Unity is the seedbed of peace.
Psalm 122 is titled a “song of ascents.” This indicates that it belongs to a collection of songs (Psalms 120-134) that pilgrims sang as they entered the city of Jerusalem or the temple. (If they were traveling to the city from the Jordan Valley, it would have been literally a steep ascent, approximately 2,500 feet in total.)
It is a joyful hymn addressed not to God, but to the city itself. Its lyrics reflect the passionate attachment that Jewish pilgrims have felt and continue to feel for the ancient city. (That passionate attachment has come to be paralleled among Christian and Muslim pilgrims, too.)
The psalmist celebrates the city. First of all, it is the place where all the tribes of Israel assemble before God. Here they become one people in the presence of the God who has called them to be one nation.
The city is redolent with memories of the Davidic dynasty. David conquered the city, and there his descendants reigned for the next 400 years until its fall to Babylon in 587 B.C. There their thrones were set up.
The city is the site of the temple. In this sacred place Israel meets its God and God meets his people. It is truly a thin place, to adopt a Celtic concept.
An Evocative Image
But what I have always loved most is the description of the city in verse 3. In the New Revised Standard Version, the verse reads:
Jerusalem–built as a city
that is bound firmly together.
That may be an accurate translation of the Hebrew, but the translation of the verse that resonates deeply in my soul is the translation that we find in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer:
Jerusalem is built as a city
that is at unity with itself.
I first encountered this translation in my 20s. That decade was a decade of inner turmoil for me. I was torn this way and that by many different and competing desires and beliefs and confused feelings. It would be accurate to say that I was a deeply fragmented person.*
When I encountered that phrase at unity with itself, I felt that was not a description of me, but it certainly expressed my deep longing. Oh, to be a person who was at unity with himself!
What these words convey to me is an immensely beautiful image of integration. They express the experience of a life in which the diverse pieces of that life all fit together in harmony. The light and the shadow, the successes and the failures, the achievements and the losses, the joy and the pain. All make up a full life, but most of us find it hard to accept that fact.
I have made much progress towards that goal since my 20s, but I am not fully there yet. The words, however, continue to inspire me. They are the lodestar for my spiritual journey.
The words serve not only as the lodestar for an individual life (like my own), but also the ideal for which we all long as we look at living together with others–life in a family, in a church, in a local community, in a nation, or internationally. Human kind has seldom realized this dream, but it beckons us emotionally and spiritually nonetheless.
The New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation
The elder John picks up this image of Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. In chapters 21-22, we read his vision of the new Jerusalem that descends out of heaven upon the earth at the end of history, when God creates a new heaven and a new earth.
The beauty of the city is dazzling with its bejeweled gates, golden streets, and verdant gardens. But what has always fascinated me about John’s description is that the city is equal in length, breadth, and height. The city extends 1.500 miles in each of those three dimensions.
What we have is a description of a cube. And the cube, along with the sphere, has traditionally been a symbol of perfection. The new city is a city at perfect unity with itself. All is in harmonious proportion.
The city has no temple, for it needs none. God dwells fully with his people in the culmination of that unity that unites heaven and earth, matter and spirit, humanity and its Lord.
Psalm 122 ends with the psalmist’s summons to pray for Jerusalem. Pray specifically for its peace. For where there is true unity, there also will be peace.
* So also has been the case with the historic city of Jerusalem. Few cities have been as fragmented and fought over as much as the city of Jerusalem, whether from internal discord or from foreign invasion. When we read Psalm 122, we feel we have entered into something of a dream world. This is not the Jerusalem of history. But dreams do reveal the depths of our inner psyche and for that reason point to a spiritual longing that cannot be smothered.
The Bible's in My Blood 
Pingback: The Garden City | The Bible's in My Blood