Under the Eucalyptus Tree
“Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” Song of Songs 2:7
We’re on a mission so of course it makes sense crossing the Holy Rubicon to reach the place of Christ’s salvific crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. “We are the people of the resurrection!” beams Reverend Andy Rider, Area Dean of Tower Hamlets London. “We are Easter people!” During the post Paschal season, one can almost hear the soaring descant of Regina Coeli from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Benjamin Disraeli (Disraeli: A Biography, 1993) believed, “The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth.” Simon Sebag Montefiore (Jerusalem: The Biography, 2012) concurs, “The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town amid the Judean Hills. Jerusalem was once regarded as the centre of the world and today that is more true than ever.” Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, 2019) named it the “Eternal Capital”. Teddy Kollek (Mayor and the Citadel: Teddy Kollek and Jerusalem, 1987), Mayor of Jerusalem in the late 20th century, leads with, “Jerusalem has always projected a metaphysical image.” The ancient Babylonian Talmud (circa 500) gets it: “He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendour has never seen a desirable city in his life.” In Natural History (77) Pliny the Elder exalts Jerusalem to be “… by far the most famous city of the East and not of Judea only”.
Katharina Galor and Hanswulf Bloedhorn open The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans (2014) with, “Jerusalem first appears in the written sources as a Canaanite city at the beginning of the second millennium BC.” Moshe Safdie observes in Jerusalem: The Future of the Past (1989), “Jerusalem the Golden is the Jerusalem of yellow-gold limestone.” Henry Van Dyke (Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, 1908) calls it “a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and devotions”. We’re reminded of the words of Paula Fredriksen (When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, 2018), “It [Jerusalem] was probably the most beautiful city that any of them [Jesus and His followers] had ever seen.” They resonate with Stewart Perone (Jerusalem and Bethlehem, 1965), “Its beauty is bewildering, the accumulated treasure of more than three millennia.” Celestial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, sacred and secular, universal and personal, Jerusalem is truly the interface of heaven and earth. Jerusalem, the intersection between the then, the now and the not yet. Jerusalem in all your treasured totemic totality, lift up your gates and sing! Rivers clap your hands! Daphne du Maurier writes in her short story The Way of the Cross (1973), “The lights were burning bright in the city of Jerusalem.” They continue to burn bright. Our pilgrimage gathers pace. To repeat the title of singer songwriter Amy Grant’s modern day song of ascents, it’s Better than a Hallelujah.
“And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.” Joel 2:32
(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).
