Fellowship United Methodist Church

We started the day by visiting the Bethsaida Pool where the paralytic and lame people would lay every day waiting for the Angel of the Lord to stir the water and the first one in the pool would be healed.  It was this very place where Jesus told a paralytic man to get up and walk because his faith had healed him.  It is awe-inspiring to think I stood in that very place.

Next we walked the Via Delarosa, the traditional route that Jesus carried his cross from being condemned at the Praetorium to being crucified on Golgotha.  We stopped at the place where Jesus was scourged and beaten.  We saw an impression on the street stones where Roman guards played the Game of the King, the same game they probably played to decide who got Jesus’ rob.  At the Ecce Homo Arch we saw the place where Pilate condemned Jesus to death.  As we continued we saw where tradition says the Jesus stumbled and fell, where he met his mother, and where Simon the Cyrenian was forced to carry Jesus’ cross.  We walked past where Jesus fell again, where Veronica wiped his bloody face, and where he comforted the women of Jerusalem.

The Basilica of the Holy Sepluchre marks the place where Jesus was stripped of his garments, where he was nailed to the cross, and where he died.  Within those walls are the stones where the cross stood on Golgotha, where Jesus’ body was laid after being taken down, and where the Russian Orthodox tradition says he was laid in the tomb.  In this place I saw how the rock mountain of Golgotha was split by the earthquake that happened when Jesus died.

To say that this was a soul-stirring day is an understatement.  Part of me was moved by knowing the significance of what happened here 2000 years ago, while another part of me was a bit disappointed at how the Church has so changed these sites in an effort to preserve them that Jesus himself would probably not recognize them.

It has been a life-changing week and a privilege to be here.