Grace,
mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Luke
19:41-48)
Would that
you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now
they are hidden from your eyes.
Prayer: Lord God, our heavenly Father, send us all the Holy Spirit
so that I may preach well and we all may hear well, in the name of your dear
Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Our Gospel reading today has three parts to it: the first is that
Jesus weeps over the city of Jerusalem, the second is that he enters the temple
and drives out the traders, and third is that he Jesus was teaching daily in
the temple while the chief priests sought to destroy him.
There’s so much here for us to think about in only 8 verses at the
end of chapter 19 of St Luke’s Gospel.
Earlier in chapter 19, we read about where Jesus visits Zacchaeus
in the city of Jericho. Zacchaeus was a rich tax collector. Because he was so
short, he climbed a sycamore tree so that he could see Jesus more clearly. When
Jesus saw him, he said: Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at
your house today. Many people grumbled about all this because they knew
that this man had become rich at the expense of other people. But when Jesus came
to dine at his table, Zacchaeus made a grand announcement: Behold, Lord, the
half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of
anything, I restore it fourfold. Today marks a change in my life! I have
met the Lord of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ! And Jesus says: Today
salvation has come to this house.
This reading is a traditional reading for the anniversary of a
church, because in each church we celebrate the fact that Jesus comes to our
house today. He comes to eat with us, just as he ate with that sinner,
Zacchaeus. And also Jesus says: Today salvation has come to this house.
We pray constantly that by God’s grace and Holy Spirit our house of
prayer, our church, our place of worship, may always be a place
where Jesus says: Today salvation has come to this house.
Later on in the chapter, Jesus prepares to enter another house. He
rides into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey. The crowds cheer and welcome him
and say: Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in
heaven and glory in the highest!
He comes into the city of Jerusalem and prepares to enter the house
of prayer, the temple. But his entry into the city of Jerusalem does not
contain the same sort of joy for Jesus as it did when he entered Zacchaeus’s
house. Jesus brings salvation to the house of Zacchaeus, but when he enters the
temple, he brings whips and throws the traders out. You can see that there’s
two quite different things going on here.
So first, let’s look at the first part of our reading. It says:
When Jesus drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying:
Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!
But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when
your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in
on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within
you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not
know the time of your visitation.
First of all, we read that Jesus wept over the city. Here
we have to remember that Jesus is both true God and true man. He existed long
before he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He is
the Word of God, who was in the beginning with God, and who is God. He is equal
to his Father from eternity. The fact that Jesus is called God’s Son and
God the Father is called his Father does not indicate that Jesus was
created by his Father, but it shows the relationship between the Father
and the Son.
Now, it’s not in God’s nature to shed tears. God doesn’t lose the
plot and let his emotions take over like us. God created all things in peace
and is himself totally peaceful. But God the Son, the second person of the
Trinity, Jesus Christ, came and took human flesh from the womb of the Virgin
Mary. He became a true man, so that Jesus is true God and true man in one
person.
When Jesus took flesh and became a man, he entered into all the
mess of the world in such a way that experiences it and suffers it together with
all of us. He experiences cold, hunger, he sweats, he sheds blood, and here in
our reading he sheds tears. He weeps over the city. This is not
the only time we read about this. In fact, the shortest verse of the bible is
in John 11, where Jesus goes with Mary and Martha to the tomb of their brother
Lazarus. We read: Jesus wept. Some people had found this little verse so
powerful a few years ago, that they paid for an advertising campaign to have these
words printed on the back of buses: Jesus wept.
We often read how Jesus went up on mountains and into quiet
desolate places by himself to pray. In the book of Hebrews, it says: In the
days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries
and tears.
Even today, Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, praying for
us, listening to our sighs and our groanings and placing all of them in God the
Father’s hands. Tears is something that comes upon people quite unexpectedly. Not
for Jesus though: he knows when it is time for tears. As Ecclesiastes says:
There is a time to weep and a time to laugh. These words are fulfilled
in Jesus here. But also, God the Father gives these tears to him as a gift. And
then Jesus gives them back to God the Father. As it says in Psalm 56: Put my
tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?
Often tears are given to us quite unexpectedly. In fact, in many times
in church history, various writers often spoke about the gift of tears.
Tears are like a tap that is released, and give release to the pressure
contained within our hearts. Sometimes we only need to think of someone and
immediately tears flow. Then we think of someone or something else and the
tears stop. This is all part of Jesus joining in with our prayers, and joining
our prayers in with his.
The difference between our prayers and our tears and those of
Jesus is that Jesus never despairs. Just imagine Jesus here, walking into the
city of Jerusalem: he knows the hearts of the people who are going to try to
kill him. He knows all their deepest thoughts, he knows the intrigue and the
malice and the envy and the darkness. And nevertheless, he goes to the cross in
obedience to his Father’s will, willingly for us. The same happens today: there
is plenty to cry about in our world today, and Jesus knows this even more
deeply that we do, because he sees not as man sees, but he looks in the heart. He
has much more reason to despair that we do, and yet, he never despairs.
Instead, he lives to intercede for us. He comes to us in his word and sacraments
and joins his holy flesh with our sinful flesh, and in that wonderful union, he speaks his
forgiving word to us wiping away all the tears of despair from our eyes, and letting
us borrow his unsullied, unmixed, unalloyed tears.
So what is this pressure that has erupted from Jesus’ heart and
flowed down his cheeks in our reading today?
