The Road to Jerusalem

Lamentations 3:55–66; Mark 10:32–34

They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. Mark’s spare prose captures the scene with cinematic precision. Jesus out front, striding toward the city. The disciples trailing behind, caught between astonishment and dread. They do not fully understand what is coming, but they sense it. The road to Jerusalem is the road to the cross.

Jesus pulls the twelve aside and tells them plainly: See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all." —Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries

The detail is terrible. Condemned. Mocked. Spit upon. Flogged. Killed. Jesus does not spare them the specifics. And he does not spare himself. He walks toward Jerusalem with open eyes. This is not a man caught by surprise. This is a man making a choice—choosing the cross, step by step, mile by mile, with the full weight of foreknowledge.

The Lamentations reading provides the language of the one who has already suffered: I called on your name, O Lord, from the depths of the pit; you heard my plea. You came near when I called on you; you said, Do not fear. The voice is that of someone who has passed through the worst and found God there—not preventing the suffering but present in it. You came near.

We stand at the threshold of Holy Week. Tomorrow is Palm Sunday. The palms will wave, the crowds will shout, and the road will narrow toward Golgotha. Everything we have been preparing for during these forty days converges here: the secret room of Ash Wednesday, the bronze serpent lifted up, the living water, the man born blind, Lazarus stumbling from the tomb. All of it leads to Jerusalem.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would himself be executed for his faith, wrote: When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. The dying he meant was not morbid resignation but the radical surrender of self that makes resurrection possible. You cannot have Easter without Good Friday. You cannot have the garden without the cross. You cannot have the road’s end without walking the road.

Today, walk with Jesus. Not behind him, where the afraid followers lagged. Walk beside him, if you can. Hold the terrible details without flinching. The road is going up to Jerusalem. There is no detour. But at the end of the mocking and the spitting and the killing, Mark adds three words that change everything: he will rise. He will rise. Hold onto those words. They will hold you through the week to come.

The early Christians called the days before Easter the Triduum Sacrum—the Sacred Three Days—and they understood them not as a historical reenactment but as a present-tense participation in the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection. As we enter Holy Week, we do not merely remember what happened. We enter it. The road to Jerusalem is not behind us in history. It is before us, and we are on it. The amazement and the fear the disciples felt are available to us too—if we are willing to keep walking, to stay close, to follow the One who goes ahead of us into the dark.