So often a road is built upon the back of an earlier pathway - one upon the other, built up and strengthened by what went before. The busy Detroit Avenue before our church (Lakewood, Ohio) was once a Pony Express route, carrying mail toward Detroit City in Michigan. That route was earlier an Indian trail through forest lands.

So it was with the road that came from Bethany, climbed across to the Mount of Olives, snaked down into the Kidron Valley, moved through the region of the Garden of Gethsemane and finally made a steep climb to the Compassion Gate of Jerusalem. That road’s history went back before David’s choice of Jerusalem for his temple-building, back to when Ornan discovered a smooth rock surface on the hilltop that became his grain threshing floor (2 Samuel 24). Since that first …