We read: Would that you, even you, had known on this day the
things that make for peace! He also says: You did not know the time of
your visitation.
In the history of the Jewish people, Jesus was constantly walking
with them. He didn’t have a human body back then, but he was still there. He
was the Word of God in person. He spoke to Moses in the burning bush: I AM
WHO I AM. In the New Testament, Jesus says: I AM the bread of life. I AM
the way, the truth and the life. I AM the resurrection and the life. I AM the
good shepherd. And also when the soldiers ask to arrest Jesus of Nazareth,
he says: I AM. We read: When Jesus said to them, “I AM”, they drew
back and fell to the ground. Do you see the power of Jesus here, and the
power of what he said?
Also, St Paul tells us that Jesus was there in a hidden way
through the word of God, when Moses led the people through the Red Sea, when
they ate manna in the wilderness, when God let water flow from a rock. St Paul
says: They all drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and
the Rock was Christ. Do you see how Jesus Christ was with the people all the
time?
Even in Colossians, St Paul gives us a sense in which Jesus was
with the people in the way in which they didn’t eat certain food or drink, or
in the way that they kept certain festivals, like the Saturday as the Sabbath,
or the Passover and all the other festivals. But St Paul says: Let no one
pass judgment on you in questions of food or drink, or with regard to a
festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come,
but the substance belongs to Christ.
You see Christ here. When God shines through the cross back in
history, it casts a shadow upon the Jewish history before Jesus, in such
a way that Jesus himself was with them through these shadows. But now
that Jesus is here and present and risen from the dead and
ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of God the Father
and praying for us and with us physically in our midst, there is
no need for these shadows anymore. There’s no need for the Jewish food
regulations or the keeping of Jewish holy days and festivals. What a terrible
thing it is when false prophets—and there are plenty of them around today—want to
take faithful Christians away from their living and resurrected Master and
Lord and Saviour who is risen from the dead and back into the dark shadows!
So as Jesus comes into city, he knows that the people have
these shadows and that they are waiting for him to enter the temple. They cheer
for him, they shout for joy as he is carried by that little donkey into the
city, but they don’t understand. They just want a political king who is going
to do away with the Romans. They want him to feed their bellies, but as long as
he doesn’t come near their hearts and souls and their spirits. But Jesus says: My
kingdom is not of this world. My kingdom is a hidden kingdom. It is a
kingdom which is built through my word and my sacraments. It is a kingdom that comes
through my living, physical, fleshly, bodily presence in your midst. It
is a kingdom that comes through being born of water and the Spirit. It
is a kingdom that comes from eating his body and drinking his blood in
remembrance of him as he himself consecrates and distributes his supper to us,
with even himself as the food for our journeys.
So the people of Jerusalem want all of Jesus’ power but not
his word! And when Jesus enters the city, he does enter it with all
his power, but he hides it and becomes the weakest, because he wants
to die for the sin of the whole world. This is powerful. But it’s not
powerful in the way that the people want. It’s not powerful in the way the
world wants power or the way our flesh wants power.
The word of Jesus, his blood, his death, his resurrection, his
Holy Spirit, his sacrament of Holy Baptism, his body and blood given for us to
eat and drink in the Lord’s Supper: these things are the things that make for
peace. And so often we forget all about them! We forget that Jesus is here. We
don’t know the time of our visitation!
How Jesus must pour out tears constantly over each of us, knocking
on the doors of hearts, and saying to us: Behold, I am with you always to
the end of the age! Don’t forget that! I am with you, and I stay
with you and forgive you with my blood, and I give you my Holy
Spirit!
In our Gospel reading, Jesus prophesies the destruction of the
temple in Jerusalem. And this is exactly what happened, because the people didn’t
know the time of their visitation. They didn’t recognise Jesus as their
Immanuel: God with us, God with them! In 70 AD the Romans set up siege-works
and destroyed the city to the ground.
Jesus also doesn’t want us to replace him, and his grace with our
works: our human solutions! Jesus comes to be the holiness and righteousness
of our temple. So he casts the traders and money-makers out of the temple. They
don’t belong there. Jesus will provide and withhold all the funds the temple
needs as he sees fit, by his grace, and his gracious will. He says: My house
shall be a house of prayer.
But then in the end, we read that Jesus does a wonderful thing
that we can so easily blink and miss. We read: He was teaching daily in the
temple.
Everything we know about Jesus, about the Christian faith, we have
to be taught. And when the church makes disciples through baptising
and teaching, then we know Jesus is with us always. Jesus is the one
who comes himself and speaks his word. He is the one who baptises with his own
voice and his own hands. He is the one who consecrates and distributes his own
Supper. He is the one who forgives us our sins, totally, freely, lovingly,
abundantly, fully.
Teaching, teaching, teaching. How many people have been led down
the garden path because they were never taught! How many people flounder
around in the darkness, because they were taught badly or wrongly!
Jesus says: My house shall be a house of prayer. Jesus was
teaching daily in the temple.
Come to your house today, Jesus, with weeping. Come to us with
your warning and the threat of your holy law. Cleanse out our church and the
temple of our hearts from all falseness, from all false doctrine and life. And
come and make your home with us and teach us, and never stop teaching us, Lord
Jesus. Let your word never be hidden from our eyes! Let your house always be a
house of prayer, let salvation always come to our house, and give us hearts
that are thankful and grateful for your holy and precious word. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus our risen and ascended Lord. Amen.
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