What a Place!

One of the highlights of my trip to the Holy Land last spring was going to the Garden Tomb.   It was a profoundly Christian spot.  People working there had a special presence about them.  It was unique.  It was also a beautiful place.  The tour led us through an ornate garden to the back of the property.  On the back of the property was a deck that overlooked a bus depot.  It was somewhat strange and loud.  Cesar, the guide in the garden, showed us a picture of what that scene had looked like 50 years ago.  At that time a cliff that rose about forty feet from the foot of the bus depot parking lot looked just like it had two eye sockets with a mouth, and a nose that pertruded from the mountain.  It was easy to see why it would have been called the Hill of the Skull.  It is thought (and I believe) that Jesus was crucified at the foot of that cliff.  On a map it is not far from the old city wall and probably 200 yards from the garden tomb.

My favorite places to visit in the Holy Land were the places that had remained as they were in the days of Jesus.  The great chapels that have been built are amazing but not near as amazing as the remains that lie in their basements that they are protecting.  I wanted the Hill of the Skull to stay the same.  I did not want a city bus depot parking lot to cover the very soil where my Savior hung on the cross.   I did not want erosion (with a little help from people) to change the look of the cliff that was the backdrop of the cross.  I did not want there to be a wall on the top of the cliff that had a message written in Aramiac and praising Muhammad to be in the place where my Lord was crucified.

It then came to me....

This is the kind of atmosphere that Christ was crucified in.  Read how John describes it in
John 19.16-20  -So they took Jesus, ¹⁷ and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. ¹⁸ There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. ¹⁹ Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” ²⁰ Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek.
George McCloud put it this way:
I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the centre of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, at a crossroad so cosmopolitan they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was the kind of place where cynics talk smut, thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. That’s where he died. And that’s where Christians ought to be and what Christians ought to be about.

Jesus died where the people lived, died for the people, and provides hope for the people.  Let's not get so caught up in the nostalgia of that and instead get caught up in the mission of that. 
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