The Two Walls

Dr. Tuell made a comment at the end of the day that I think does the most adequate job summing up what we felt and experienced in the Holy Lands today: we started and ended our day with two walls.

The first wall was the Wailing Wall. I wailing wall is the wall that was used to retain the dirt when building the second temple. Herod probably used pieces of the destroyed first temple to build this wall, which means some of the stone may date back to the time of David. There was so much history there. When we were given a chance to pray at the wall, I was struck by its history.. I was struck by the fact that I was taking part in something so ancient.

The second wall that we visited was much different than the first. This was not an old wall, but a new one. This was not a wall of unity and prayer, but a wall of separation and division. The wall is the separation wall, built by the Israeli Government to stop the Palestinian people from leaving Bethlehem. A wall over 400 miles long is being built around all of the Palestinian territories to protect Israel from terrorism.

As you can see from the photos, it is covered with graffiti expressing peoples feelings about it. Palestinian people (many of whom are Christian) have to get visas to visit people in Israeli territory. Often, they visas are hard to obtain. Image if you were not able to visit your family which only lives a town over? The wall has only occurred in the last ten years, but the political situation has been causing a mass exodus of Palestinians and the Christian population in Israel has increased from well over 30% of the country to less than 2% in the past 50 years.

I have not expressed enough for anyone to make a fair judgment about the situation. But my point is, does it really fix problems to wall them in? Don’t we do this in our own lives: we try to cage our sin away without addressing it and giving it over to Jesus. I’m not try to make anyone pick a side but am trying to address a point: all are sinners: Israeli, Palestinian, and American. Yet the same grace I experienced earlier in the day is available to us: Jesus died on our behalf. In light of that, we need to not build walls, but build bridges in love toward one another. Caging our conflicts within ourselves solves nothing, we have to give them over to Jesus, laying them at the foot of the cross.