Jerusalem Fog 4.3.2025

     From the gospels we know all about the last week of Jesus’ life. We read about the conversations, controversies, and the conflicts. He teaches the curious, the crowds, and the committed. We move with Him back and forth to Bethany, through the festival crowds, along the streets of the city, through the temple and into the collective memory of the Church. Easter season should be a time to reinforce what the Scripture clearly teaches and to remind us not only of our debt to Him but the high cost of our discipleship. 

    This clarity requires yearly reflection, largely due twenty centuries of wishful thinking and the current tides of theological confusion. A central reason for this yearly journey to Jerusalem to share the passion week with Jesus and His disciples is to cut through the Jerusalem fog. We can never know perfectly the precise parameters of historical occurrences, but we can know perfectly those things God has chosen to disclose in His word. Far too often, even that knowledge eludes us as we construct elaborate edifices to our own cultural compromise and declare that to be the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. Easter provides the searing sunrise to cut through the Jerusalem fog in order that we might rightly understand the way of the cross and the victory of resurrection. 

    If we are to see clearly and understand accurately who Jesus is and what His intent is for His people, we must dissipate the fog as effectively as possible. We live in an age of rapid, nearly instantaneous communication. In the satisfying comfort of the Western world, we seldom are confronted life-threatening challenges to our Christian faith. A people who are accustomed to considering the slightest disagreement to be some kind of underhanded persecution is a people whose vision is still obscured by the Jerusalem fog. 

    Jesus died for us. Jesus’ death was and is formative for the Church. Earliest Christianity was cruciform from the very beginning. The terms of entrance include a decision to bear our own cross. For Jesus, paying the price for our salvation meant being borne by the cross. Not much room for negotiation when Empire holds the chips, and the price of Kingdom is paid in blood. To wear the name of Christ, twenty centuries after that initial Easter, while being insufficiently informed or even dismissive about the nature of the Christian faith is inexcusable. Ignorance can be fixed. Intransigent blindness first baffles and then disgusts the true disciple. 

This season reminds us of some clear points of reference which point us to the truth of our mutual faith as the fog burns away and we can adjust our bearings in the wakening dawn. These are the key focal points for all believers whether those who fast for lent or those who prepare by spending more time reflecting upon the details of their discipleship. 

• Jesus
• Scripture
• Cross
• Resurrection

    We must keep these especially before our minds because even as our eyes see more clearly as the fog burns off there are other obstructions that rise to distract us. Culturally derived Easter practices can easily find us replacing Jesus with family and Scripture with tradition. We may be tempted to exchange the foolishness of the cross for something more user-friendly and appealing for the sake of filling the pews, forgetting that the glories of resurrection can only be realized after the Lamb has been slain. 

    Because Easter has been celebrated since the beginning of the Christian faith there are no real secrets. We don’t celebrate Easter because we are unaware of the events of the week or the meanings of the moment. We celebrate because we do. When necessary, I can make it from my home to the Church house on a foggy day, with little difficulty. Even when the fog is as deep as pea soup, and the threat remains from other drivers, pedestrians, and the occasional squirrel I know where I am going, and the fog is but an annoyance. I prefer to make the trip on a bright sun kissed day. The destination is the same, but one journey is stressful, the other often, pleasant. 

    The Church is in a fog bank, but it is not entirely a natural phenomenon. We have allowed the   accretion of cultural religion to erode the revolutionary and counter-cultural nature of the Kingdom. Anytime the Christian faith has been appropriated or approved by Empire it has suffered. People are often as fog bound as they wish to be. It is time for Kingdom people to catch the Easter vision of our suffering Savior whose call to us is to share in His suffering. Kingdom means an apparent weakness that loses itself in service to others. Kingdom means love over all in obedience to the One who loves us best and loved us most. Each of us is called to help the Church see clearly through the fog into the embrace of Jesus and the Father’s saving grace.