When you were raised from the Font, you were set on the Path of salvation, and your life suddenly became high adventure! Our Lenten journey of the last six weeks takes us today into Holy Week. Mystically, we enter Jerusalem with the LORD and His disciples, and we draw near to the Gate of Heaven, the LORD’s Tomb. As we engage prayerfully the liturgical rites of this week, we engage spiritually the Path of salvation we stepped onto at our baptism.

Today, with His disciples, we hold palm branches and sing out: ‘Hosanna!’ Listen closely and discern what that means. We are singing Hosanna to the LORD with the streets of the Heavenly Jerusalem that sing out to Him without ceasing on the Eighth Day: ‘Hallelujah!’ (Tobit 13.17) It means that the Light of the New Heavens and the New Earth that dawns when they place the Savior’s Body in the Tomb on Great and Holy Friday evening (Lk 23.54) is beginning already, even today, to shine on us sitting in darkness and in the region and shadow of death (Isa 9.1-2).

It means that the Last Day is here. We are in it. Today, the LORD calls to us as He cried out to Lazarus, ‘Come forth!’ Having raised us from the Font as He raised Lazarus from his grave, He leads us now ‘up to the Heavenly Jerusalem’ (Mk 10.32-33 par.), and into the Land of our Inheritance (Eze 37.12-14). To the Jews and to all unbelievers He says: ‘Silence the voices of my disciples [if you can], and the very stones will cry out!’ (Lk 19.40) For the Day of the LORD has come, and you cannot stop it!

So, what does it mean that the LORD enters Jerusalem, and comes into the Temple, the center of the world, and then, instead of setting up the Throne of His Kingdom there as His disciples expected Him to, He leaves the Temple, He leaves Jerusalem, to go to Golgotha?

The LORD tells us why through Isaiah – we read this a week ago: ‘I will lead the blind on a path they did not know. I will transform their darkness into light, I will make the crooked to be straight, and I will not forsake them.’ (Isa 42.16). This ‘path they did not know’ is the path of salvation we stepped onto when we were raised from the Font as Lazarus was raised from his grave. It is the path our Lenten journey makes visible. It leads us mystically up to Jerusalem and into the Temple, but it does not stop there. It continues beyond even the Temple in Jerusalem, beyond the ‘center of the world.’ It takes us to Golgotha and all the way into the LORD’s Tomb.

So, what is the theological reality all this is making visible?

It says that when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, they were made to dwell opposite the Garden of Eden (Gn 3.25 LXX). This means that the Temple in Jerusalem, the ‘center’ of the world, is ‘outside’ of Eden. Mt Zion is a hill ‘opposite’ the Garden. Clearly, there is a deeper ‘center of the world’ in which the Temple in Jerusalem itself is ‘centered’ and rooted.

In the Babylonian captivity centuries later, the LORD shows the prophet Ezekiel, in a vision, the Glory of the LORD leaving the Temple of Jerusalem and going to stand on the mountain ‘opposite’ the city. (Eze 11.23)

Who is the Glory of the LORD that leaves the Temple of Jerusalem if it is not the LORD Jesus leaving the Temple of Jerusalem Today on Palm Sunday? And if He is going to stand on the mountain ‘opposite’ the city, where is He going if not to stand on the Cross on Golgotha that is opposite the city? If He is the Tree of Life, what is the ‘hill’ of Golgotha ‘opposite’ the city where the LORD goes to stand if it is not the Mountain of Eden; and what is the Garden where His Tomb was, near the spot where He was crucified, if it is not the Garden of Eden? If His Body that they destroyed is the Temple He said He would raise up on the Third Day (Jn 2.19-21), if it is, moreover, the Tree of Life, the Wisdom of God incarnate who is the First and the Last, in whom all things were created in heaven and on earth, is not His Body the ‘center of the world’ in which the Temple of Jerusalem was centered and rooted?

