THE city through whose streets Jesus walked to His death and triumph 1,923 years ago was vibrant with tension and murderous with hate. It is tense and murderous today. Suleiman’s 16th century wall and Palestine’s 20th century travail divide Jerusalem between Old City and New, and sentries—Jordan’s Arabs, Israel’s Jews—stand an uneasy guard. “If one of those soldiers throws a tin can at another across the wall,” says a Western diplomat at the bar of the National Hotel, “it could touch off a holocaust.” A travel agent sips his drink, then breaks in: “There has been no change. There has never been peace in Jerusalem.”
There were savage riots in January, and there may be more violence at any moment, but for the 800-odd Christian monks, priests, ministers and missionaries who care for Christianity’s holy places in the Old City, time passes in centuries. “Just as Herod’s men in the time of Our Lord used to buy up vegetables here and send them to Rome,” said an Irish priest last week, “so the Americans in the oilfields down in Saudi Arabia send lorries today to buy up our food at prices we can’t match.”
On Holy Thursday of 1956, the Garden of Gethsemane glows with flowers beneath its ancient olive trees—the poppies and daisies, the groundsel, ranunculus, garlic and blue lupine that grew wild there when Jesus sweated blood in the agony of His prayer: “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me.” In the grotto nearby, where Judas betrayed his Master with a kiss, the murals from the Byzantine and Crusader periods have peeled away, and the air is still dank from the winter’s rains.
In the city below, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre looms in the dusk beneath a skeleton of steel girders that shores it up, a byproduct of the 1927 earthquake. A group of Greek Orthodox priests in conical hats chat quietly in the courtyard, and inside a Russian nun kneels beneath the dim flicker of three lanterns to kiss the Stone of Unction, where Christ’s body is supposed to have been anointed for burial (several such Stones of Unction are said to have been kissed away by pilgrims).
Just outside, an Arab barber named Aouni leafs through an Egyptian picture magazine while he waits in his shabby shop for a late customer. From the bare-walled coffee shop comes the click of dice. An aged street vendor watches for hungry pilgrims with his roasted peanuts, and the Moslem proprietor of the souvenir shop next door offers a special on the miniature crowns of thorns made by Arab refugees. The Holy Week price: $1. At the barricaded Jaffa Gate, a pair of Arab Legion sentries stuff hands in pockets against the chill, and a radio blares a newscast. A bright red poster on an ancient wall nearby advertises an American movie, Massacre Canyon.
The hostility between Jerusalem’s Moslem and Jewish stewards never fades. But there are times when it seems to part and let Jerusalem’s other worshipers, the Christians, come in. One such time is the Christmas season. This week is another. On the Arab and the Israeli sides, ship-and planeloads of Christian pilgrims are flowing in from the U.S. and Europe. One day this week, the Jews lift their Mandeibaum Gate at the line separating New City from Old. Until April 4th, men may pass undeterred to seek at the sepulchres, the shrines and the Stations of the Cross, in flowering Gethsemane and on Golgotha, the Hill of the Skull, a kind of peace the world cannot elsewhere give.
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