Going underground

In the late 8th and early 7th centuries B.C., Jerusalem was threatened by invasion from Assyria. So to prepare for the expected siege, King Hezekiah had a tunnel made to take water from the Gihon Spring into the city. Which sounds simple enough, except that meant his men had to chisel their way through 500 metres of rock with nothing in the way of powered equipment. Two teams followed a winding route towards each other and met in the middle, adding the extra puzzle of how they managed to keep tunneling in the right direction without so much as a compass. It's also impressive that the difference in height from one end to the other is only 30cm - another sign of precision work.

However the Jews of old did it, the tunnel is still there, and the waters of the spring still flow through it. For the small cost of an entry ticket, tourists and pilgrims can follow this underground stream to the Pool of Siloam. It is somewhat surprising that visitors are left to do this unsupervised. The tunnel gets quite narrow at some points, and it could be quite problematic if someone had a panic attack or some other accident somewhere in the middle, 250m from any help. Perhaps they rely on the fact that there are always people passing through.

Hezekiah's Tunnel

Anyway, I'm not complaining - it was good fun to wade the length of Hezekiah's Tunnel, in the company of Br. Pawel Teperski (who took this photo of me). It took us about half an hour - surprisingly long, but wading slowed us down, as did a group of Israeli schoolchildren whom we caught up with. There wasn't anything much more Indiana-Jonesey than that, I'm afraid: no blades suddenly protruding from the walls, no rolling boulders, no crocodiles, not even any snakes. But I recommend it as an interesting diversion from the normal round of holy places and ancient ruins that a Jerusalem pilgrimage involves. Just so long as you're not prone to claustrophobia.

Pool of Siloam

(rather smaller than in Biblical times)

Speaking in many tongues

For the past couple of weeks my laptop has been languishing in the dread grip of 'The Black Desktop of Death'. So now that I've wrestled free from it (albeit with the loss of most of my apps and settings), I have some catching up to do on computer-related matters, including this blog.

More than a fortnight after the event, therefore, I'm reporting on the experience of Pentecost here in Jerusalem. As with many other liturgical events here, the real buzz is in getting to celebrate it in The Place Where It Actually Happened. In the case of the Cenacle (aka, the Upper Room) it's extra special because the Israeli authorities only allow Christian services there on a few occasions in the year - Pentecost unsurprisingly being one of them.

Another bonus this year was the coincidence of the Catholic observance of Pentecost with the Jewish observance of the same feast - although they call it by its Hebrew name, Shavuot. At the time of Jesus the feast was a celebration of God giving the Law (the Torah) on Mount Sinai, which is why so many Jews had gathered in Jerusalem on the day when the Holy Spirit came and gave us another, even bigger thing to celebrate. The Old Law was written on tablets of stone; but the New Law is written on human hearts.

The current Upper Room is probably bigger than the one that the disciples of Jesus were gathered in; but it's still not a large space and probably less than two hundred of us were there for the permitted celebration - Second Vespers of Pentecost - late on the Sunday afternoon. There was a lot of singing and processing around (the Franciscans of the Holy Land like to make the most of these occasions), but the best bit for me was when we prayed the Lord's Prayer, each one of us in our mother tongue. The resulting babble of languages, all raised in prayer to God, was a non-miraculous sign echoing the miraculous sign of that Pentecost day nearly two thousand years ago. On that occasion the Holy Spirit made it so that all the visiting Jews heard the disciples of Jesus speaking in their own native languages. Now the Holy Spirit gathers from the nations disciples of Jesus, each with their mother tongue. Both events are a sign that the Gospel is for all peoples of the Earth.*

Overall, an uplifting experience. But I must mention one discord: some Jews were unhappy with our celebration. There was one venerable-looking Orthodox Jew standing outside the entrance with a little poster telling us that holding our services in the room above a synagogue "is forbidden". The ground floor of the building, you see, was transformed into a synagogue in 1948, on the basis of a medieval tradition that the tomb of King David is there. When this aggrieved Jew heard me speaking English, he backed up his poster by pointing back down the lane and saying, "You have a church down there - please go and pray there. We've suffered enough from you." Luckily for me, I happened to have been speaking to a more ecumenically-minded Jew, so I was able to leave the two of them remonstrating with each other. But it was yet another reminder of the jockeying for space that mars life in the Holy Land, and something of a counter-sign to the universality of the Gospel.

* And possibly for peoples of other planets, if such peoples exist and are in need of redemption. But that's a story for another day.