The Road from Jericho to Jerusalem

The sermon in church yesterday morning was entitled, “The Road from Jericho to Jerusalem.” The title actually comes from the parable of the Good Samaritan (that’s the road where the man in the parable was beaten, robbed, and left for dead), but, the point was made (that, I must admit, I had never seen before), that’s the route that Jesus took on Palm Sunday. Part of the reason that I never caught that is that in Matthew 20:29, it says that they left Jericho, and Matthew 21:1-2 says that as they approached Jerusalem, that He sent two disciples to fetch a donkey and her colt. Keep reading, and it’s clear that He was coming into Jerusalem for Palm Sunday. For that matter, if you read from Matthew 20:29 through Matthew 21:1, then it becomes clear that Jesus started out from Jericho, and wound up in Jerusalem, so He would have been traveling the same road that was in the parable.
Of course, Jesus chose that road for the parable on purpose. Jerusalem was one of the highest points in Israel (if not the highest—roughly half the altitude of Denver); Jericho was one of the lowest. They are about 18 miles apart as the crow flies, but, it does a lot of winding back and forth, otherwise, it would be very steep, so the actual travel distance is about 23 miles. With all that winding, there are many places along the road where a traveler would be out of sight of other travelers, even if they were traveling fairly close together. Many of those places have areas where thieves could lie in wait for a lone traveler or a small group of travelers.
In the parable, Jesus talks about a priest and a Levite that passed by on the other side of the road. It has been suggested that this was simply self-preservation—they didn’t know if the thieves had moved on, or whether they were still lying in wait on that side of the road, but it would be harder for the thieves to attack from across the road. One thing that was brought up yesterday that I had never considered before was that the priest and the Levite both had to maintain themselves in order to perform the service to the Lord. If they were unclean, they couldn’t do their jobs. There were many things that they were not allowed to do, such as touch someone who was bleeding. They may not have even been sure if the mugging victim was still alive, touching a corpse was another thing that was forbidden, and that would leave them unable to perform the service of the Lord for a week. So, realistically, we look at these two men as having been callous individuals, but they actually had good reasons for not helping out (were those reasons good enough reasons—I’m thinking not, but I haven’t lived in those times, and I’ve never lived under the restrictions that they were under).
Also, in Matthew 19, as Jesus was leaving Jericho, there were two blind men that called out to Him. The crowd tried to quiet them down (“Why are you bothering the Master? He doesn’t have time for you! Leave Him alone!”), but these guys wouldn’t listen, and persisted. Jesus asked them what they wanted (as if He didn’t know!) and healed them. In Matthew 20, after the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the Pharisees tried to get Jesus to quiet down the multitude, but Jesus told them that if the people stopped praising God, then the rocks would cry out. In both instances it is clear that speaking out was the right thing to do. It is also obvious that the blind men were right to ignore what everyone else was telling them. When it comes to your relationship with God, no one else’s opinion matters. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you that you don’t matter to God. For God so loved the world… The thing that strikes me as most interesting about the whole thing is that I sent out an E-mail reminding someone (that I’m sure already knew) that Jesus would have paid the ultimate price even if that individual had been the only one that would have been saved as a result. Think about that: He died for the sins of the whole world, but He loves each of us individually that He would have done the same thing for just one of us, any one of us. That, I invite you take personally.