Israel, Day 9: Culminating...

Well, we woke up for our final day in Israel in the lap of luxury at the American Colony Hotel.  We thoroughly enjoyed that luxury so much that we kept enjoying it several hours longer than we had planned or anticipated.  But after many short nights in a row, a few extra hours of sleep seemed like a reasonable thing to prioritize.

Another part of our slow morning was the best in a series of fabulous Israeli breakfasts.  It is a well-known fact that I am a lover of meats.  This personal factoid has even been officially documented on this blog.  And, truth be told, I have appreciated that Israelis seem to share my appreciation for carnivorousness.  However, it is no great secret nor should it have been a great surprise to me that any Israeli affection for meat would exclude pork products, for well-known religious reasons.  What did surprise me was how much I would miss my swine-based delicacies.  So, it was to their great credit that the American Colony Hotel, owned by folks with American and Swedish Christian roots, offered both bacon and a fancy form of little wieners, much to my glee!

Before checking out of our extravagant accommodations, we took a few pictures, in a rather gorgeous garden courtyard...

and in a historically significant reading room.  Of note, though you can't really tell in our picture, is the couple on the portraits at which I'm pointing.  Yes, those are the Spaffords, founders of the American Colony before it was a hotel, and the couple whose descendants still own the hotel.  If the name doesn't ring a bell, how about the song "It is Well with My Soul?"  Horatio Spafford wrote it.  And then he moved to Jerusalem to found a Christian utopian society.  And, eventually, they moved to this location and established this hotel.  Though I'm not sure how much Horatio and I would agree on all matters of theology, I find his work in Jerusalem to be compelling and his song, "It is Well," to be one of the finest in all of English hymnody.  In some sort of inexplicable way, it was especially meaningful to me to spend a night sleeping in his old house.

So, after an admittedly sluggish but perfectly delightful start to the day, we snagged a taxi to take us to the top of the Mount of Olives.  From there, we had some spectacular views of the Old City, the City of David, and the entirety of Jerusalem.

Kate snagged a shot of the place of what Jesus presumably saw when He wept over the city upon His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

We wandered down the narrow road from the Mount of Olives to the Old City.

We spent a few minutes looking at some ancient olive trees, maybe even the ones that surrounded Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

We drew closer and closer to the Old City and the Temple Mount.

We saw the Golden Gate, where Jesus likely entered the Temple courts on Palm Sunday and promptly cleared the Temple of opportunistic merchants.

We took another jaunt down the Via Dolorosa, the street on which it is traditionally understood that Jesus carried His cross from His conviction to His crucifixion.  Though the commercialism of walking amongst dozens and dozens of shops selling trinkets made this experience less than spiritually reflective for me, it is interesting to note that Jesus would have likely walked between a similar array of 1st-century merchants (though likely less populated by millions of T-shirts saying, "My mom/dad/sister/brother/friend/barber/butcher/florist went to Jerusalem and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."  By the way, if you were hoping to get one of those lousy T-shirts from us, I'm so sorry to bring this disappointing news.  We purchased none.)

We made our way through the touristy throngs into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  I captured this shot of Kate, standing along with eight thousand of our closest friends in front of the traditional site of the crucifixion.  (Immediately after taking this picture, a monk bull-rushed a lady who was trying to cut in line, aggressively sending her out of the building in shame.  All of the involved parties were clearly acting in the spirit of Jesus.)

Here's a view of the lovely interior dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Here's a picture with a view of the Immovable Ladder on the second floor in the background.  Really, you just need to read about this:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immovable_Ladder.  In so many ways, this ladder captures the pettiness and slavish devotion to tradition that made the entire Church of the Holy Sepulchre experience rather silly to me (not to mention that fact that there is virtually no evidence to support the idea that any of the events of the first Easter weekend actually happened anywhere near this site).

Finally, after circumventing a rather violent and somewhat frightening political/religious protest, we made our way to a spot a block north of the Old City, known as the Garden Tomb.  Though Christians have made pilgrimages to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre since the 4th century to the traditional sites of the death and burial of Jesus, the location of that church in relation to the events that it commemorates was made rather arbitrarily by Constantine's mother, Helena.  In the 1800's, Protestant Christians who were unsatisfied with the historical unreliability of Helena's whims settled on a location outside the city walls which more closely fits the biblical accounts of those events, known since then as the Garden Tomb.  From this garden, we were able to see a rock formation that vaguely looked like a skull ("Golgotha" means "place of the skull"), though the mountainside has eroded and looks decidedly less like a skull than it did a century or more ago.

This plaque summarizes the significance of this place.

Here's a shot of Kate in the tomb.

And here's a lovely couple standing in the doorway of the tomb.

Of course, we do not know for sure that this tomb is where Jesus' body laid between His death and resurrection.  But this location is infinitely more likely than the rock that is now covered by an admittedly lovely but massive church.  And the entire atmosphere of this area, much less noisy, congested, and contentious than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was a wonderful place for us to simply sit, read Scripture, pray together, and reflect on the eternity-altering events that happened somewhere near here two thousand years ago.  Various tour groups were singing hymns in various languages all around us.  We even took a short nap on a bench overlooking the tomb, which demonstrated the peaceful aura of this sacred space.  This was a perfect spot to end the pilgrimage aspect of our trip.

After some trinket-shopping among the merchants of the Old City, we had our final Jerusalem meal on this charming rooftop restaurant, with a lovely view of the Temple Mount and the rest of Jerusalem in the background.

Then, we made the quick journey to the airport, returned our rental car, went through airport security, and had our final authentic Israeli experience at the Burger Ranch.  It turns out that Israeli fast food is just as forgettable and underwhelming as American fast food joints.

Here's a final panoramic shot of the entirety of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.  Click on it to see the whole thing.

Kate and I will offer a few more thoughts of reflection and analysis in a final post, but let me just conclude the daily posts with this video.  We recorded this video on our first day in the Old City, when we made our way into St. Anne's Church, constructed just a few feet from the Pool of Bethesda, where Jesus healed a cripple.  It was simply breathtaking to enjoy the splendor of these world-renowned acoustics (our voices continued to ring out for 10+ seconds after we quit singing), singing praise to our Savior for the depth of His love.