Jerusalem
SHORTLY AFTER his election as pope in October 1978, John Paul II had an idea: He should spend his first Christmas in Bethlehem. When he broached this to the traditional managers of popes, they were aghast. Bethlehem was in disputed territory; the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with any state in the region; popes simply didn't do drop-bys; the logistics were impossible to arrange. For one of the few times in his 21-year pontificate, John Paul let his evangelical instincts be trumped by the ingrained cautiousness of the Vatican's diplomats: He spent Christmas 1978 in Rome.

But on numerous occasions in the ensuing years, he would ask those same diplomats, "When will you let me go?" In 1994, in an apostolic letter announcing the Great Jubilee of 2000, he proposed making a lengthy pilgrimage to the great sites of biblical history; for the next five years, there were endless arguments about whether and how it could be done. Finally, John Paul had had enough. On June 29, 1999, he wrote a letter to the entire Catholic Church announcing, quite simply, that he would go to the Holy Land in 2000. And now he has done it.

John Paul insisted that his was a pilgrimage without political or diplomatic purpose. Virtually everyone present could feel and see the truth of this. Here was a man immersed in prayer, walking in the steps of Christ, reminding the world that the year 2000 is not a mere calendrical quirk. By celebrating Mass at the traditional site of Christ's last supper with his apostles, by preaching at the site of his sermon on the mount, by praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, at Calvary, and at the tomb where Christ's body was laid, John Paul II fulfilled one of the deepest desires of his Christian heart.

At the same time, he reminded Christians (and others) taught by generations of scholars to be skeptical of the Bible that biblical religion is a gritty, earthy business. Critical scholarship can help us read the Bible more intelligently. But at bottom, biblical religion is about a God who, as John Paul put it on his arrival in Israel, "has gone before us and leads us on"--a God who entered history in order to redeem history. Biblical religion is not simply an idea; it is built on events that happened to real people, in real places, at particular moments in time. As he satisfied his yearning to be a pilgrim in those places, John Paul II was also bearing witness to that truth.

But the papacy is an inherently public office, and as the intertwined papal and Israeli flags on Jerusalem's lampposts suggested, John Paul came to the Holy Land as the embodiment of a complex and often tortured history. He also came as Karol Wojtyla, a Pole, a priest, and a pope who has invested enormous energy in building a new conversation between Catholics and Jews. The interplay of that history and this singular personality made for some of the week's most dramatic moments.