beyond the graves
What's waiting for you beyond the graveyard? What holds you back from claiming your space in a living world? What's your step off the mount and into the hope of life abundant?
Acts 1:12
[After Jesus’ ascension, the disciples] returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away.
Do you know what is planted on Mount Olivet?
If you guessed “olives” you could be forgiven for being wrong since that is how it got its name.
Once it was covered in olive groves, but the few trees it has now are, some say, as old as Jesus, and if there’s new ones they spring up naturally.
What is planted on Olivet is graves. Over 150,000 of them. The mountainside is host to a Jewish cemetery and a necropolis and has been since Biblical times.
And this is where Jesus’ ascension takes place: amid a few lone towering ancient symbols of peace surrounded by corpses. Jesus left the tomb only to return to the dead for his ascension.
His disciples don’t stay there, though. They go back as he instructed and await the Holy Spirit in the city.
The next steps cannot come to them on Olivet.
What cemetery do you keep returning to - real or metaphorical - expecting to be transformed? What peace are you seeking there, and can it really be found among the graves?
—Kate Davoli