Jerusalem is bitterly divided. It longs for its Prince of Peace to return

Some 15 years ago, in the Old City of Jerusalem, a woman I didn’t know pressed a simple wooden clutching cross into my hand. It was in the Armenian Quarter, which vies with the Jewish Quarter in my opinion for offering the Old City’s best food. She didn’t want money, so perhaps it was just a spontaneous act of hospitality, a Johannine welcome in the spirit of “come and eat” (John 21:12, NLT). 

We look apprehensively towards Jerusalem over the coming days, not only as Iran’s missiles rain down towards it but as we approach 7 October, the dreadful first anniversary of the Hamas incursion into Israel that claimed 1,139 lives and sparked the reprisal campaign in Gaza, which has cost tens of thousands more during the past twelve months. 

And we might look to it instinctively as the modern capital of Israel, though that status is disputed. 

Can this city really be the place where sorrows cease, and joy begins? 

But there’s something else about the bleak 10/7 anniversary that turns our attention to Jerusalem. The less than one square kilometre that is the old walled city contains within it the historical record of religious conflict over thousands of years. Today, it becomes an icon of that religious conflict again. 

A melting pot 

For Jews, it is the site of King Solomon’s holiest Temple Mount, built a millennium before the common era and sacked many times, most famously by the Babylonians around 500 years before Christ and the Romans, approximately 70 years after. 

For Christians, it’s where their Nazarene, Jesus, who took on the Jewish Temple authority with his new covenant and the Roman Empire with his threat to temporal power, was executed and emerged triumphant in his Resurrection.  

For Muslims, the most populous Old City quarter, there is the historical claim on Temple Mount, where their mosque and Dome of the Rock have stood since the seventh or eighth century, and the emblematic claim to Palestine’s statehood since the post-war establishment of modern Israel. 

These quarters rub along – the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim – as a microcosm of global tension between the Abramic faiths.  

So, it feels right to look to Jerusalem over coming days, as we’re forced to commemorate the most recent territorial, bloody conflict between two of these faiths. I’ve sought out my clutching cross; I don’t know why. After the last 7 October, it feels like clutching at straws as much as holding the Prince of Peace close. 

Christian conflict 

It’s not as if the Christian presence in the Old City is a shining example of unity in the pursuit of peace. We have two quarters: the principally global Catholic and the Armenian (historically, Armenia was the first country to formally adopt Christianity). The quarrelling between these two Christian factions down the ages almost competes in its divisiveness with the issues between Muslim and Jew. 

The Old City contains within it the record of religious conflict over thousands of years 

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the (probable) site of the crucifixion of Jesus (then known as Golgotha) is a melting pot of bitter historical rivalry. It may be situated in the Christian Quarter, but six denominations share the basilica. The wealthiest - the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox - dominate. Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox have bit parts. Others, in that fraternal Christian way, were thrown out centuries ago. And Protestant churches are just too Johnny-come-lately to get a look-in. 

I may have been made alert to Armenians by the sudden gift of the clutching cross, but at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I’m sure I was told that the Immovable Ladder - a short ladder at one of the church windows that’s been there for centuries - was the only way for Armenian priests to enter. I can’t trace that story, but the ladder is a strange little symbol of transcending Christian divisions. 

These divisions remain what Jerusalem is about. In the West, there is a tendency to romanticise the city. The cradle of Christianity might be at Bethlehem, but its birth was in Jerusalem. A lesser-known hymn ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’ has as its first verse: “O fair, O fair Jerusalem / When shall I come to thee? / When shall my sorrows have an end / Thy joy that I may see?” 

Can this city really be the place where sorrows cease, and joy begins? Yes, in a theological sense. But less so in our historical (and current) experience. The Christ who was executed here prophesied that not one stone of the Temple would be left standing on another (Matthew 24:2). On that, he would soon be vindicated when, around 70 years after his death, the Romans destroyed it. And today, as he also predicted, the women of Jerusalem weep not for him but for themselves (Luke 23:28). 

Bitterly divided, the city stands as a monument to human folly and misery. So, what do we do as our eyes turn to Jerusalem ahead of 7 October? Well, we pray. But everyone prays in Jerusalem.  

For Christians like me, it’s probably a case of remembering what the Old City did to the Christ – and clutching the cross we’ve so unexpectedly been gifted.