Psalms 122:2

Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem

The psalm was probably written by a pilgrim to Jerusalem at some time previous to the Babylonish Captivity. On the one hand, it is clear that “the house of the Lord,” the ancient Temple, was still standing; on the other, the reference to “the house of David” and the anxious prayer “for the peace of Jerusalem,” its walls, its palaces, seem to point to a later period than that of David. The pilgrim who composed the psalm would have belonged to one of the ten separated tribes; but he had remained after the general defection true to the divinely-ordered worship at Jerusalem, and his psalm may well have been composed on the occasion of his first visit.

1. Now, one thing that would have struck a pilgrim to Jerusalem who should approach the city, as was natural, from its north-eastern side, would be its beauty. Possibly this pilgrim had seen Damascus straggling out amid the beautiful oasis which surrounds it in the plain of the Abana, or he had seen Memphis, a long strip of buildings, thickly populated, extending for some twelve or fourteen miles along the western bank of the Nile. Compared with those Jerusalem had the compact beauty of a highland fortress, its buildings are seen from below standing out against the clear Syrian sky, and conveying an impression of grace and strength that would long linger in the memory. No doubt in the eyes of a pilgrim in these old Jewish times, as afterwards, the physical beauty of Jerusalem must have suggested and blended with a beauty of a higher order. The beauty of the world of spirit imparts to the world of sense a subtle lustre which of itself it could never possess. “Walk about Zion, and go round about her, and tell the towers thereof; mark well her bulwarks; set up her houses that ye may tell them that come after.” And why? “For this God is our God for ever and ever. He shall be our guide unto death.”

2. And secondly, Jerusalem was the centre of the religious and national life of Israel. Jerusalem was what it was in a good Israelite’s eyes less on its own account than because it contained the Temple. “Yea,” cries the pilgrim, as he looks out on the fair city beneath him--“yea, because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do thee good.” And so, although the city of Solomon and its Temple passed away, and a new city and a new temple rose upon the ruins of the old, pilgrims still came up with the old psalm upon their lips and in their hearts: “Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem.”

3. And a third characteristic of Jerusalem, which appealed to religious pilgrims like this psalmist-pilgrim, was, if I may so phrase what I mean, its unworldliness. This appears partly in its situation. Jerusalem was not on the sea, or on a navigable river. The little stream of the Kedron was dry for the greater part of the year in ancient days as now, and nothing but rude mountain-paths connected the city with Egypt on one side or with Syria on the other. It was thus cut off from those activities of commerce and intercourse with distant countries which are essential to the material well-being and development of a great capital.

4. As the centuries went on, Jerusalem, thus dear to the heart of Israel as being what it was in itself, became yet dearer to it by misfortune. Of all that is most beautiful in life, sorrow is the last consecration. Sorrow is the poetry, no less than the discipline of humanity. Certainly, if one thing is clear from Scripture and from experience, sorrows such as those of Jerusalem are the result of sin. And yet this could not kill out the sense of blessing which attached to the sacred spot in the eyes of successive generations of pilgrims. Thinking only of the sure mercies of David, thinking with the apostle of a later age, that the gifts and calling of God are indeed without repentance, again and again under Manasseh as under Hezekiah, under Jehoiakim as under Josiah, they uttered their song, “Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem.” The events which make Jerusalem what it is in Christian eyes do not belong to the Old Testament. That wonderful self-manifestation of the Eternal Being among men which began at Bethlehem and Nazareth reached its climax at Jerusalem. On the hills around this favoured city, along its streets, in the courts of its great sanctuary, there walked in visible form, One who had already lived from everlasting, and who had folded around His eternal person the body and the soul of the sons of men. Just outside its walls, He condescended to die in agony and in shame only that He might rise in triumph from His grave, and on a hill hard by He went visibly up to heaven to reign for ever in glory. He conferred on it in Christian eyes a patent of nobility which will only become invalid when His Gospel disappears from among men. But the Jerusalem of Christian thought is no longer only or mainly the city of David. It is, first of all, the visible and universal Church of Christ. The towers and walls and shrines of the ancient city, as faith gazes on them, melt away into the outline of a sublimer prospect--that of redeemed humanity through all the Christian centuries gathered and harmonized into the city of God. This was what St. Paul meant when, writing to the Galatians, he contrasted with Jerusalem “that now is which is in bondage”--that is, to the Romans--“with her children”; the Jerusalem “that is above,” or, as we should say, “the spiritual Jerusalem that is free, and is the mother of us all.” That vast society in whose ample bosom the souls of Christian men from generation to generation find shelter and welcome and warmth and nourishment is the reality of which the old Syrian city was the material type. This is the Jerusalem of the Christian creed--“I believe in one holy Catholic Apostolic Church;” this is the Jerusalem of, perhaps, the greatest work of the greatest teacher of the Christian Church since apostolic days--Augustine’s treatise on “The City of God.” There may be controversies among Christians as to the exact direction and extent of its wails, just as there are controversies among antiquarians as to the extent and direction of the walls of its material prototype, but as to its place in the thoughts and affections of all true Christian men there should be no room for controversy. No other association of men can have such claims on the heart of a Christian as the Church of God. What if sin and division have marred its beauty and its unity. The old Jerusalem did not cease to be Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s eyes because of the sins of the priests, of princes, of peoples which he so unsparingly denounced. The factions which rent the city that fell beneath the legions of Titus did not kill out` the love and the loyalty of its noblest sons. The true remedy for disappointment and sorrow on the score of shortcomings and differences within the sacred city is to be found in such prayers as those which we offer in our holiest service to the Divine Majesty, beseeching Him to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord. And this earthly Jerusalem suggests another city, a true haven of peace, with which the visible Church of Christ is already in communion, and into which all those true children of Zion who are joyful in their King will one day be received. (Canon Liddon.)