Pilgrimage (14 page)

Today is the boy’s
bar mitzvah
celebration. Today he becomes a “son of the commandment,” which is what the words
bar mitzvah
mean in Hebrew. He will have the honor of reading the daily Torah passage aloud to the others, and he can take his turn reading Scripture in the synagogue from now on. He will wear phylacteries on his forehead and arm for the first time today, and then for the rest of his life when he prays each morning. These small boxes, which fasten to his forehead and left arm by leather straps, contain passages of Scripture from Exodus and Deuteronomy. Jewish men are commanded to “Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads” (Deuteronomy 6:8).

I watch as the young man’s procession makes its way inside the worship area near the Wall. The men in his family surround him while the women and young girls watch from
behind the low barrier, showering him and each other with candy. The psalmist declared, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119:103). The candy helps children associate God’s Word with sweetness from the time they are very young.

The Bible says that “Every year [Jesus’] parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Feast, according to the custom” (Luke 2:41–42). At age twelve, boys in Jesus’ day became responsible for celebrating the Jewish feasts as adults, and this was likely the first time that Jesus would get to study and read the Torah with the other men in preparation for His own bar mitzvah. “Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:47).

The study of Scripture was of such importance to Jesus that He lingered behind in Jerusalem when the festival ended instead of joining His family for the trip home. I can understand if a child wants to stay behind at Disney World, but how many children would choose to stay in a place of worship to study the Bible with their elders? When Jesus’ worried parents finally found Him, He said, “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). In these few, brief verses, we get a sense of His love for His Father’s Word and His eagerness to read and study it.

I picture twelve-year-old Jesus looking much like this modern-day bar mitzvah boy with his dark hair and eyes, surrounded by his proud, doting family. Like this boy, Jesus would have worn a head covering, or
kippah,
while praying, and His mother would have sewn tassels called
tzitzit
to the corners of His garments, as the Torah commanded. He probably wore phylacteries on His forehead and arm when He
prayed every morning. We know that devout Jews wore them in Jesus’ day because He admonished the Pharisees for making a show of them. “Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long” (Matthew 23:5). But Jesus never said Jews shouldn’t wear them at all. These symbols on forehead and arm reminded Jews to keep God’s commands in the forefront of their minds and let them guide all of their actions.

Watching the bar mitzvah festivities makes me long for a rite of passage to celebrate our decision to become men and women of God’s Word. If only we had Jesus’ passion to study Scripture, to consider God’s Law sweeter than honey, and to read it with joy instead of as just another item on our to-do list.

The Jewish way of studying the Bible is very different from ours. In the Sunday school classes and Bible studies that I’ve attended or taught, many Christians seem afraid to ask the hard questions, afraid of sounding like a heretic—or worse, afraid that the answers or lack of answers might topple the shaky walls of our faith. For example, how do we reconcile “Thou shalt not kill” with God’s command to Joshua to slaughter every Canaanite man, woman, and child? How does the Bible’s clear statement that “the Lord your God is One” fit with our doctrine of the Trinity? So we decide not to dig too deeply, sticking to the pat answers that we’ve been taught. Too many of our teachers stand in front of our young people and say, “This is what you need to know; this is what this Bible passage means; these are the lessons we can learn from the story of David and Goliath or Noah’s ark.” We package everything neatly as if God can fit on a flannel board, making sure our children always color between the
lines on their activity pages. We’re content when our students can echo back everything we’ve said and overjoyed if they profess to us that they believe every word of it.

In Jewish teaching, questions are the essence of the way young people learn. Their teachers pose a hard question, knowing that the Jewish sages themselves don’t always agree on the answer. Back and forth the students fly from one verse of Scripture to the next, digging into what each one says, studying how each contradiction shines a tiny bit of light on the problem. Confused about a particular word, they’ll find the first place in the Torah where that word is used and examine the context for answers. That, I believe, is what Jesus and the teachers at the Temple were doing that day. “Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.” The teachers would have asked questions that the wisest sages in Judaism had discussed and argued about since the time of Moses. They weren’t expecting pat answers from these young Torah students, a 100 percent on the quiz. But Jesus would have revealed to them from Scripture what God’s Word really, truly meant. Not only were the elders astounded, but Jesus was having fun—like a trip to Disney World.

The way to deepen our children’s faith isn’t to give them milk but meat to chew on. And the way to do that is to be brave enough to ask the tough questions. My first wrestling match with God some thirty years ago didn’t destroy my faith; it made me read the Bible, searching, asking, digging. I tried to teach my children that whenever they have doubts and fears it’s okay to wrestle with God the way Jacob did. That’s what Jacob’s new name, Israel, means: the people who struggle with God.

When my daughter Maya was fourteen and first felt called to minister to the Jewish people, she discovered an inconsistency
in Christian practice. Maya had celebrated Passover with one of her Jewish friends from school and recognized all of the beautiful pictures of Christ in the Passover Seder. She also saw that the Last Supper was a celebration of that same Passover meal, and so when Jesus took the bread and broke it, saying, “This is my body,” He used unleavened bread. She had been taught from Scripture that leaven is a type of sin . . . one small pinch of it destroys our entire body the way a tiny pinch of leaven raises an entire loaf of bread. She then asked the question—no, she demanded to know—why did our church use leavened bread for Communion? Why did our ministers hold up loaves of leavened bread when they said, “This is Christ’s body, broken for you.” Christ was without sin. Our church should use unleavened bread.

She was right, of course. I told her to ask her youth leader. He shrugged and suggested she ask the church elders. The next time we had Communion she marched into the vestry when they were preparing the Communion plates and asked why they were using leavened bread. Most of them laughed it off, made a joke of it. One of them said it was tradition, the way it had always been done. Another said that grocery stores in our town didn’t sell the unleavened kind. In reply, she named the aisle in our local supermarket where her Jewish friends had purchased unleavened bread for Passover.

