The New Testament fully recognises the importance of Jerusalem in God’s plan
Jerusalem. Jesus forbids swearing by Jerusalem “because it is the city of the Great King” (Mt 5:35). He resolutely goes up there; it is there that he must fulfil his mission. 211 But he says that the city “did not know the time of its visitation” and he tearfully foresees that this blindness will bring about its ruin, 212 as had already happened in Jeremiah’s time.
In the meantime, Jerusalem continues to play an important role. In the Lukan theology, it is at the centre of salvation history; it is there that Christ dies and is raised. Everything converges on this centre: the Gospel begins (Lk 1:5-25) and ends (-52) there. Then everything begins from there: it is from there that, after the coming of the Holy Spirit, the good news of salvation is spread to the four corners of the inhabited world (Ac 8-28). As regards Paul, although his apostolate did not begin from Jerusalem (Ga 1:17), he considers communion with the Jerusalem Church to be indispensable (2:1-2). Elsewhere, he declares that the mother of Christians is “the Jerusalem above” (4:26). The city becomes the symbol of eschatological fulfilment both in future (Rv 21:2-3, 9-11) and in present dimension (Heb ).
Thus, aided by a symbolic 
intensification already well attested in the Old Testament itself, the Church will always recognise the bonds that intimately unite it to the history of Jerusalem and its Temple, as well as to the prayer and cult of the Jewish people.
In times of real crisis, which ought to have been occasions for proving their trust in God, the Israelites “murmur”, 213 adopting an attitude of challenge to God’s plan and of opposition to Moses, to the point of wanting to “stone” him (Ex 17:4)
52. Continua a leggere “The New Testament fully recognises the importance of Jerusalem in God’s plan” →
