This sermon was preached at St Peter’s Evangelical-Lutheran Church, Public Schools Club, Adelaide, 9am
Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!
Prayer: Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Our Gospel reading today is set on Palm Sunday, which marks the week where Jesus will suffer and die on the cross and rise from the dead. We often call this week Holy Week.
And our text today tells us about three things: first of all, when Jesus was coming close to Jerusalem, and was riding on the donkey, we read that he wept over the city, and spoke a prophecy about the city of Jerusalem. Second, we read that once he arrived in Jerusalem, he drove out those who were selling in the temple. We often call this, where Jesus cleansed the temple. And third, we read about how Jesus was teaching in the temple, and how the people were listening to him carefully. And that the chief priests were completely unable to do anything about it because of the crowd.
So let’s ask the Holy Spirit to lead us a guide us in our sermon today, so that I may preach effectively, and that we may all hear for our benefit and for our blessing.
First of all, we read: When [Jesus] drew near and saw the city, he wept over it. Now, there are a couple of places in the Gospels where we read that Jesus wept. This is one of them, and there is another place where Jesus was going to the tomb of Lazarus to raise him from the dead. We read there in John’s Gospel, the shortest verse in the bible, where it says, very simply, with two words: Jesus wept.
On this occasion, Jesus was amongst people who were grieving the death of their friend, Lazarus. On the other occasion, which we read about in our reading today, Jesus was weeping over the hardness of heart of the people of Jerusalem, in not recognising him as their Saviour.
Now, there’s a little philosophical question that is important for us to consider. When we talk about God, it is not right to speak of him as experiencing human emotions, and having a need to cry and to weep. Of course, we believe that God cares and loves his people, but we wouldn’t say that he loses control of himself, and is overcome by emotions like we sometimes are.
But then of course, we believe that Jesus is God. If God is all-powerful, and if we are to rely on God and the strongest, most powerful being, of what help is he to us if he is overcome by human weakness, and cries and weeps like us?
Well, first of all, it’s important to say that there is a very mysterious connection between God and we human beings, in that we are created in his image. Tears and weeping and sadness was not part of the original creation of man and woman in the Garden of Eden, because quite simply put, there was nothing to be sad or to cry about. Weeping and sadness and sorrow and crying really belong to the world after the fall to into sin, and comes as a result of sin. Also, the fact that we human beings don’t often have control of our emotions, and sometimes can be overcome with weeping or sadness is also part of this sinful condition, because we now have things in this world which cause us great sadness. However, when we enter heaven, and everything is made new, we read in Revelation: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
You see here, how tears, mourning, crying are all connected to the fact that there is death in the world.
But then, secondly, we do believe that Jesus is true God, but that he also entered into this world, in his incarnation, by becoming a human being like us. In Philippians, we read that Jesus took the form of a servant. However, in Hebrews we read that he is our high priest, who is not unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
And so, when God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ, it is only the Son of God who became a man, not God the Father and not the Holy Spirit. But in the person of Jesus, we see God in the flesh. Even everything that Jesus does and says gives a reflection of God the Father, because he is one with the Father. We read in John 14, where Jesus says: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
And so, Jesus, in becoming a man, took on himself our human weaknesses. It says about him in Isaiah: Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He entered into this world, and entered into all the sadness of the world, and we even say about him that he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And all of this is because Jesus, the Son of God, has entered into our human flesh, and therefore he experiences the sadness of this world, just as we experience it.
Sometimes, many Christians think that they should be happy all the time, and almost see it as a kind of sin, when they feel sad, or cry. Sure, as Christians, we have so many wonderful things to be happy about – if only we recognised all these things. Sometimes, when we are happy though, we are happy for the wrong reason. When we are sad, we can be sad for the wrong reason too. But in Jesus, whether he was rejoicing and happy and glad, or whether he was weeping and sad and sorrowful, we know that in all his perfection, as the sinless Son of God, and the perfect Lamb of God, that he was always completely happy for the right reason, and always completely sad for the right reason. And so, anything in us, our feelings of being overwhelmed, or out of control, or when our emotions are out of place, and tainted by excess and lack of self-control ---none of that is in Jesus. We can look at this weeping of Jesus in our reading today, and we can look at it as the perfect tears of God. And we say this not because God the Father has tears, but because in entering human flesh, Jesus is perfect God. So we say that Mary is the “mother of God”, because Jesus is God. We say that on the cross, God died, because Jesus is God. And we say in our reading today, that God wept over Jerusalem, and God cried, because Jesus is God.
