Explainer

Creed

Israel

Middle East

23 March 2024

6 min read

The most contested real estate on the planet

Can contradictory views about how God connects to Jerusalem ever be reconciled?

Peter Walker

Peter is a rector, writer and theologian.

A gold-domed, blue-walled octagonal mosque seen through a row of arches.

The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

Andrew Shiva via Wikipedia.

It was Saturday 14 October last year. BBC Radio were about to play a pre-recorded interview with a spokesman for Hamas and needed to explain to listeners something in advance: “the reference you will hear in a moment, stating that one of the causes of the Gaza conflict is the desire to preserve the freedom of ‘Al Aqsa’, is a references to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem—regarded as the third holiest site in the Muslim world”.

That was it in a nutshell. The Hamas spokesman was making it plain that, behind all the many political causes of the conflict erupting so tragically in the Holy Land, there was an essentially theological issue. Yes, as in other conflicts around the world, there are strong human desires in both Israeli and Palestinian communities to live in a place of security and to have their aspirations for some political independence to be adequately met, but here in the Holy Land there is an irreducible ‘God-component’ to the conflict.

The heart of the conflict

It’s not just that the conflict is predominantly between two major monotheistic religions—Judaism and Islam. It’s that those two world-religions have conflicting theological views—derived from their respective scriptures, the Hebrew Bible and the Quran—about physical places in the Holy land. And, even more particularly, they are have essentially contradictory views about the piece of land which Christians now often refer to as the ‘Temple Mount’: namely, the place where the former Jewish Temple stood, but which Muslims refer to as Haram Esh Sharif (‘the noble sanctuary’), because it is now the site both of the Dome of the Rock and the above-mentioned Al Aqsa mosque.

This is the most contested piece of real estate on the planet. The same site is, on the one hand, revered by Jews as the site of Solomon’s temple centred on the ‘holy of holies’ and, on the other, is revered by Muslims as the place from which Muhammed went on his mysterious ‘night journey’ up to heaven and back, as recounted in the Qu’ran. So, for both religions the site is not just of historical interest but rather is invested with theological weight—as a place associated like no other, with God himself.

The Hamas spokesman was thus helpfully laying bare the irreducible theological crux at the root of this conflict. Secular politicians and humanitarian agencies might want to take this ‘God-component’ out of the equation, but it will not go away. For this conflict is based on essentially contradictory views about how God connects to Jerusalem and especially to the Temple Mount.

Enter Jesus

The familiar story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is remembered on Palm Sunday every year. It is an event with layers upon layers of meaning. At its heart, however, is the conviction of the Gospel writers and of the early Christians that Jesus had entered Jerusalem as the human embodiment of God himself.

A hint of this may be found in the way that Jesus, when criticised by the religious leaders for the extravagant claims the crowds were making for Jesus at that moment (especially haling him as the ‘Messiah’), himself claims that “even the stones would cry out” in honour of him, if they could—presumably because they know that their Creator was passing by at just that moment!

Yet this conviction—that Jesus had been the human embodiment of God—is perhaps best sensed when we note how Jesus’ coming over the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem can, arguably, be seen as the return of the Lord’s Shekinah glory into the Temple. This comes through noting a highly significant passage in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. The prophet, writing from exile in Babylon, had seen a vision about the ‘glory of the God of Israel’: ‘the glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain to the east of it’ — in other words the Mount of Olives, the hill to the east of the city of Jerusalem, that looked over the Temple Mount

Now Jesus comes over the Mount of Olives and storms into the Temple: this is Ezekiel’s vision but now in reverse. He is embodying the return of the Lord’s glory; he is the personal presence of Israel’s God; he is, as the prophet Malachi predicted, ‘the Lord himself coming into his Temple’.

If true, then Jesus was God’s embodied presence coming into the Temple. God had previously made the Temple to be the place where he dwelt on earth; now Jesus was that presence himself—in human form.

And, when Jesus goes on solemnly to announce that “your house is left desolate”, he is making it clear that that divine presence, which had genuinely filled the Temple back in the days of Solomon, was now being removed once and for all.

After some further teaching Jesus eventually makes his own final departure from the Temple precincts—a clear sign for the writer of Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus is taking the divine presence with him out of the building. And a few weeks later, as described by Luke, we are presented with the picture of Jesus taking divine presence back into heaven in the event of the Ascension.

Viewed in this way, we can see the whole story of Jesus’ going into the Temple as effectively a ‘de-secration’ of the Temple. He was making it clear that he alone was now where God’s presence was to be found. Divine presence was no longer to be associated with a place, but with a person.

Back to the present

Coming back to the present day, then, there is a profound sense in which those who associate the former Temple Mount with a doctrine of divine presence are chasing after ‘thin air’. The Temple once upon a time had housed the presence of God, but, according to this Christian understanding, it does so no longer—it is an ‘empty pot of gold’. ‘The Glory has departed’—in Jesus.

If so, this major source of tension in the contemporary Middle East—the conflicting theologies of Judaism and Islam concerning the sanctity of the Temple Mount and its historic connection to God’s presence—can only be resolved by a recognition that Jesus has decisively changed all this.

If Jesus is ‘God incarnate’ (something clearly not recognised in Judaism and Islam)—if, in other words, he is the place where we go to find God—then that takes the ‘God-component’ out of the equation and brings to an end the elevated status that so many give to Jerusalem and the Temple.

