerusalem, that looked over the Temple Mount

Now Jesus comes over the Mount of Olives and storms into the Temple: this is Ezekiel’s vision but now in reverse. He is embodying the return of the Lord’s glory; he is the personal presence of Israel’s God; he is, as the prophet Malachi predicted, ‘the Lord himself coming into his Temple’.

If true, then Jesus was God’s embodied presence coming into the Temple. God had previously made the Temple to be the place where he dwelt on earth; now Jesus was that presence himself—in human form.

And, when Jesus goes on solemnly to announce that “your house is left desolate”, he is making it clear that that divine presence, which had genuinely filled the Temple back in the days of Solomon, was now being removed once and for all.

After some further teaching Jesus eventually makes his own final departure from the Temple precincts—a clear sign for the writer of Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus is taking the divine presence with him out of the building. And a few weeks later, as described by Luke, we are presented with the picture of Jesus taking divine presence back into heaven in the event of the Ascension.

Viewed in this way, we can see the whole story of Jesus’ going into the Temple as effectively a ‘de-secration’ of the Temple. He was making it clear that he alone was now where God’s presence was to be found. Divine presence was no longer to be associated with a place, but with a person.

Back to the present

Coming back to the present day, then, there is a profound sense in which those who associate the former Temple Mount with a doctrine of divine presence are chasing after ‘thin air’. The Temple once upon a time had housed the presence of God, but, according to this Christian understanding, it does so no longer—it is an ‘empty pot of gold’. ‘The Glory has departed’—in Jesus.

If so, this major source of tension in the contemporary Middle East—the conflicting theologies of Judaism and Islam concerning the sanctity of the Temple Mount and its historic connection to God’s presence—can only be resolved by a recognition that Jesus has decisively changed all this.

If Jesus is ‘God incarnate’ (something clearly not recognised in Judaism and Islam)—if, in other words, he is the place where we go to find God—then that takes the ‘God-component’ out of the equation and brings to an end the elevated status that so many give to Jerusalem and the Temple.

Jerusalem, understood in this way, now points in God’s purposes to the far greater reality of Jesus Christ who alone embodies the true presence of God in human form. Jesus himself said that “one greater than the Temple is here”. But, tragically, the overwhelming majority of those who live in Jerusalem and the Holy Land today are committed to religious systems which deny these and other New Testament claims for Jesus.

Taking this further

Alternatively, you might like to access to a suite of resources for Holy Week: take your pick from some ‘In the Steps of Jesus’ videos (filmed in Jerusalem), or some audio recordings (‘The Week that Changed the World’) or a book (‘Immersed in the Passion’) that retells the story from Palm Sunday to Easter Day.

Article

Belief

Creed

30 September 2024

4 min read

Are miracles real?

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman sees her reflection in a mirror and hold a finger up.

Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash.

Recently, I heard a remarkable story about a friend of mine who happens to be a vicar. He had been diagnosed with a serious cancer, and the diagnosis was bleak. He was preparing himself for a difficult few months, readying himself, and his parish, for the end before too long. His body was reacting poorly to chemotherapy, and the prospects did not look good. However, he continued to try to get a balance of rest and work through the tiredness, praying when he could - little and often - but without too much discomfort.

A short while ago, during a routine visit to the hospital to receive the results of a scan on how the cancer was progressing, something puzzling happened.

The surgeon showed him the scan related to the original diagnosis. He asked, "Can you see the tumour?" My friend replied, "Yes, of course, it's right there," pointing to the black mass. The surgeon then showed him another scan.

He asked again, "This is the most recent scan we’ve just taken; can you see it on this one?" My friend peered closely into the scan and said, "Hmm. I'm not sure I can." The surgeon then responded, puzzled, that somehow, between the two scans, the tumour seemed to have disappeared.

He added: “To be honest, in my world, we don't really have an explanation for things like this. But I suspect in yours, you do.”

Besides being delighted for my friend, since hearing the story, I've pondered what it means. Of course, miracles are by their nature rare and we cannot automatically predict them, My friend was in the kind of church that doesn't routinely demand God for miracles but simply carried on gently praying that somehow God would be with the vicar in his struggles, hardly daring to hope that the cancer would in fact vanish.

Was it a miracle? Or was there some other explanation? It seems to me that the answer you give to that question depends on the framework you bring to it. If you are a believer in a God who might do this kind of thing from time to time, and consider that such things can and do happen occasionally, not regulated by the usual course of cause and effect, but by some extra dimension of reality unseen to us and immeasurable by the methods of science, you will probably simply accept it as one of those occasional interruptions to the normal course of things. And then give thanks to God and rejoice with my friend at this sign of God’s goodness.

Of course, it raises the question of why this cancer was healed and others aren’t, but that takes us into other territory, which I’ve examined before in relation to Donald Trump’s narrow escape. Would we rather a world in which such things as this never happened, and my friend’s cancer had taken its usual deadly course? Or a world where just every now and again, something delightful and unanticipated happens, like stumbling on a gloriously unexpected view of rolling hills and a dramatic sunset at the end of a routine walk on a summer’s evening?

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning.

An honest doctor like the one treating my friend, might recognise that the methods of medical science, for all its brilliance, value and wisdom, on which we all depend so much, has to shrug its shoulders at this point, realising that it doesn’t have the categories to explain it, reverting to a kind of agnosticism. A more thoroughgoing materialist would say: “Of course we know there are no such things as miracles, so that’s the one thing we know it is not. There must be some other explanation, and science will one day discover why such mysterious things happen.”

What we believe about such things is determined not by the self-evident ‘facts’, the bald evidence of what is before us, but by our pre-conceived mental map of the world, our framework of faith, what we think the world is, and what, or who we think God is, (if he exists at all). We are all believers in the end – the difference is what we believe in.

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning, open to the possibility of an extra dimension of enchantment that occasionally shows its face, and that there is a bigger world out there than we with our small minds and spirits are able to comprehend.

GK Chesterton once put it like this. "Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has risen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles except them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them, rightly or wrongly, because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them, rightly or wrongly, because they have a doctrine against them."

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.