Tammuz begins not with fire, but with a crack. It is the sound of walls breached, of defenses shattered. On the 17th of this month in the Jewish calendar, the outer walls of Jerusalem were broken through—first by the Babylonians, then by the Romans. The path to destruction is not sudden, but unfolds like a wound deepening. It is within this painful breach that, intriguingly, the question of atonement is whispered.

The name of the month, Tammuz, echoes more than chronology. It bears the name of a Mesopotamian deity, a symbol of death and seasonal decay. In a paradox as old as prophecy, the Hebrew calendar has inherited this name. We might recoil at this inheritance—how could a month of mourning carry the name of a pagan figure? But perhaps this is precisely where the mystery of atonement begins: not in purity, but in mixture. Not in triumph, but in exposure. And whatever circumstances, we should keep in mind that this universal factor is rooted in the North, not the South Hemisphere of the globe.

In this time, the Church also remembers another kind of breach: the destruction of the body of Jesus on the Cross, a breaking that unfolds within the Church of the Resurrection—Anastasis—in Jerusalem. This “second Temple” of sorts is not of stone alone, but of time, memory, and revelation. It is not accidental that Jesus compared his body to the Temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). His crucifixion occurred outside the walls, just as the Babylonian armies tore through Jerusalem’s perimeter.

And yet, the heart of the mystery is not the destruction itself, but what it reveals. Peter, whose given name is Shimon bar Yonah, utters in Cæsarea Philippi: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” He confesses this not in Jerusalem, not in the shadow of the Temple, but at the edge of Israelite geography—at Banias, a site saturated with pagan symbolism. It is a place traditionally associated with Pan, the dying god of nature and chaos. Peter’s confession occurs not in purity, but again—in the context of a then and now full mixture.

Jesus responds by renaming him:........

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