In Jerusalem on Friday afternoons, loud sirens sound throughout the city an hour before sunset. The locals scurry about from the shops and streets before the train lines and bus routes shut down and the usual bustle of whole place descends into the calm of the Shabbat. Many have apps to tell them the exact moment the Torah-required rest begins. Similarly, minarets around the city blare Islam’s five daily required prayers, sometimes right outside pilgrims’ hotel bedroom windows. Muslims can be seen stopping and praying towards Mecca on their rugs. Christians march through the cobblestone streets led by the Franciscan friars on the Via Dolorosa, making the Stations of the Cross along the route Christ Himself walked, clogging up the narrow alleys and interrupting the ubiquitous Middle Eastern chaos with somber recollection as bells echo from the many historic steeples. Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the various Christian groups observe the Status Quo agreement about when each is permitted to celebrate liturgies at the various altars, overlapping in a cacophony of chants. Visitors and residents co-entangle in the City of David, where his psalm’s theme is heeded, whether they like it or not: “O God, let all the nations praise you!” They become “foreigners who join themselves to the Lord… who keep the sabbath free from profanation.” Diverse crowds swell Fridays at the mosques, Saturdays at the synagogues, Sundays at the Christian shrines; these regular religious rhythms open pilgrims and inhabitants alike to encounter God in the most sacrosanct places on earth.
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But does He really “rule the peoples in equity” and “let his face shine upon us” there, is that spiritual epicenter truly “a house of prayer for all peoples” after millennia of wars and ceaseless sins? The Lord promises: “my salvation is about to come, my justice, about to be revealed.” When? We must be ready for His mysterious timing to grace. That requires persistence from us, like the Canaanite woman whose daughter was possessed. After we pray, it still may seem that the Lord “did not say a word in answer.” It may feel like we’re getting ignored when He refuses reasonable and charitable requests like freeing a child from “being tormented by a demon.” He may even appear rude by our standards for the divine, comparing us to animals: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” Resolute earnestness, authentic sincerity, and radical humility are required for us to dispose ourselves properly for the moment He sees fit.
Paul, the “apostle to the Gentiles,” assures us “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” The Lord never defaults on His blessings, but we sinners stand in need of transformation for those graces to take effect. After all, “God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.” It’s the very power of the Resurrection in our own lives. For those who have rejected the Lord, when they repent, “what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?”
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A stone in Jerusalem excavated in 1968 contains a Hebrew inscription: “The trumpeter’s place.” It capped the corner of the Temple Mount complex, crashed down into the rubble when the city was wrecked by the Romans in 70 AD, now called the Western Wall. From that spot, appointed Jewish priests blew horns signaling the sabbath even in Christ’s day. Atop all the sacred sites of the Holy Land, ruins of early Byzantine monasteries reconfigured in various upheavals over the long centuries confirm the consistent presence of worshipers singing God’s praises, sanctifying all creation. His Beatitude the Cardinal Latin Patriarch consecrated a new church building of the Baptism of the Lord at the Jordan River just last year. The Al-Aqsa Mosque with its notorious golden dome towers over the leveled Temple location, adorned by manicured greenspaces, drawing Muslim devotees from around the world. Surrounding it, scores of heavily armed guards ensure a tense peace. Underneath it, fragmentary remnants of the Crusader Kings’ chapel remain as a stark reminder of the site’s violent history. Overhead, the famed Iron Dome invisibly preserves it all from the ongoing ravages of modern warfare. The entire place is a microcosm of the nation and the world awaiting salvation, as it always has and will. Our patterns of prayer must ready us for whatever graces the Lord has planned in their due time and, ultimately, for whenever He sends His Son again to bring the whole universe to its eternal rest.