So, when the LORD raises us from the Font as He raised Lazarus from the dead, and calls out to us as He called out to Lazarus with a great voice – i.e., from the mystery of His Cross (Mt 27.50 pars), i.e., from the deep center of the world (Ps 74.12, Rev 13.8) – when He calls out: ‘Come forth!’ what He is calling out is this: ‘Whoever would be My disciple must deny himself, and follow Me, and lose his life for My sake.’ He is calling us onto the Path that He Himself is, the Path who takes us into His Tomb that opens onto the center of the world, to lose our life for His sake and to be united with Him in the likeness of His death in the center of our being, in our heart, where we are deep beyond all things (Jer 17.9 LXX).

He says to Mary and Martha just before He raises Lazarus: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in Me, even if he dies, yet shall he live.’ In the Font, we died and were buried with Christ. In the Font, we lost our life, and in the Font, we found it. In the Font, we united ourselves to Christ and we died to death; and, because we united ourselves to Christ, in our death we found our life, because we were united to Christ who is Himself the Resurrection and the Life.

Might the Temple of Jerusalem, if it is the center of the world, correspond to Lazarus’ tomb? What is the center of the world if not the tomb where all of us go? Moreover, in Adam, our root, we all died, and when Adam, our root, was expelled from Eden, our heart that opens onto the center of the world in the deep, beyond all things, became a large stone that sealed us off from God.

So, when Jesus comes into the Temple, and then leaves it to go stand on Golgotha opposite the city, to be crucified and placed in a new Tomb hewn out of the rock – we are seeing the LORD coming to us in the Font, coming to us in the tomb of our stony heart where we were dead in our sins and trespasses.

Did you not come to the Font looking for the LORD? Did you not renounce the devil and unite yourself to Christ in the Font in the likeness of His death precisely in the hope that you would find the New Adam, the Resurrection and the Life? And where did you find Him? You found Him not somewhere out there but within you, in the center of the world, in the midst of the earth, in the center of your death, in your heart where He, our King of old, is working His salvation in you (Ps 74.12; Col 1.27).

And when you were raised from the Font, the stone – death – that covered your heart, and sealed you off from the Land of the Living, was rolled away from the tomb of your heart as it was from Lazarus’ tomb, as it was from the LORD’s Tomb! The LORD came to you in the temple, in the center of the world, in the tomb of your heart, and He found you! And now, when He calls out to us: ‘Come forth!’ ‘Deny yourself and follow Me!’ He is calling us onto the Path of salvation which is none other than the Path of the New Exodus foreseen by the prophets that goes to Golgotha, the mountain ‘opposite’ Jerusalem. We read, for example, in Ezekiel: ‘I will gather you out of all the lands and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle on you clean water, and purge you of all your uncleanness. I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit within you. I will extract the heart of stone out of your flesh – I will roll the stone of death away from your heart! – and I will give you a heart of flesh. (I will give you a living heart, the human nature of the God-Man, Jesus Christ!) For I will put my Spirit in you, and I will make you strong to walk in my ordinances (Eze 36.24ff.)’

The Path of the New Exodus that you set out on when you were raised from the Font is the LORD Himself who now goes before you into Galilee, into your everyday life in this world, to open doors and to level mountains, to break into pieces the brazen doors of hell and to burst its iron bars,’ as Isaiah foretold (Isa 45.2), in order to save us out of our distress; and, as the Psalmist foretold to bring us out of our darkness and the shadow of death, and to break our bonds asunder, to break to pieces the brazen gates and to crush the iron bars of hell ( Ps 106.8ff. LXX).

This is the ‘high adventure’ your life became in the Font! Your life is now theological; it is the theology of the bible being lived out now, made incarnate now, in your daily life.  This is the invisible mystery of God that is now within you that is being made visible in these services of Holy Week. Behold, the Bridegroom comes at Midnight! Our Bridegroom comes looking for us, to take us back to Eden! Dear faithful: will He find us watching with the wise virgins who kept their vigil lamps filled with oil, filled with love for the Bridegroom; or will He find us heedless with the foolish virgins, who allowed their vigil lamps to be filled with love for the world? O Giver of Light, enlighten the garment of my soul that I may enter with Thee into the joy of Paradise, my true home! Amen!

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