What I Saw In The Holy Land 4.2
This is the Mount of Temptation, in the middle of the famed Judean desert. In the valley below there are lush fruit orchards, irrigated naturally by springs fed from the Jordan River (Jericho is an oasis, recall) As you can see, it's not a sand desert, but one of mountain and rock, and I've never seen a more desolate looking place (although starkly beautiful). If this photo were high res, you could see that those little dark spots in the center are not mineral deposits, but caves, and tradition holds that Jesus spent his nights there when he was fasting and praying in preparation for his public life. On top of the mountain is an orthodox monastery.
I was there in winter, so it wasn't hot, but it was very dry and dusty, and after a while your throat is seriously parched. You need the freshly-squeezed orange or grapefruit juice that they sell at all the local stands. You can understand why in Christ's time people went out to this wilderness to confront the devil. Since hell is the absence of God, the absence of life, this wilderness does seem godforsaken.
In all honesty, we're not too sure this is really "the place." But since the whole area for miles around looks just like this, you certainly get the picture. And in its defense, it's right above the ancient city of Jericho, so when the Bible says Jesus went out from Jericho to the desert to fast and pray, it makes sense.
One of the best graces you receive in visiting the Holy Land is simply that it brings the scriptures --both Old & New Testament-- to life. You can picture what's happening; you know the approximate distances between one place and another, you can imagine the people. Pilgrims who went before I did have said, and I'm finding it true now, that this aspect of the journey only deepens and grows richer once you return home. While you're there, as hard as you try to cultivate a climate of prayer and reflection, you're still a tourist and sometimes suffer a bit from the overwhelm of so many things to take in. Back home, you'll find your Bible reading takes on new life.
I was rarely so scared for my life as I was here, when our driver backed our bus what seemed to me to be dangerously close to the precipice of our mountain overlook. (No guide rail to warn him if his judgment was wrong.) I thought about Satan tempting Christ to throw himself off a cliff because "He will give his angels charge over Thee" and considered telling the driver "thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." But the driver had a better sense of the distance than I did and we survived without apocalyptic warnings from me.
After a nice pause for photography, we had to beat a hasty retreat from our look-out point here, because first one and then a steady stream of young boys came up from the valley to beg.
