by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good day, prayer and fasting faithful. Hoping yours was an uneventful yet full 4th holiday weekend; if nothing else, peacefulness is celebratory as well.

The word for our consideration is back. Amazingly, it can be a noun, an adverb, a verb, and an adjective; one simple four-letter, monosyllabic word with so many uses. All four forms of back are used in the Bible in English at least 1944 times, 544 of them in the New Testament (NT). Of these Luke 23:11 and John 14:3 might reflect two interesting behaviors of Jesus the Christ that were reported throughout His life.

Mightily offended, Herod turned on Jesus. His soldiers joined in, taunting and jeering. Then they dressed him up in an elaborate king costume and sent him back to Pilate.
Luke 23:11 (TMB)

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
John 14:3 (NIV)

In the first passage, Jesus was seemingly forced to go back and forth: Shackled, beaten, imprisoned, castigated by Jewish leaders as a rebel fomenting unrest among the Jews and vying for kingship with Caesar. As Christians we believe that He surrendered his body and His life on earth. In other words, Jesus could have gotten out of the Crucifixion if He wanted to, even though He was taken prisoner by force through violence. In the second passage Jesus tells His followers that He will voluntarily come back to get His people; that we are to trust Him because He is doing God’s will. Again, Jesus is voluntarily doing what God wanted Him to do for the world. What’s the difference, we might ask, between the two passages? If we believe He is the Son of God, then He had a choice in both cases. Perhaps, the difference is in what it appears to be and for whom it is meant.

In the first passage one could look at Jesus being seized in the Garden of Gethsemane as being out of His control. He was taken away under armed guard, possibly tied up or bound at the wrists. In the second passage Jesus tells us He is coming back willingly as He has promised, and in both instances, it is possible that The Christ has a choice. He appeared to be in bondage when betrayed, but we believe He could have freed Himself if He only asked: The prayer dialogue He has with God pleading to “remove this cup” is powerful. Jesus is simultaneously bound by His devotion to God and free to not follow through with the surrender of His body, His life for the world.

"Papa, Father, you can-can’t you?-get me out of this. Take this cup away from me. But please, not what I want-what do you want?"
Mark 14: 36 (TMB)

When Jesus affirms that He is will return for His followers, He is simultaneously giving reassurance to Jewish believers that there will be a resurrection of the body after death and providing hope for His future Gentile believers that they will be with Him forever in eternity.

Martha said, ‘Master, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now, I know that whatever you ask God he will give you.’ Jesus said, "Your brother will be raised up." Martha replied, "I know that he will be raised up in the resurrection at the end of time." "You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this?
John 11:21-25 (TMB)

What this might suggest is that the dialectics of bound versus free, choice versus compulsion, Jew versus Gentile, and Self versus the Other were at the heart of Jesus the Christ’s teaching and modeling; that appearing to go back and forth between two seeming opposites is not incompatible or incongruous, nor is it necessarily accurate. In fact perhaps these states are at the heart of the Mystery of The Christ.

In the last week of His life, Jesus went back and forth between Bethany and Jerusalem, a walk of about two miles each way (four miles round trip), possibly from Friday (the Sabbath) through the following Thursday morning, the day of his arrest.

www.pinterest.com/map/Bethany

On Palm Sunday, Jesus and his disciples spent the night in Bethany, a town about two miles east of Jerusalem. In all likelihood, Jesus stayed in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from
the dead.
Christianity.about.com/od/easter/ss/Holy-Week-Timeline.htm

On Monday evening Jesus stayed in Bethany again, probably in the home of his friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
Ibid., 2.

After a tiring day of confrontation and warnings about the future, once again, Jesus and the disciples stayed the night in Bethany.
Ibid., 3.

While we can only speculate, it's fascinating to consider how our Lord Jesus spent this final quiet day with his dearest friends and
followers.
Ibid., 4.

From Bethany Jesus sent Peter and John ahead to the Upper Room in Jerusalem to make the preparations for the Passover Feast
Ibid., 5.

Although there was a “Bethany beyond Jordan” that Jesus also visited, his frequency in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in Bethany places Bethany-near-Jordan as one of His homes during His public ministry; the other being Capernaum by the Sea. It was this Bethany that was Jesus’ final home before He went Home to God.

