A Meditation in The Dust

(Posted April 16, 2024)

I wonder how you see it in your mind’s eye. What do you see when you imagine the dusty road that led from where the donkey brought Jesus into Jerusalem. There will be footprints on that route.

Footprints Though Holy Week

First, of course, Jesus’ prints and that of his little beast. Then a clamor of footprints left by the crowd that followed, perhaps over to the Temple vestibule. And then, the street dust might have recorded people fleeing in panic, as Jesus emptied the tables there of the money changers.

Footprints to an Upper Room

A little farther down the road, those footprints gather just outside a household, where steps lead to an upper room and a Passover feast. There are dusty prints going in, but clean prints leaving. I wonder what transformation happened inside that room?  

Footprints in the Garden

In the gathering gloom of evening, the crowd of footprints lead toward the olive trees and Gethsemane. To a place where the grass tells us people had laid down and slept after dinner. But then there was that spot on the ground where the dust was caked with blood and you could tell there had been a fight. Gashes in the dust showed where swords had been dragged along the stampede of people. And then there was nothing.

Footprints on Golgotha

Days later brings us to the foot of the road to Golgotha – The Place of The Skull, where the Roman Empire put on display for humiliation the people who didn’t play by their rules. If ever there was a plot of earth stained with blood and tears, this was it. There weren’t too many footprints here. And at the base of a cross, only two – a man and woman. It was a lonely patch of ground, punctuated only (some would said they saw them) by some donkey tracks.

And then came the rains, the torrents that sped down the hill, washing Jerusalem in watery blood, obliterating the prints of people who cared.

Back to the Garden

So then we fast forward to that Garden – just after the dawn, as the light slowly cascades down the outer stone walls of an empty tomb.

A glass jar of ointment lies overturned in the earth. Just a few footprints here – two men side by side, the tiny prints of a small woman, and then – the bold prints of Him… each bearing the vacant hole where the nails had held him. And where his prints and the woman’s prints end, there is a cascade of human prints, multiply and bringing more of them along with each step.

He is risen and so have we.

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