You Understand? – The Observer

I was speechless as they led me down paths where Jesus walked. The olive trees – descendants of the olive trees he had walked under, prayed under, wept under. Different trees but yet the same.

His tears felt like my own.

Easter has always been the season where I come undone, where my brokenness feels a little more raw, a little more pronounced. I first felt it when we sang an Easter song in church more than 20 years ago. Everyone around me clapped as my eyes filled with tears. We rejoice because he suffered.

This year, in the weeks leading to Easter, I toured Jerusalem. The places he walked, the spots where he lived, worked. I sailed on the Sea of Galilee as he would have done. Then we took the ascent to Jerusalem in our last days.

Our guide – a man whose grandmother and aunt and uncle had perished in the Holocaust – led us to the spot where Jesus wept over Jerusalem. ”He wept not because he would suffer, but because he knew we would reject him,” Dror explained to us in accented English. “You understand?”

I do.

We reject who He says He is. We say we believe in certain parts but not all. We say we follow him, but our lives look nothing like how he asked us to live.

Again, his tears of 2,000 years ago mingled with my own.

Millions flood the Holy Land year after year on a search to walk in his footsteps, visit shrines, visit locations, and to see artifacts.

But it was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee that the priest who led us through Magdala reminded us: “Don’t come all this way and miss Jesus.”

Because we can travel the world in an attempt to be closer to Him only to find ourselves farther away.

This Easter month brings the reminder yet again of His sacrifice for a world who would reject him, twist his truths and walk away.

The question he asked Peter so long ago still resonates through the centuries:

“But who do you say I am?” He asked Peter, but his voice echoes through our hearts and asks us the same. Who do you say I am? The way you answer will change your life. The way he lived changed ours.

His heart shattered over those who would reject him and the destruction of Jerusalem that he foresaw as he looked over the walls of Jerusalem. His heart still shatters today.

Easter is the season where everything changed. It’s the moment where all of heaven mourned for the one who gave his life. The resurrection reaches through centuries and gives new life again and again and again.

Every nation comes to this place, called the Holy Land, to give him honor. The nations come to a land that would otherwise not be known because He made it known. But he made it clear that this epicenter of it all was only the beginning. To the ends of the earth, He said.

And as I watched people of every race and color and tongue come into places made known by the One who calls us His own, I was overcome and again undone.

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” – Jesus