Jesus knew that the Father had put him in complete charge of everything, that he came from God and was on his way back to God.
John 13:3 (TMB)

Jesus knew that he had come from God and would go back to God. He also knew that the Father had given him complete power…
John 13:3 (CEV)

For John’s Jesus, interestingly, neither Nazareth nor Capernaum represented ‘home’. [sic] That honor fell instead to the village of Bethany, precisely located by John ‘just under two miles from Jerusalem’ (11:18). It is to Bethany that Jesus goes each night on his final visit to Jerusalem for a Passover; there is only an echo of this (with the significant variation of domicile noted above) in Mark and the other Synoptics. Undoubtedly Jesus was on his way to Bethany, whence he come to Jerusalem earlier that same day, when he stopped at Gethsemane (with 11 of ‘The Twelve’) to pray directly following the Last Supper.
MacAdam, H.I. (2004). Domus Domini: Where Jesus Lived (Capernaum and Bethany in the Gospels). Theological Review, 25(1), 46-76.

Of course, we assume that if one knew that your death was near, you would want to be among friends whom you trusted. Even though we assume that Jesus was in danger from the Pharisees who had been trying to capture Him long before this Holy Week of Passover, the crowds were actually on His side all week.

On Tuesday, the longest day of the week in Mark's account, Jesus is engaged in a series of conflict stories with the temple authorities and their representatives, ending with ‘the little apocalypse’ in Mark 13, in which Jesus warns of the coming destruction of the temple. Throughout this day, as on Sunday and Monday, the authorities want to arrest Jesus and have him executed for what he is doing, but he is safely protected by having the crowd on his side. This was already clear from the enthusiastic support of ‘many people’ on Palm Sunday in Mark 11:8-10. It continues on Monday after the temple incident: ‘When the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching’ (11:18). And lest hearers or readers forget, the protective support of ‘the crowd’ against their high-priestly rulers is reiterated three times on Tuesday: ‘They were afraid of the crowd, for all regarded John as truly a prophet’ (11:32); ‘when they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away’ (12:12); and ‘the large crowd was listening to him with delight’ (12:37).
Borg, M., & Crossan, J. D. (2007). Collision Course. Christian Century, 124(6), 27-31.

Jesus probably could have safely stayed in Jerusalem with other friends all week with His disciples among the adoring crowds. After all, The Christ could have had the proprietor of the inn with the upper room make space available for them all earlier in the week than Thursday? Is it too easy to resolve that He and “The Twelve” walked to and from “home” in Bethany solely to be with those two sisters and their brother whom Jesus raised from the dead? Didn’t He have many friends by this time at the height of His popularity? Was there a message to us in His going back and forth to Jerusalem that we might tease out 2000 years hence?

Bethany-near-Jerusalem was Jesus’ home and ‘base of operations’ (Mk. 11:1, 11-12; Jn. passim) for the Judean portion of his public ministry. In that community he lied with Simon the Leper (Mk. 14:3) and/or with Lazarus, Martha and Mary (Jn. 11:1; 17; 12:1); at the home of the latter he performed the last great miracle before his arrest, trial(s) and execution. From Bethany Jesus made regular short excursions (less than an hour’s walk) into Jerusalem for various festivals (Tabernacles, Dedication, Passover), and from there also he traveled ‘across the Jordan’ for refuge in another Bethany ‘where John had been baptizing earlier’ (Jn. 10:40). Very probably it was to Bethany-near-Jerusalem that Jesus and the Twelve were headed after the Last Supper when they ‘crossed the Kedron ravine’ (Jn. 18:1). In ‘a garden’ (Gethsemane) along that path to Bethany Jesus was arrested by Temple police led there by Judas Iscariot.
MacAdam, op. cit., pg. 76.

If we assume Jesus the Nazarene wants us to seek Him out (as was and is God’s intent), it is possible that going back and forth to the home of a man who Jesus brought back to life after days of physical death is symbolic of our free will to choose God, to choose Christ, to choose life. We can go in and out of Zion (Jerusalem, God’s church, the Body of Christ) as we choose, but ultimately we will come face to face with The Nazarene, The Christ, on one of those trips. We will bump up against Him as He both walks with us and waits for us, either in Jerusalem or in Bethany as we journey Home to God. And sooner or later we might discover that He is not on the road to and from life and death but that He is the Road.

