When the walls go tumbling up.

THE NIGHT THE people of Berlin tore through their infamous wall, I was rejoicing with a friend in Poland who had been building walls, the walls of his new home. As East and West Berlin were reunited, my friend finished the wiring in his house and for the first time illuminated it in the night, like a city on a hill.

Walls: Perhaps no single image has so much resonance these days. The Vietnam Memorial, for instance, is a wall covered with the most solemn graffiti imaginable, names of those bodies stacked to make a wall as thick and long and dark as their suffering. It is a wall, but a human wall, a stone list of human flesh, its very hardness made of vulnerability.

These names are not just another brick in the wall protecting power and privilege at the ease of the freedom of the masses. We know that wall well, but we know best our own walls, the walls of our bodies: open and shut through surgical trap doors, broken and healed or finally breached from without by gunshot or crashing metal, breached from within by cancer, or simply worn almost to transparency by age.

Jerusalem, like most ancient cities, has walls around it, but it did not always. When Babylon razed Jerusalem and led all but a small remnant off into exile, it left only rubble behind. Jerusalem was unwalled, but was it Jerusalem, or just more land to be used for an empire centered far away? Babylon left only ruins and, most important, only ruins of the Temple and ruins of walls. Israel's body had been blown open and its heart reduced to piles of "raw materials"--as Ezekiel saw it, a field of dry bones, jumbled together, with no flesh or life or movement. But God calls those bones to life.

This time, in the Book of Nehemiah, the resurrection happened through God's call to Nehemiah, the Jewish cupbearer to Autoxerxes, ruler of the empire that included what had been Israel. When Nehemiah heard from visitors the miserable condition of Jerusalem, he turned to God weeping and fasting to plead for the restoration of Israel, according to God's promise to forgive his penitent people. Autoxerxes noticed Nehemiah's anguish, and when he heard the reason for it, he authorized Nehemiah to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the city's walls.

Walls create a place by making an interior, but they also create by making an exterior, by shutting out. Walls are always controversial. The enemies of Jerusalem, when they discovered what Nehemiah was about, quickly responded with derision, plots, and threats of armed opposition. The remnant led by Nehemiah were never more vulnerable than in the middle of rebuilding their wall, for they had roused opposition but they could not yet defend their city. Nehemiah wrote that every builder wore a sword at his side.

Women and men together, priests and laypeople all dispersed around the city and worked feverishly to rebuild the wall, listening all the time for the trumpet call that would tell them to drop their work and run to join in a battle. This was hardly an effective defensive plan, as they all knew. "God will fight with us," Nehemiah reassured them (4:14). They built feverishly for 52 days, in which time Nehemiah tells us neither he nor his kinsmen nor his attendants took off their clothes--almost two months--until the work was completed, a city raised from the grave.

The people who made up the remnant of Israel may not have known until that point who their enemies were. They could hardly have had recognizable enemies as long as they had no identity themselves. Yet as soon as this remnant began to appear--and to appear as not just another town but as the heart of the priestly people of Yahweh, making Jerusalem's claim to be the city of God--they discovered their enemies. They could have remained "at peace" as vassals to a distant empire. They would have had no enemies if they had not answered the call to have a self.

As exhilarating as this rebuilding was, it was only half the story. As walls create conflict without, so they create dissension within. The city of God was reestablished, but it was now found to be a place of sacrilege, as only the city of God could be. Resurrecting a city to follow the law of Moses means re-creating a people who may not follow that law. To ask a people to honor God is to risk their refusal.

Nehemiah heard, among other complaints, that some Jews were demanding interest from other Jews, thereby enslaving their own poor and depriving them of their land. If Jerusalem were no particular place, as it was without its walls, we might deplore the greed that allowed the rich to profit off someone else's misery under cover of aiding them. With a shake of the head we might call it "the way of the world."

BUT JERUSALEM IS NOT THE PLACE FOR "THE WAY OF THE world." In Jerusalem, interest-taking is an offense against God. Nehemiah, in the name of Israel's God, confronted these entrepreneurs with their sin. "As far as we were able, we bought back our fellow Jews who had been sold to Gentiles; you, however, are selling your own brothers, to have them bought back by us" (5:8). The walls that reestablished the city also raised a question: Will the people of this city be what they are called to be? Can a city of God really exist among us?

And they still do raise that question. Jerusalem, the holy city, the center of pilgrimage and devotion, remains a place of violence and hatred. The horror we feel at its warring has a peculiar bitterness amid the horror we feel at so much bad news from so many places: this place, this city is like no other. It has walls, and we know where it is and what it is and why the expectations around it rouse a passion that can spill over into brutality. We watch with heartbreak as the darker side of Nehemiah's story of Jerusalem is repeated: "Outsiders" are rejected as a threat to the identity and security of that city. The walls can become not only a declaration of Israel's existence, but a guard against the danger and impurity of strangers.

For Christians, alongside our sad love of Jerusalem, there is also the hope of a New Jerusalem. Outside that city, the walls of Jesus' Body were finally breached on the cross. When his heart halted, plundered of its treasure, open and empty like the violated Holy of Holies, a scattered remnant of disciples mourned. They no longer had enemies because they were no longer a threat. Just more land to be used, just more bodies to pay taxes. Then came Resurrection. "April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain," wrote T. S. Eliot in "The Wasteland."

Jesus' Resurrection triumphed over death, but like the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls, it was hardly an announcement of human peace. Opposition from without followed quickly. Within the new city of Christ's Body, the demand that the "way of the world" is not our way has made Christian history boil with disputes. We have had to learn, as Jerusalem did, about scandal and penitence and forgiveness.

THE WALLS OF CHRIST'S BODY, THE CHURCH, CREATE A PEOPLE and in doing so create conflicts, just as Nehemiah's building project did. They do exist to close something out: fear, slavery, despair. They claim a place where sin doesn't get the last word. But these walls of Christ's are strangely unlike other walls. Instead of marking a line of defense, they fulfill the call God gave to Jerusalem to welcome all nations to worship. They are not defended by our wars, because the law of this city is love even of enemy.

Because the strength of these walls is the gift of one who overcame death, we don't have to shore them up against the infidel attackers or cast out every suspected half-breed. They are a bulwark made by fear, because they create the place where perfect love casts out fear. These walls are as deep and sturdy as the love of God, and they give structure to the common life of Christians. But they are like no walls we have ever known, even in Jerusalem. The walls of the church are Christ's Body, broken, vulnerable, completely victorious over sin and death, and open-armed. What an odd new city we are.

We who have been baptized into that Body and who share in it in the Eucharist know that these walls give our lives a strange shape. In our city, good economics is following God's law and realistic politics is forgiving as we would be forgiven. Miracles happen. Becoming a child is a life's aspiration. On the plain of the world, we join Nehemiah in loving and longing for the city of God that changes the life of the world by its presence. The city is not unambiguous: We have become the site of worship and therefore always potentially the site of sacrilege. But because forgiveness abounds and grace will not be defeated, we can face that risk as we do others: truthfully and hopefully.

These wounded, fleshy walls that are Christ's Body create a city that invites us all, Roman soldiers and condemned thieves and women of dubious background included. We won't find a neat or easy life there--and certainly not one free of conflict--but within this city the Lord invites us to come and have life to the full.

By KELLY JOHNSON, a graduate student in theological ethics who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and teaches at the University of St. Thomas.