Inside the inner walls of Jerusalem

Dead Sea, Israel - By the time you are reading this column, we'll be flying back home. It was indeed a looong week for me, but a very spiritually uplifting one, especially when last Friday we finally entered the inner walls of Jerusalem. We entered through The Lion's Gate (the Lion of Judah is the symbol of Jerusalem) or St. Stephen's Gate, so named after the first martyred follower of our Lord Jesus Christ who was stoned just a few yards from that gate. From there we saw the ruined Pool of Bethesda, which scripture says that our Lord Jesus Christ cured the paralytic man.

Beside the Pool of Bethesda is the Church of St. Anne, dedi-cated to the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is a statue of St. Anne with the Blessed Virgin Mary who was still a girl. Under this church is a crypt where the priest told me was the site of where the Blessed Virgin Mary was born. However our tour guide told us that this church was built during the Crusader period and was placed there for pilgrims who had no time to go to Nazareth where St. Anne really lived. Joachim and St. Anne lived in Sepphoris, which was the largest city in Galilee, which was near Nazareth.

As we turned into the main street, we were now in the Via Dolorosa or the Stations of the Cross. We did the Way of the Cross there, after we loaned a wooden cross while the pilgrims of Delmar Tours carried the cross for a few minutes each and everyone had a chance to carry this cross in order to feel how it is when our Lord Jesus Christ carried the cross of our sins.

My idea of the Via Dolorosa was totally blown away because I thought that the route was an unpaved road that led to Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. What we saw of the Via Dolorosa was something like carrying the cross in the middle of Carbon Market, with shopkeepers selling their wares. In some areas, it gets to be so narrow and we had to climb a steep incline. But we only got to the 10th Station because when our Lord Jesus Christ was stripped of his garments, he was already in Calvary (Golgotha), which was now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, run by Greek Orthodox Christians. 

The Church of the Holy Scripture was built when Empress Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine discovered it in 325 AD. What used to be the small hill of Golgotha was turned into three different buildings, a round church called Anastasis, which is above the empty tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ, a basilica called the Martyrium and a square between two churches. But those buildings were destroyed by the Persians in 614 AD and eventually rebuilt into what it is today…a maze of steep stairs and when you reach the inner sanctum, just like what we did at the Church of the Nativity, you have to crawl under an altar to touch a hole where the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ was inserted when the cross was lifted up.

This pilgrimage allowed me to see the traditional site of the birthplace of our Lord in Bethlehem and touch the very spot where our Lord was born. I held my scapular and medallions in my hand when I knelt down to touch this sacred ground. In the hole where the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ was inserted into the rock, I used my rosary to touch this hole.

When we exited from this (after a two-hour queue) we touched the stone slab of the Anointing, where the Blessed Virgin Mary received the lifeless body of our Lord and perhaps the best sculpture that depicts the Mother of Sorrows is the marble sculp-ture of the Our Lady of Sorrows as you enter the main door of the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It was here that we finished our Way of the Cross just a few feet after the empty tomb where Mary Mag-dala met the risen Christ.

It was an emotional experience for me after all, it is my first time in the Holy Land and this was the focal point of our pilgri-mage. We then left the inner walls of Jerusalem and proceeded to the Western Wall a.k.a. the Wailing Wall…the holiest site of Ju-daism. This is the retaining wall that used to be Mt. Moriah, the exact place when Father Abraham was going to sacrifice his son Isaac, but was stopped by an angel.

This was the site where Solomon built the first temple, which was destroyed by the Babylonians and later rebuilt during the time of our Lord and destroyed again by the Romans in 70 AD. As this is a sacred place, we had to wear a Jewish skullcap and just like any devout Jew, we faced and touched the Wailing Wall as God promised to the Jews that his presence would never leave the Temple. The western wall is the closest wall to where the Holy of Holies would have been located.

By the time we were done, it was already 6 p.m. and the day of the Sabbath was already celebrated in Israel. For most western-ers, including us Filipinos we always Thank God that it is Friday as there is no work on the following day. But for the Jews, the en-tire Jerusalem shuts down and no one goes to work and the streets are empty by evening time. It was surreal.

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