Now, I won’t say too much more about this, but we can also apply the same thinking to the second part of our reading, where Jesus appears to show anger, when he drives out the traders from the temple. If Jesus is perfect God, and sinless, how can he lose his temper, like one of us? Well, we don’t believe that he loses he temper—even the reading doesn’t say that he was angry at all. However, in John’s Gospel, we read he made a cord of whips.
It’s important for us, not to try to understand Jesus through the experience of our own emotions. Just as our sadness is often tainted, and our anger is tainted, Jesus sadness and weeping is pure and holy, and his anger in cleansing the temple is also pure and holy. Because when we see this in Jesus, we must then sit up and realise that there really is something in our reading for him to weep about and there really is something in our reading for him to be angry about. These things happen and are done in the flesh by our one true God, who is perfect God together with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Now, let’s have a look at what Jesus says. We read: When he 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.”
Jesus weeps over the great hardness of heart of the people. He says: Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.
Now, the things that make for peace, of course, are the person of Jesus himself, and his wonderful life and his sacrificial death and his resurrection from the dead. Even when Jesus was born, the angels sung about him as the things that make for peace. Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth among those with whom he is pleased. Also, on Palm Sunday, it says just a few verses before our reading where the people are welcoming him, with palms, and singing, and shouting, that the crowd says: Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!
And for us, of course, our sin and our sinful hearts and our whole sinful condition actually bring about in us a great hatred and enmity towards God. So how do we make peace with God? Well, it’s so important to realise that it is not us who make peace with God, but God who makes peace with us. He has sent his Son to die for us, and to offer himself as a sacrifice for sin. And this means that Jesus had made peace for us between us and God, as our Saviour and also as our Mediator. Jesus pleads for us before the Father, and prays for us. It says in Ephesians: In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility… Actually, Jesus makes peace for us with God, but as we receive this peace as fellow Christians, this creates a wonderful peace between each other, just as Paul here is talking about peace between Jews and Gentiles. In Colossians, Paul also writes: In [Jesus] all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
And so, we can see that the person of Jesus, who is both true God and true man, in his birth, his life, his preaching and teaching, his miracles, his death, his resurrection, his ascension into heaven, all of this is our peace. He is our peace.
And what a sad thing it is, when so many people can’t see this, can’t recognise it. Sometimes these things are right before their eyes, and they just won’t believe it. And so this is what Jesus weeps and laments about. He says: But now they are hidden from your eyes.
Then Jesus actually preaches to them a stern and serious and frightful warning. He says: 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.
Jesus tells them that it is not nothing that they do not recognise God the Father’s face in the face of Jesus. It is not nothing that they do not recognise in Jesus and his words the living voice and the living waters of the Holy Spirit. It is not nothing, but it is of the highest and most serious significance. If they do not believe in Jesus, their city will be destroyed.
Actually, we should realise that one day the whole world will end. The great nations and civilisations will end. The great buildings and works of architecture and engineering will all be destroyed. As we read in Isaiah: The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the Word of our God abides forever.
And so, we know from history, that what Jesus spoke of here, actually did happen in the year 70 AD, when the Romans came and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, and broke down the temple, which to this day has never been able to be rebuilt. Even I once heard, that when the Romans destroyed the temple, that they burned it with fire, and that this fire was so hot, that it melted the gold, which then went down into the cracks of the floor. And so the Romans then pulled up the stones from the floor to get the gold out, which is exactly what Jesus said: They will not leave one stone upon another in you.
