I am often asked about my experience as a student at BYU’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. One of my favorite ways to describe my experience is through the scriptures. It is as if the scriptures came alive and opened up a whole new level of understanding, connection, and reality. They are literally no longer the same.No longer are they just words on a page, but rather actual places, smells, hills, mountains, and even actual military strategies. I physically walked where Jesus walked. I understood the distance between Jericho and Jerusalem from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Immersed in a vineyard, I participated in an actual olive and grape harvest.
As part of the Center’s historical displays they have reconstructed an early century wine press. Each year, fall semester students get to participate in the ritual of the harvest and process of the preservation of grapes. Grapes along with olives we know anciently were an essential life sustaining food source. It is no wonder that one of the many metaphors Jesus Christ is referred to is the true vine.
By physically participating in my own treading of the grapes, I quickly and acutely became aware of how impossible it is to tread these grapes alone. Not the most efficient way to squeeze out the juice you step and stomp on the mounds of grapes, most steps grapes slip out from underneath your feet squishing relatively a few at a time. Some steps squishing grapes between your toes and giving a new meaning to toe jam. Slowly, juice is extracted and collected, the more people that are treading the more juice is squeezed out and collected. Some students, if you were brave enough, before it was fermented and before it was collected into jugs, after it drained into the next section of the wine press would taste a sample. I think about it now…and I think I was young, adventurous and invincible. Okay, truth be told I would probably do it again. In addition with all the stomping and smashing going on,the juice would splash or “sprinkle” and stain your clothes.
It was during this activity, the reality, the magnitude of what Jesus Christ did came sharply into focus, it suddenly became tangible. It was no longer a concept I read about and struggled to comprehend. In a small fraction I physically and emotionally understood what it must have taken for the Savior to declare in Isaiah and the Doctrine and Covenants, “It is finished; it is finished! The Lamb of God hath overcome and trodden the wine-press alone.” In a small way I understood what it meant to tread the wine press and just how humanly impossible it was but yet He did and He did it for me.
Because of my Savior Jesus Christ treading the wine press alone, I am and will never be alone. Because His garments are stained red, mine stains can be made white. The phrase, “I have trodden the wine press alone” will always be imprinted on my mind and heart and there will always be a special connection because of my study at the Jerusalem Center, never to be forgotten.
This story was written by Elaine Schaat Williams who was a student in Fall 1992.
Image Courtesy of Ben Cloward who was a student in Fall 1993.
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