Up to Jerusalem

It begins with a decision, and Luke describes it with a phrase that sounds like a man bracing himself.

Understand the geography of that decision. He was in the Galilee, in the north, where He was loved, where the crowds were, where His mother lived, where the fishing was. Jerusalem was four or five days' walk south, and He had already told them three times what was waiting for Him there. He went anyway, and Mark says something unforgettable about how He walked: in front of them. Not dragged along by events. Leading the way to His own execution, at a pace that frightened the men behind Him.

Jericho is the last stop before the climb, the oldest city on earth and the lowest, an oasis on the desert floor with the road to Jerusalem rising out of it. Every pilgrim came through here. And on His way through, with the cross a week away, He stopped twice: once for a blind beggar shouting a royal title, and once for a small rich man in a tree.

Look at what He was doing with His last days. He was not preparing. He was still working.

He does not go into the city. He goes to a house. Bethany is a village on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, over the ridge from Jerusalem, and it was His Judean home: Martha, Mary and Lazarus, the friends who fed Him.

And there, at a supper, a woman does something extravagant and slightly scandalous, and He defends her with a sentence that tells you He knew exactly what week it was.

Now the week begins, and it begins with theatre. He arranges it deliberately, down to the animal, because He is quoting a prophecy on purpose and in public. Every king in that world entered a conquered city on a warhorse. Zechariah had said the true king would come on a donkey, and everyone in that crowd knew the verse.

The road runs down the western slope of the Mount of Olives, and as you come round the bend the whole city rises up in front of you at once. That is where the singing was. And that is where He stopped and cried.

He comes back the next morning, and this is the day of the overturned tables.

It is worth being precise about what He objected to, because the scene is often preached as though He hated commerce. Pilgrims travelling from other countries genuinely needed to change money and buy animals; that was not the offence. The offence was where it had been set up. The only court a Gentile could stand in, the outer court, the one place in the whole complex where the nations could come and pray, had been turned into a market. So when He quotes Isaiah, He quotes the words the market had made impossible: a house of prayer for all nations.

And He begins the day with a strange act against a fig tree, which Mark deliberately wraps around the temple scene so that you read them together: something that looks alive, and has no fruit.

Tuesday is the longest day in the record and the least famous. He teaches in the temple courts all day, answers every trap set for Him, tells the parables that make the leadership decide finally to kill Him, praises a widow nobody noticed, and then walks up the Mount of Olives in the evening and tells His friends that the building they are admiring will come down.

I want you to notice the last thing He says in public, in Matthew, because it is the same image He used weeping on the ridge: a hen with her wings out.

The quietest day, and the darkest. The Gospels record almost nothing of what He did, and two things about what was done to Him: the leadership decides, and one of His own friends goes to negotiate.

Thirty pieces of silver is not a random figure. It is the price the law sets as compensation for a slave gored by an ox, and it is the exact sum Zechariah is told to throw into the temple treasury as the insulting valuation of a shepherd.

Now everything slows down, because the longest single scene in the Gospels is about to happen, and it happens at a table.

Understand the evening in its Jewish frame and every gesture ignites. This is a Passover seder. There are four cups, and each one is lifted over a promise from Exodus 6. The third cup, the one taken after the meal, is the cup of redemption, lifted over the words *I will redeem you with an outstretched arm.* Luke tells you exactly which cup He used: the cup after supper. He took the redemption cup and filled it with Himself.

And before any of it, He gets up and washes their feet, including the feet of the man who has already been paid.

They walk out of the city, down through the Kidron valley, and into an olive grove He used so often that Judas did not need to ask where He would be.

The name of the place is Gat Shemen, the oil press. Olives from the whole ridge were carried down here to be crushed, and the name had been waiting in the ground for centuries for the night it would explain.

They march Him up the slope from the Kidron to the upper city, to the houses of the high priests, and hold two hearings in the dark: first before Annas, the old power behind the office, then before Caiaphas and the council.

And in the courtyard outside, at somebody else's fire, the bravest of the disciples falls apart in front of a servant girl. Luke records the detail that changes everything about that story: the direction of a look.

Morning. They take Him to the Roman governor, because the council can condemn but only Rome can execute. What follows is a trial in which the judge repeatedly says the defendant is innocent and then hands him over anyway, which is the most human thing in the entire story.

Then the walk. It was short, a few hundred metres through a crowded festival city, past shoppers and soldiers and people who never looked up. And then a hill outside the wall but beside the road, where the charge could be read by everybody passing, in three languages.

Two members of the very council that condemned Him come out of hiding to bury Him, which tells you something about how many people in that story were quietly on the fence.

And then, for one whole day, nothing. The Sabbath. The women who wanted to work could not work, because the commandment said rest, and they kept it. I have always found that day the hardest to preach and the easiest to recognise: the day when the worst has happened, God is silent, and the faithful thing to do is to keep the rhythm you were taught.

It begins in the dark, with a woman walking to a grave, and the first thing anybody notices is a practical detail: the stone has moved.

Then a footrace, and inside the tomb the quietest and most convincing detail in the whole Gospel. John says it is what made him believe, before anybody explained anything: the cloth that had been around His head was rolled up in a place by itself. Grave robbers do not fold laundry. Whatever happened in there happened calmly.

He does not leave immediately. Luke, who is careful with numbers, says forty days, and He spends them doing the most ordinary and the most astonishing things: cooking breakfast on a beach, letting people touch Him, explaining the Scriptures, and appearing to more than five hundred people at once.

The most important conversation of those forty days happens on the shore of the lake where the whole thing began, and it is a repair job. Three denials by a fire, three questions by a fire. And then a job, three times over.

And at the end He takes them out along the Bethany road, up the Mount of Olives, blesses them with His hands up, and is taken from their sight. They are left standing on a ridge, staring at a cloud, being asked a gentle question by two men in white.

Ten days of waiting, a room full of about a hundred and twenty people praying, and then the feast.

Read Pentecost in its Jewish frame and it opens like a gate. Pentecost is Shavuot, the harvest feast, counted seven weeks and a day from Passover, when Jerusalem filled with pilgrims from every nation under heaven. It is also the feast that remembers the giving of the Torah at Sinai, where tradition says the Word went out in fire and in every language, and three thousand fell. At Shavuot in Jerusalem the Spirit fell in fire and every language, and three thousand rose out of the water. The church was not born at a new festival. It was born at the oldest one, exactly on schedule.

And now the practical question, which is the one you asked and it deserves a careful answer: where? The text says they were in a house, and it says that afterwards they were continually in the temple. What we know for certain is that three thousand people were immersed that day, and that requires an enormous quantity of water under Jewish law, running or living water in proper ritual baths. There is exactly one place in Jerusalem that could do that in an afternoon: the south side of the Temple Mount, where dozens of mikvaot were cut into the rock to handle festival crowds, at the foot of the great monumental stairway. So the southern steps are the most likely place in the world for the first sermon and the first baptisms, and I teach it that way, while telling you honestly that Acts does not name it.