Now, we live in a nation where so many people are so hardened to the message of the Gospel. There are so many Australians that are simply lazy and won’t think about anything serious. There are so many people who are comfortable in their lives, and just like to relax and have holidays, and give no thought to their salvation and eternal life. There are conservative people who think that everything is about morals and values, but don’t think that they are sinners themselves. There are many left-wing people who are trying to silence the truth about all kinds of things, including the message of the Gospel. There are people on the TV or the internet who have got all kinds of things to say, and people listen to them—sometimes it’s good stuff, sometimes it’s bad stuff. But will people consider their own sinful heart? Will people turn to Jesus?
Just as the things that happened to Jerusalem happened, so also something will happen to Australia, if people don’t back to God, and don’t receive the Gospel. It’s not nothing that people don’t listen—it is of the utmost seriousness indeed! Jesus speaks in our reading about things that he knows. We must trust in him, and flee to him, and run to him, and recognise in him the things that make for peace.
Also, it’s worth mentioning too, that there are some Christians, particularly Calvinists, who believe that the reason for people having a hard heart is that God has made an absolute, eternal decree about it. We call this the teaching of double predestination. They base this teaching on passages like Romans 9:18, where it says: So then God has mercy on whomever He wills, and He hardens whomever He wills. And then they look at the fact that Pharoah’s heart was hardened so that he didn’t want to let the people of Israel go.
However, it is not God who is the author of people’s condemnation, but the people themselves. When we read about God hardening people’s hearts, it is only when they have already hardened themselves by rejecting and despising his grace. Think about Jerusalem, and how many opportunities that the people had to hear the Gospel, and all the wonderful things that happened there in the life of Jesus. The reason why Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, was not because God had already decided from eternity that they were all going to hell and there was nothing that they could do about it. This kind of teaching really causes true despair in people.
Rather, Jesus says: They will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation. The reason is because the people rejected the things that make for peace, and did not recognise the time when God had actually visited them in human flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Now, also in our reading today, we read that Jesus then goes and cleanses the temple in Jerusalem. He also goes and teaches there daily.
This gives us a wonderful picture of things. First of all, Jesus gets rid of the false worship, as if everything depends on the outward sacrifices. They go there and buy and sell all these things, like it’s some kind of business. The temple, and even the church, is not a religious money-making enterprise.
But then we see two things that make the temple a true temple. First of all, prayer. Jesus quotes where he says: My house shall be a house of prayer. And also, the Word of God. We read: He was teaching daily in the temple.
Actually, as we mentioned before, the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed. But also, we read in the Bible, that Jesus is our temple. In John 2, we read where Jesus says: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body.
And so, also, Jesus is the true house of prayer—he is the man of prayer, who prays for us, and intercedes for us. Also, he is the true Word of God, and he speaks the Words of God. He is our wonderful teacher of the Word of God, and we listen to him and hang on his every word. Actually, his Words are the words which created the world in the beginning.
Also, in the Bible, our bodies as Christians are spoken of as temples of the Holy Spirit. We are joined in our Baptism to Jesus who is the true temple. And throughout our lives, we are filled with the Word of God, and ask for God to send us the Holy Spirit in prayer. Jesus also enters into our temples, and cleanses them of all uncleanness, and he washed us clean with his blood. He drives out the falsehood, and the idolatry. And he teaches us daily in His Word, in the Holy Scripture.
And so, let’s come to Jesus this morning, let’s come to him as our true temple. Let’s be filled with His words, that that we may be living temples of his Word and Holy Spirit. Let’s receive from him the precious gift of the Lord’s Supper, his true body and blood, given and shed for us for the forgiveness of sins. Let’s pray to him, and bring our needs to him, so that we may be a living temple and a house of prayer. Let’s receive from him whatever cleansing he wants to give, however painful it might be, and not run from hearing the holy Law of God. But also, let’s recognise in him the things, the wonderful things, that make for peace, and recognise in him the time of our visitation, that he has come to visit us as true God in true human flesh, who has laid down his life for his sheep. Let’s receive from him, and find in him, our peace! Amen.
The peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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