O Jerusalem Jerusalem how often have I longed to gather your children to me as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
When I first saw Jerusalem it was a dream fulfilled. It did not look like I had imagined it would, except for the big buildings so frequently photographed. My pilgrim group, largely Episcopal priests and their families, had come to the City from Bethlehem, where we visited the Church of the Nativity. Now we were going into the Old City of Jerusalem, where we would visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We would stand atop the Temple Mount aka the Haram al-Sharif. We would also approach its base, where the Western Wall calls to its stone the supplications of devout Jews and curious Christians. And we beheld the City from across the Kidron Valley, when we walked down through the graveyards of the Mount of Olives to a church near its base, called Dominus Flevit (“The Lord wept”). There, right near the Garden of Gethsemane and its nine ancient olive trees, I sat in the front pew facing the altar. Through the arms of the Cross on the altar I sighted straight across to the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock.
Dominus flevit. The Lord wept.
When he came to Jerusalem for the last time and beheld that same sight, the Lord had cause to weep. And it was in the Temple itself that he cried out, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’ (Mt 23:37-39, NRSV)
When I first saw Jerusalem, I had a book along with me, in my luggage, packed carefully. It is by my college advisor Donald Nicholl, who served four years as rector of the ecumenical study institute at Tantur, outside Jerusalem on the way from Bethlehem. In it he related his attempts to be a bridge person, one whom people from various traditions and with varying viewpoints could all come for an understanding heart. And he related how he and his wife, Dorothy Nicholl, had agreed to try to maintain balance. If we find ourselves favoring one side to the exclusion of the other, they agreed, we will find that our hearts have been hardened.
‘I remember him saying something quite similar, which was that they had a test that if they ever chose one side over the other, it was time to go home. ’ (Seana Graham, 3/14/2025, email)
Our hearts have been hardened. How difficult it is not to take sides. How challenging but how necessary to peace to engage and to humanize people with whom we disagree. Listen to them, see them as human, not as Those People or even as some sort of objects. In Dorothy and Donald’s time, forty years ago, as in ours, the Holy Land is in conflict, and still it is between those whose collective trauma is the Holocaust and those for whom it is an-Nakba, the Catastrophe. For the Israeli there is something in the past that can never be forgotten and should not ever be factored out of their perspective. For the Palestinian, 1948 was the time, not of the War of Independence, as Israelis may call it, but Catastrophe, the displacement from ancestral homelands that forms their historical trauma.
To take one side in such a struggle is to harden one’s heart. If we can keep our hearts as hearts of flesh and not of stone we can find peace. There are people in the Holy Land trying to do that. We pilgrims met two fathers, one Israeli, one Palestinian, who together will meet with groups such as ours to talk about their common work at building understanding across divides. And as recently as the Academy Awards ceremony American filmgoers learned of a pair of film makers, one Arab, one Israeli, who have documented together the life in one village during the current conflict.
Not long ago the Rev. Dr. Gary Mason, who directs a conflict transformation organization based in Belfast called ‘Rethinking Conflict’, came to Tucson to talk about how in Northern Ireland they have addressed the questions, Why are we divided? and What can we do about it? Besides the Arizona Faith Network, he also advises Carter Center groups in several states, nonpartisan democracy resilience networks, to address these questions.
Civil conflicts, Gary Mason told us, ‘are mostly based in land, identity, and religion’. This is true for northern Ireland, for the Holy Land, and even for ourselves, when we find ourselves in polarized political headlock. Various factors predispose a situation for conflict. Change can be hard. Fear. Polarization is bigger than any one of us – but understanding that should lead to grace.
We need to identify shared values, and to create platforms for conversation. We need to move from misperception to understanding, to create a language of understanding. Engage and humanize. Invite and listen: “tell me your story.” And to realize: we love this place, this state, this country, this earth, we share, and in large part we do trust each other. And that can grow. And it must.
In Jesus’ time the conflicts were perhaps even more bitter, within the Jewish community, with their neighbors, with the imperial power in whose unfond embrace they found themselves.
We recently recalled the miracle of the transfiguration, the end of the Galilean ministry, after which Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem. Accompanied by his disciples, he made his way into the City and into the Temple. After driving out the monetizers of devotion, and rebuking the hypocritical rule-makers, Jesus spread his arms and spoke the words we remember, O Jerusalem Jerusalem.
How can we imagine him as any other than the one sent by God to bring his people together? It is not a martial metaphor. He is not like the heroes of old, arming to resist conquerors. He is coming for more than political liberation. He is coming for the total liberation from bondage to more than political oppression. And he is coming for all people.
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O Jerusalem Jerusalem - may the one who longed to gather the children to himself be the one to gather us together.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You who kill the prophets and stone those who were sent to you. How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that”. (Matthew 23:37, Common English Bible)
