Where Would You Go If Jesus Said ‘Meet Me at …’?

What do you do when you make plans to meet someone? That may depend on whether the person is your friend, relative, colleague, or boss. But, most of the time, you settle on a time/place/activity and look forward to the meeting. Can you say the same about Jesus?

What does it mean to truly “meet” Him—to encounter Jesus—as opposed to hearing, reading, singing, or talking about Him? More important, do you know where to meet Him?

I ask because that question hit me hard this past week.

The season of Lent is underway, which makes the question of where to meet Jesus especially profound. To answer that question, we need to start with Exodus 33. (Yes, really!)

After the golden calf debacle, God told Moses set up the Tent of Meeting (aka the Tabernacle) outside of the camp, “some distance away.”

God would descend in front of the Tent of the Meeting as a pillar of cloud. The Israelites would watch from their individual tents inside the camp and would worship God from afar.

Wait. The people were inside the camp. God’s presence was outside the camp. Where everyone dumped their trash. Buried their dead. Used latrines. Banished outcasts. Performed executions.

Why was God not in the midst of His people? Mostly because they’d defiled the camp by making the golden calf. But, if you thumb back to Exodus 20, there’s another reason. The people were terrified they’d die if God spoke to them. They only wanted to eavesdrop on what God said to Moses.

Yet God didn’t give up on His people. That’s why we can fast-forward to the first century, to Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.

The last week of Jesus’ life, He taught every day at the Temple; but every evening He camped on a ridge on the Mount of Olives (Luke 21:37), east of the city limits. It gave Jesus a bird’s-eye view of the Temple and the Kidron Valley, which He had to cross each time He went into the city. It was the week of Passover. Tens of thousands of sacrifices were being made. Drains hidden in the Temple altar diverted the blood of those sacrifices underneath the flooring and into the valley, making it run red.

Note the pattern: daytime inside the city (inside the “camp,” if you will). Inside, where the religious rulers, then the general populace, rejected Jesus.

He was crucified outside the city. Outside the camp where everyone still dumped their trash. Buried their dead. Used latrines. Banished outcasts. Performed executions.

That’s where Jesus wants you to meet Him. Outside the camp. At the foot of the Cross.

Jesus calls us to a place where we normally wouldn’t go.

Western Christianity is so “resurrectionist” that it doesn’t want to pause on the suffering Christ. But we need to go outside the camp to meet Him. Because Christianity isn’t a set of beliefs but a PERSON.

His last thoughts were for us. His last prayer was for us. In love, Jesus went outside the camp to die for us, to rescue us from our sins. He surrendered His life to God’s greater plan because we wouldn’t have chosen Him if left to our own devices. Truth be told, we don’t choose Christ as much as we surrender to Him. So, in love, let us meet Him outside the camp.

This is the first installment of a Lenten series.
Read the second one here.
Read the third one here.

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BONUS:
For more perspective, check out this 2021 blog I wrote about Jesus’ week on the Mount of Olives. It includes a great map of first-century Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.