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

Creed

Easter

16 April 2025

5 min read

The compassion of Easter's tears

There’s complexity and beauty behind crying.

Simon Cansdale

Simon is a vicar in Winchester, Hampshire.

A stone statue's face depicts a falling tear.

Ohlsdorf Cemetery, Hamburg.

Marek Studzinski on Unsplash.

The great English metaphysical playboy poet, John Donne, became Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. During Lent a year later he preached a majestic sermon entitled ‘To speake of Tears’. I first read it 30 years ago and it has prodded and challenged me ever since. This hyper-bright poet and reformed Lothario brought to the pulpit all his astonishing rhetorical skill, and a deep learning, combined with an overriding sense of God’s mercy and the wonder of new beginnings. His sermons were as thick as treacle and as rich as chocolate mousse, but built on a profound religious sympathy and a pastor’s ear for the yearnings of his listeners.

In his 1622 sermon, Donne highlights the different kinds of tears shed by Jesus in the last weeks of his life.

He speaks of Jesus’ ‘humane tears’ - tears he shed alongside Mary and Martha at the grave of his dear friend Lazarus - so surprising, Donne suggests, that the scholars charged with the chapter and verse divisions of the New Testament stopped in wonder at the two words ‘Jesus wept’ and made it a complete (and the shortest) verse in the Bible.

He speaks of Jesus’ ‘prophetic tears’ on Palm Sunday, as Jesus looks down over the city of Jerusalem, foreseeing the people’s rejection of God and the judgement that would come upon this city he loved. These tears are again surprising - Jesus had been borne into the city on the excited adulation of the crowds - so why does he weep?

Donne speaks of Jesus’ ‘pontifical’ or ‘sacrificial tears’ on the Cross - forsaken, despairing tears, encapsulated in Jesus’ agonisingly seizing a line of dereliction from the Psalms and hurling it at the dark sky - ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Donne was hardly the first theologian to wonder at these tears. But he is compelling in separating them out, wondering how different they are, and plotting the complexity of Jesus becoming a Man of Sorrows, for people who know so much sorrow. And he has the pastor’s touch as well as the preacher’s flourish to help us understand that we see ourselves most clearly through the tears of Jesus, or as C.S. Lewis would put it in the Problem of Pain, ‘the tears of God are the meaning of history.’

Tears, like snowflakes, are unique. Donne started to tease them apart 400 years ago, and we can see this even more clearly today, though it is always a challenge to do so because of the emotional intensity and maelstrom they spring from.

We now know there are physically three kinds of tears; basal tears, which lubricate the eye, irritant tears, which flush out bugs or specks of dirt and emotional tears, agreed by most to be unique to humans (though newborn babies don’t normally cry tears for the first month or more). Rose-Lynn Fisher poignantly deepened this understanding of different kinds of tears in her ground-breaking work on The Topography of Tears. As an artist, she captured some of her own tears and placed them on a microscope slide. She then took close-up pictures of the tears with a digital microscopy camera mounted on a 1960’s Zeiss standard light microscope;

‘The microscope provided the means to examine my tears and visually evoke the unseen realm of my emotions.’

She discovered that no two tears look the same, much as another hero of mine, Snowflake Bentley, had discovered, using a similar method in a frostier setting, the same is true for snowflakes. Tears of grief, even if shed at the same time, are all uniquely different; each one subtly changed by air temperature, and the proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes in an individual tear.

This knowledge brings a new weight to Jesus’ searching question to Mary on Easter morning - ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ These tears that I’m shedding, today, what kind of tears are these? Angry, grieving, frustrated, fearful? Fisher gives astonishing names to her close-ups of tears - ‘Compassion’, ‘Tears of Change’, ‘Overwhelm’, ‘Redemption.’ And it opens up the question of what tears am I not shedding? If there are so many different kinds of tears, are there some I am avoiding, or closing my heart to?

Richard Rohr has just published a long-awaited book on the Minor Prophets called The Tears of Things. I cannot possibly summarise it here, but Rohr includes an argument for the necessity of tears to soften our anger and outrage, the defining emotions of our age. He charts the prophet’s journey from outrage at the lawlessness of the world, through tears for the greed and cruelty of the world, to a settled but fiercer love and mercy. The prophetic tears of Jesus - tears of love, not for ourselves, but an expression of compassion for others - are the ultimate expression of this. This is a compelling vision - I would prefer the people who mould our world to be less shouty and angry, and more tearful and compassionate, people who live near enough to the pain of others to have cried with them and for them before making a plan.

The Psalms offer us a second discipline for our tears. As well as knowing them, that is understanding them, naming them, placing them, we can sow them:

‘Those who sow in tears

Will reap with songs of joy.’

This is an ancient invitation to give weight to our tears. To take them to God, to share them with others, and not just to see them as a way to get things of our chest.

Our human tears can deepen our sense of frailty and dependence on others and God.

Our prophetic tears can invigorate our fight for justice and peace, without destroying our spirit or making us worse than the people we criticise.

Our forsaken tears, the ones shed quietly, without hope, without even the hope that God sees them, can prepare the way for God’s new beginnings.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Give now