Even before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, He made frequent visits to Jerusalem in the final 180 days of an approximate three year ministry.

It is also significant that John’s narrative leading up to the raising of Lazarus includes three visits of Jesus to Jerusalem for three festivals within the final six months of the ministry. Bethany would have been ‘home base’ for each visit. These three pilgrimages begin with the festival of tabernacles (perhaps mid-October that year), and includes the Feast of Dedication (perhaps mid-December) before Jesus’ arrival for Passover (Late March/early April). In between Jesus makes at least one trip (between the second and third Jerusalem visits) east of the Jordan to ‘where John had been baptizing earlier’ (Jn. 10:40). Throughout the six months of this Judean interlude between leaving Galilee and the Last Supper, John’s Jesus alternates between those two Bethanys-the one ‘beyond Jordan (for safety), and Bethany-near-Jerusalem (for convenience).
MacAdam, op. cit., pg. 72.

Given all of His options, just why did Jesus make Bethany-near-Jordan so significant by making it the last place He lay His head before He submitted to the excruciating death He had witnessed all of His life? Roman crucifixion as a means of controlling the occupied Roman territories was a common practice in the First Century. As a child, Jesus must have seen His fellow Jews suffering and dying on those hundreds of crosses as He traveled with His family in and out of Jerusalem for holy celebrations.

While the Gospel does promise earthly fellowship and joy (as in Bethany)—and we should not easily dismiss this—it also leads to confrontation with power (as in Jerusalem) and communion at the foot of the cross.
C. Pramuk, “Strange Fruit: Black Suffering/White Revelation. 2006. Theological Studies, 67(2), pg. 371.

Bethany to Jerusalem and back. Bethany to Jerusalem and back. Bethany to Jerusalem and back. Walking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth for probably seven days, a total of at least twenty-eight miles…until finally, it is a one way trip for The Nazarene on His way to the Godhead. And He knew all along what was coming….

THE TRUTH OF THE CHRISTIAN GOSPEL," [sic] writes Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘is apprehended at the very limit of all systems of meaning. It is only from that position that it has the power to challenge the complacency of those who have completed life too simply, and the despair of those who can find no meaning in life.’
Ibid., 345.

What is God asking of the 21st Black Church in our goings and comings, our silences and outbursts, our empty and full pews?

Because Black ecclesiology is shaped by the particular memories buried in such horrific numbers [slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow], narrative takes a central place in the life of the community. Through their stories, the ancestors claim a theological authority marked by uncommon fidelity to the church and, above all, hope in the midst of darkness. Their texts—the slave narratives, the Negro spirituals, the documents and oral histories of the Civil Rights Movement, African American literature—function alongside the Christian Scriptures as a kind of contemporary canon, a living record of recent salvation history and the Spirit’s liberating power even in the deep valley of suffering.
Ibid., 355.

The Black Church is at a crossroads: Whither shall we go and where is The Christ leading us, back and forth to Zion?

LORD, we come. We come. Sometimes lost; sometimes found, but still, we come. Create in us a clean Spirit, open to Your Mystery. Give us walking shoes that keep up with You. We are wandering, seeking Your purpose, and sometimes, we don’t know whether we’re coming or going. It feels like the same round trip over and over again, and we get tired. But oh, how you lift us up! Lift us up, Jesus, lift us up! You are the Road, the Way, and the Destination. Into thy Hands we fall and onto Your Breast we sink. Revive us, revive us, revive us, again!

Amen.

For at least four decades Black theologians have been asking their White colleagues to subject themselves to such questions. They have asked us, in other words, to place ourselves at the Niebuhrian limit of every racist, apathetic, individualist, or complacent framework of White hope and, in doing so, to transcend all culturally constructed limitations on Christian solidarity and love. The question at hand then is this: Does the memoria passion is of the Black community, which haunts the graveyards at the edge of every White system of meaning, hold revelatory, even salvific meaning for White believers? Can and should the dangerous memory of Black suffering function somehow as a source of White revelation?
Ibid., 347.