The following article was written by Dr. Dale Bishop, the Middle East area executive of the United Church Board for World Ministries of the United Church of Christ and the Division of the Overseas Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). This article is being reprinted from JISR/BRIDGE, a publication of the Common Global Ministries Board.

When I began my work with the United Church Board for World Ministries, a United Church of Christ colleague who had been heavily involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue warned me that Christians should stay away from the issue of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is as important to Jews as Jesus is to Christians, he said. Regardless of whether or not this is an accurate statement, it nevertheless captures an important dimension of the dispute among the three Abrahamic faiths over a city considered holy by all three. If Jerusalem is, as one Palestinian Christian leader puts it, "the mother of the children of Abraham," then those children have been engaged in an endless quarrel not over whom "mom loves best," but over "who loves mom more."

Behind such arguments is the assumption that love and devotion can be quantified, and behind that assumption is yet another, and more fundamental one: that love is a finite and quantifiable entity. Absent is an appreciation that different kinds of love, or different ways of expressing love do not lend themselves to being ranked or compared.

Not only are there different understandings of the significance of Jerusalem among the adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also within each of the three Abrahamic religious traditions there are differences.

Western Protestants, for example, have tended to "spiritualize" Jerusalem, to treat it as a kind of metaphor for the realm of God that is to be.

Orthodox and Catholic Christians of the Middle East, on the other hand, although they carry the reputation of being "more spiritual," see Jerusalem as the place where the real and the ideal, the human and the divine meet in the Incarnation. There is, therefore, among the Orthodox a deep appreciation of the "here and now," the very physicality of Jerusalem, along with its spiritual sanctity.

Rather than assuming that religious claims to Jerusalem are mutually exclusive, that the Holy City "belongs" to any one of its children, Christians might argue that an integral aspect of Jerusalem's holiness is the very fact that it is shared.

If we take such a view, the attachment of others to the city does not detract from the Christian attachment; on the contrary Jewish and Muslim devotion to Jerusalem provide Christians with the opportunity to deepen their own faith by benefitting from the piety of others. Whenever Jerusalem has been "owned" by any particular group, it has lost its vocation as a holy city, it has become like any other ordinary city in the Middle East. At the moment that holiness is grasped and appropriated at the expense of the other, that holiness evaporates.

Christians have tended to idealize Jerusalem in our historical memory or in our eschatlogical expectations. By the hundreds of thousands, Christian pilgrims visit Jerusalem in hopes of visualizing sacred history and recapturing the power of the sacred events that happened there. Some, on the other hand, visit the city with the end times in mind, anticipating the second coming of the Messiah and the rapture.

For both groups, there is a tendency to overlook the immediate human drama of the city, the struggle of Palestinians and Israelis for peace, justice, and security. For them the current inhabitants of Jerusalem are either the contemporary props for historical reenactments, or potential cannon fodder for Armageddon.

But Jerusalem is neither a museum nor a battleground. It has been, and is, above all else a meeting place: the intersection of the real and the ideal, the individual and the universal, the past and the present. In Jerusalem one experiences the realm of God already among us, and, in the refugee camps and in emotional and physical barricades, the realm of God not yet realized. In Jerusalem the human and the divine came together in Jesus, and they still come together in the deeds of love and mercy done by courageous and faithful individuals. In Jerusalem, particular events assume cosmic significance. In Jerusalem, the Biblical past joins with the contemporary human present. And for Christians, this remarkable intersection is symbolized by an ineradicable part of the city's physical and spiritual skyline - the cross.

Thus it was that in 1994 the heads of the churches of Jerusalem, in attempting to delineate their significance of Jerusalem for Christians, went beyond the historical squabbles over land and buildings to evoke the imagery of home.

"For Christianity," they said, "Jerusalem is the place of roots, ever living and nourishing. In Jerusalem is born every Christian. To be in Jerusalem for every Christian is to be at home."

It is this human dimension of Jerusalem that is all too often overlooked as the diplomats pore over maps and as political leaders make their claims. Jerusalem is, for all of us, home. For each of us to be in Jerusalem is to be at home