I had an email from Australia today. It said ‘see you later’, and so I shall. Anyone can join a meeting on Zoom from almost anywhere, no longer to we have to be in the same place to meet.
But does that mean ‘place’ is no longer important? I don’t think so. We have no thought to replace St Mary’s Church with a URL, and Shaw and Donnington are important to us because they are the places we live and share community.
For Jesus, Jerusalem was the key place. It was the capital city and the largest population centre of his world, but its importance was much more because of the Temple – the central focus for Jewish Worship. And the Temple was more than just a building, it was the place of God’s presence, the enduring symbol of God among his people, the place where God would hear and save, and so it would become the place where Jesus would die.
A physical place for a physical event, fixed in time and space. Something happened that cannot be changed and should not be forgotten, because it was an event that matters for us: an event that changed the world.