In the sermon on the Quinquagesima gospel of Jesus’ words, “We are going up to Jerusalem,” I indicated that all of us Christians are included in those words. A parishioner asked me about this Jerusalem: Where is it, how can I find it? Below was my answer to him:

Dear ______,
If you will, there are three “Jerusalems”:
1) The physical city that we can identify on a map and visit;
2) The church; and
3) The New Jerusalem, the heavenly city of which Rev. 21 speaks.
When Jesus says, “We are going up to Jerusalem” in the Quinquagesima gospel, the immediate and primary meaning is that He is going to the city (1), the Twelve going with Him. What I was suggesting in my sermon (and the idea, I must confess, is not mine), is that Jesus is “Israel condensed into one man,” and that through the incarnation and our baptism into Him, we are joined to Him and He to us, so that we go with Him (in a mystical or sacramental way), we die with Him, and we rise with Him.
God allows the city to be destroyed by Titus in AD 70, and the temple with it, because Jesus is the temple; where He is, there the Church is, thus where He is, there is Jerusalem. So while one can go and visit the city to which we can point on a map (and I hope to do that, as soon as this fall perhaps), one need not go to Jerusalem to, as it were, visit Jerusalem. We go every Divine Service. The Jerusalem in which Jesus celebrated the Passover, was condemned, and crucified, is now an archeological curiosity. We live in the Jerusalem which is the Church, and we await the New Jerusalem at the consummation of the age.