From the Steps | Songs of Ascent

 

Photo Credit - Timothy Ritz

(Memories from the Holy Land)

I lift my eyes up to the mountains – where does my help come from?

Psalm 121

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We take one step up, feet slipping in the grooves that have been worn down by a million feet, and in some ways I feel that I’m looking for the footprint of the Foot that treads through starlight like it’s a Roman walkway. I’m winded, but it can't be the altitude - the air here feels weighty with memory. Weighted with years, with doing and undoing; building and tearing down.

The woman said it was hard to be one of them - that’s the understatement of the century. She didn’t mention that it’s hard to be human either way, and perhaps it is only a richer multiplication of the skin-to-skin conflict that comes from loving Yahweh and being loved by Him from the vantage point of rubble. A microcosm of the infinite war going on in places invisible to the eye.

May those who love you be secure.

Little more than children on the steps of the Temple Mount, we wonder how the mystery dwells within us now. I have been a bad little temple. I have been a broken-down trailer with barely enough space to turn around in – yet, it is His pleasure to make beautiful things out of nothing. It is the wisdom of God.

Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us,

for we have endured no end of contempt.

This is a somber place. I rest on the third step and try to look out across the hills without hearing the sounds of grief that feel ever present. The Kidron and Hinnom meet in shadows of what must’ve been ancient rivers or currents – they have seen blood, and it feels like I can hear it running. The world here feels old and wise, settled on its foundations like an old man sitting beside his shop with the paper in his hand. 

How is it that our salvation comes by the loss of so much?

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,

we were like those who dreamed.

Those who dreamed. I mouth the words on the heights of the steps, collapsed down in the shade of the wall. There has been so much loss, and yet the sun still rises in the East. The mouth of the Temple is not there, but the mountain face still stands. And there is hope. Unkillable hope, written on the palms of anyone who has this little Temple of a heart, and we are waiting for a day unseen where the old stones will be peeled away – all the unmovable rocks will be lifted and things will be set onto a new Cornerstone, the One that causes men to stumble and walk on water in the same breath. 

I wait for the Lord

more than watchmen wait for the morning,

more than watchmen wait for the morning.

And I smile. 

I watch the sun sink as a Gentile woman on the Temple Mount. Things are not as they were – but they never are. 

There is an avenging day coming, a day of delivered justice, when the sweetness of grace will mingle with the wrath of perfection, and there are answers to every unanswerable question just waiting to be known – this is what I think about on the steps where the feet of the Messiah walked, and I like to think I can hear Him laughing with Peter about something John said. 

I watch the sun sink as a Gentile woman on the Temple Mount. When they broke down the walls, they let us in. Is this the healing balm of a miracle within the empty stomach of dark days? What a mystery of love.

Israel, put your hope in the Lord

both now and forevermore.