Not content to have her honest question brushed aside, Maya asked our senior pastor. To his credit, he didn’t dismiss her with a pat reply. Instead, he promised to think about it and get back to her. When he did, he also saw the beautiful significance of unleavened bread—naturally striped and pierced—as a type of Christ’s body. At our next Communion service, he gave a lengthy explanation of why, from now on,
unleavened bread would be in the Communion plate, not the traditional kind. He also fielded countless complaints from members of the congregation for daring to change the traditional way of doing things.

I was proud of my daughter and her willingness to ask hard questions, as proud as these bar mitzvah parents must feel. As she grew, her questions weren’t always as successfully and fully answered as they were in this case. She stirred a lot of angry hornets’ nests in the Christian college she attended and is doing it now in her studies at the college in Jerusalem. But her faith remains strong enough not to be shaken by difficult questions.

I believe the Jewish way is so much wiser. If we don’t allow our children to ask, if we don’t encourage them to ask, they are going to ask nonetheless—but they won’t be equipped to look for the answers in Scripture. We’ll make them feel guilty and sinful and un-Christian for doubting, reluctant to show any chinks in their armor of belief. We know they must have doubts—we all do, if we’re honest. The Jewish way is to keep digging, keep asking, tearing the Bible apart line by line, knowing that God will show us the answer if we search with all our heart. None of us should be content with pat answers or God-in-a-box theology. This pilgrimage has already strengthened my flabby spiritual muscles as I’ve wrestled with God.

The bar mitzvah ceremonies continue as I leave the Kotel. Later, the boy’s family will celebrate with a feast to mark his entrance into the study of Scripture. We may not have a rite of passage like the bar mitzvah, but God still wants us to grow up and put away childish things, to become sons and daughters of His Word. Jesus said, “Until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a
pen, will by any means disappear from the Law” (Matthew 5:18). That means He wants us to know it, study it, cherish it. And above all, rejoice in the sweetness of it.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”

Revelation 21:3

A N
EW
P
RAYER
FOR
THE
J
OURNEY

Our loving heavenly Father,

You are our strong tower of protection, the One we can run to for refuge. Yet You are always with us wherever we are, close enough to hear our whispered prayers. Forgive me for letting my love for You and for others to grow cold; for allowing time or anger or distractions or anything else to keep me from drawing near to You in prayer. Forgive me for resisting the Stonemason’s chisel as You have sought to use my struggles to shape me into a living stone for Your new Temple. Thank You for giving us Your Living Word in Christ to remove the barriers between us and You. And thank You for Your written Word, Your love letter to us that teaches us how to love You, serve You, and live for You. Please renew my love of Scripture, the challenge of it, the sweetness of it. Help me to take my place as a living stone—for Your sake and for Your glory.

Amen

7
Holy Week

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

Matthew 23:37

W
ild rosemary and sage perfume the early morning air as I lace on my walking shoes. Today will be a day of vigorous hiking as we retrace Jesus’ footsteps in the week leading up to Easter Sunday. I gulp down my tea, shake off my drowsiness, and ride the bus to the sleepy village of Bethany, home to Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

The insignificant town where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead is about two miles from Jerusalem as the crow flies. It seems much farther as our bus drives up and over the Mount of Olives, navigating the labyrinth of narrow, traffic-packed streets. But Bethany was close enough to Jerusalem for word
of Jesus’ miracle to fly there faster than a carrier pigeon. The miracle became the fuel that turned His enemies’ smoldering anger into a fiery determination to kill Him: “Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees” (John 11:45–46). The high priest, Caiaphas, decided that “it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish” (v. 50). “So from that day on they plotted to take his life” (v. 53).

The village of Bethany was probably just as small and tightly packed back then as it is now. Of course, a church sits on top of Lazarus’ tomb today. I file down a creepy set of narrow, stone stairs below it to see the underground tomb. It’s claustrophobic down here, worthy of a good horror film. I’m as glad to get out as Lazarus must have been.

When our visit to Bethany is finished, we set out on foot for the two-mile trek to Jerusalem, just as Jesus and His disciples did on Palm Sunday. I live in the American Midwest, where a two-mile walk along a flat prairie trail takes little time and not too much effort. But Jerusalem sits on a mountaintop with even bigger mountains surrounding it like beefy bodyguards. To reach Jesus’ destination at the Temple, we need to climb uphill to the top of the Mount of Olives, down the other side to the Kidron Valley, and then up again to the top of Mount Moriah. In Scripture, Jesus and His disciples seem to take these hills in stride. The Bible never mentions anyone huffing and puffing the way I am. No one complains or says, “Hold up while I catch my breath!” I hope my physical condition isn’t a reflection of my spiritual state.

One-third of the way to the top of the Mount of Olives, an ambitious Arab boy meets us along the path, dragging
a tattered burro by a rope. “You ride? Yes?” he asks. “Only three shekels.”

We all laugh, thinking of Jesus’ triumphal ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. In fact, we are nearly to the village of Bethsaida where Jesus borrowed His animal. I feel certain that the donkey He rode wasn’t as small and mangy as this one—nor was there a price tag attached. This squat, sway-backed burro doesn’t look like it could carry the boy up the steep hill, let alone an adult. But our guide convinces a weary, white-haired woman in our group to accept a ride. They haggle the price down to one shekel, and we help the woman climb on. Away she goes, riding sidesaddle, laughing like a schoolgirl, her feet dangling inches from the dirt.