Jerusalem, understood in this way, now points in God’s purposes to the far greater reality of Jesus Christ who alone embodies the true presence of God in human form. Jesus himself said that “one greater than the Temple is here”. But, tragically, the overwhelming majority of those who live in Jerusalem and the Holy Land today are committed to religious systems which deny these and other New Testament claims for Jesus.

Taking this further

Alternatively, you might like to access to a suite of resources for Holy Week: take your pick from some ‘In the Steps of Jesus’ videos (filmed in Jerusalem), or some audio recordings (‘The Week that Changed the World’) or a book (‘Immersed in the Passion’) that retells the story from Palm Sunday to Easter Day.

Article

Belief

Creed

Economics

25 November 2025

5 min read

The insane economics of Jesus

Does he even know about inflation, budget fights, and mutual funds?

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

Splitting the bill?

The Chosen.

Written by David Clay. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 11 November 2025. By kind permission.

Having evolved into a month-long monstrosity of various parties and trunks-or-treats, Halloween has left my daughters with an absurd surfeit of candy. It’s enough to keep several dentists in business. Even so, my children still fear the annual imposition of the dreaded “dad tax,” which they argue is illegitimate due to their lack of representation. My kids have long since learned that no matter how impressive their hoard of candy, it always runs out eventually.

What seemed like an abundance the night before is revealed to be limited supply. In other words, my children are always shocked to discover scarcity.

Most people for most of history produced about enough to keep themselves alive. The Domesday Book (1086 AD), a survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror, shows that peasants (i.e., people with limited or no land ownership rights who were beholden to a local lord) made up 95 per cent of the population. While peasants in some cases achieved prosperity, this was the exception to the rule of subsistence labor, usually agricultural in nature. For almost everyone, the possibility of starvation was anything but theoretical.

In that respect, the situation in early medieval England was little different from that in first-century Palestine. There as well, nine out of ten people made just enough to survive — and, sometimes, not even that much. Both Josephus and the New Testament mention the mid-century famine (44–48 AD) that devastated Judea. There was no social safety net in that time and place. People could and did starve to death.

It was to people permanently conscious of scarcity, then, that a certain self-styled rabbi — until very recently a day laborer himself — said,

“Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? … But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

Jesus’ audience would have agreed that provision ultimately comes from God. But “don’t be anxious about tomorrow”? In a world where starvation is always just a bad harvest away? Jesus, with a straight face, is instructing his audience to live as if abundance, not scarcity, is the ultimate reality in life. Not for the first time, he seems more than a little disconnected from what it’s actually like to live on this planet.

Insofar as some of us moderns in industrialized societies are a little less worried about starving or dying from exposure, this is thanks to human ingenuity (thank you very much) coming up with ways to radically increase our productivity. An undeniably magnificent achievement — but also one that’s exacerbated other forms of scarcity.

Think, for instance, of the “attention economy,” the battle to secure ever-shrinking attention spans. The very computational tools that have made our contemporary standard of living possible have also hooked us up to a constant pipeline of far more information than we could ever possibly process. So much so that the act of paying attention, seemingly a basic feature of being human, is valued at an increasing premium.

Or, consider time. The mid-twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that automation and enhanced productivity would naturally result in less stress and more leisure time. What he did not foresee is that increasing productivity increases expectations of how productive we should be. Time, in all times and places, is the ultimate “vanishing asset,” but the proliferation of time-management strategies and gadgets tells us, I think, that time seems even more limited when we are expected (or expect ourselves) to hustle and grind.

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that scarcity is the single most pressing reality in human experience. In some form or another, this is true of every human culture. We combat scarcity with the urge to simplify, to streamline, to do more with less, to find life hacks, or invent new technologies.

Jesus, however, tells us to ignore it. Or, at least, to behave as though scarcity is not that interesting or important. God feeds the birds and clothes the lilies; you’re more important than a bird or lily to God; ergo, God will take care of you. Stop stressing.

This doesn’t feel aspirational or inspirational. It feels insane. I have a mortgage. I have three girls to put through college. I need money, energy, focus, and time, not the bizarre exhortations of some mystic. Does Jesus even know about inflation?

But the weird thing is that, yeah, he does. Jesus is very much not detached from the realities of everyday life in his time and place. He is up on current events like collapsing towers and the machinations of Herod Antipas (“that fox,” Jesus calls him. Not a compliment). He seems a little bored by politics, but he’s definitely not naive about the power structures and major players in Galilee and Judea. He makes a conniving, dishonest middle manager the hero of one of his stories. Politics, taxes, sectarian violence, collapsing infrastructure — the Gospels describe Jesus interacting with a world very different than our own, but one that’s still immediately recognizable.

The difference is that I tend to think of inflation data, budget fights, geopolitical maneuvering over scarce resources, and supply chains as “the real world,” while the kingdom of heaven is something lovely but also a bit airy, a little insubstantial. Jesus saw things in exactly the opposite way. The kingdom is Reality, while the lords of the gentiles, the payment of taxes, even the pressing daily concerns for food and clothing, are all fleeting or at most secondary. And the kingdom is abundant, for its King doesn’t give stones when his children need bread.

What does it mean to live as if abundance and not scarcity is the final word? I don’t know. What I do know is that what really feels insane, some days, is thinking I can conserve enough time, money, energy, focus or whatever else to build a life in which I find fulfillment or peace. There are cracks in my no-nonsense, economically rational world that beckon me to ask, what if I have no money, time, energy — nothing but my daily bread — only to find that I already have all I need?

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now