Luke 19:41-48
Weeping for Jerusalem
Trinity 10
August 27, 2017
Zion Lutheran Church + Nampa, ID
Jerusalem was quite the city. For 1000 years, the city had been the capital of Israel, then of the southern kingdom of Judah. After 70 years of the Babylonian exile in the 500s BC where the people were taken away, they were allowed to return by the Persian King Cyrus. They rebuilt the city, the temple, and culture. By the time of the Romans, the city was along a major trade route and held some prominence, so the Romans quickly snatched it up. The Romans were very impressed by it all, so much so that after the Romans conquered the city, that the Emperor even commented that it was so well and firmly built that it would have been impossible to conquer if God had not wanted it to be so. (Josephus, Jewish War 6.409-413).
By the time of Jesus, the city was well known throughout the Roman Empire. The temple that King Herod built was one of the greatest architectural feats of the ancient world. But the Jews were a constant thorn in the Roman’s side, and worse, it Jerusalem was not the city of faith toward God as it was supposed to be.
Our Gospel reading from Luke 19 takes place the day after Palm Sunday, on Monday of Holy Week. As Jesus looks at this city, He weeps over it. His tears were tears of insight. He was not deceived by the marble and gold of Jerusalem, but He saw a spiritual poverty and ignorance of things that really matter. He saw beneath the peaceful view of the Holy City, that there was no true peace in the city of peace.
And He shed tears of foresight. Just the day before, He was greeted with shouts of Hosanna by the crowds, but He knew how the week would end. He saw the coming doom, the retribution toward those who would reject Him because they did not accept the time of the Lord’s visitation. Somewhere around 35-40 years later, in the year of our Lord 70, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. The ancient Jewish historian Josephus notes there were nearly 3 million people there at the time. The apostles and Christians had all been scattered by God throughout Samaria, Galilee, and beyond. Thus God has extracted the grain and piled up the chaff. The city was overrun with poverty and famine, greed and evil. So great was their hunger that they ate their shoes, and some even resorted to cannibalism. In desperation, some of the Jews swallowed their money so that it wouldn’t be taken from them by the Roman soldiers. But this didn’t stop them, and led to even greater suffering. Roman soldiers cut open the stomachs of thousands looking for money. There was such a slaughter that even the heathens were moved to pity, and Roman emperor had to command his soldiers to stop the killing, instead them as slaves and selling them. This they did, but these slaves became so cheap that they would gained more by continuing in the slaughter. And so because of their rejection of Christ, the Jews were left homeless, alienated from the city until the late 1940s.
When Jesus entered the temple, there were no tears. First He weeps out of great sympathy and pity, and then quickly changed and attacked with great wrath. As merciful and compassionate as He was toward the poor people being misled to their own destruction, so great was His wrath displayed against those who were the cause of this destruction. The temple and the priesthood were instituted so that people would proclaim God’s Word, praise His grace and mercy, give thanks to Him, and be a light to the Gentiles. Here was the house of God, the place where the glory of the Lord dwelt on earth. There was no excuse for ignorance here. But there was more evil and lack of faith here than anywhere. They made the Lord’s house into a den of robbers. Not only full of greed and covetousness, but one that robbed the Gospel from the people they were supposed to serve.
The serious sin of the Jews in our Gospel reading is that they paid more attention to their belly than their God. The Jews were repaid for not recognizing the time of their visitation. They took greater pains about how to fill their greed than how to be saved. They didn’t know the things that make for true and lasting peace. They thought it rested in their buildings and possessions, their status and good works. And so they stumbled over Christ and His righteousness.
This serves as an example to us. We have the Gospel in our country, and a freedom to live out our faith in ways unheard of throughout history. God will let the godless world complain and cry out, “If it weren’t for Christianity, this or that would not have happened. It’s the Christian’s fault that we have racism or bigotry or sexism or repression.” Similarly, the Jews at Jerusalem complained and blamed all their afflictions on the preaching of the prophets and apostles, and even said that if Jesus continued in His preaching that the Romans would come and take away their land and the people. And then, when the Roman Empire fell, they blamed it on God and the teaching of the Gospel over and against paganism. So it still goes on today.
We are also now visited by God. Christ Himself is present here. He has given us His Word so that we might recognize His will and see Christ for us. But people don’t want to take it seriously. They ignore it, they twist it, they deny it, they trip over it as the stumbling block. God is patient through it all. He watches it go on, and for the sake of some, He delays His final judgment. Whenever the Church is sunk in selfishness and greed, Christ will not weep. He will be too angry to weep, and He will use the scourge and drive out sin. If we continue to disregard His Word and His visitation, the wrath that came upon the Jews will also come upon us. It’s the same Word, the same God and the same Christ which the Jews had.
May the Lord preserve His Church from the same complaints, from the same worldly greed, from the same lack of faith. And may we hang onto the Word, the very words of Jesus. May we fear and love God so that we do not despise God’s Word or the preaching of it, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it. We are in the very presence of the Lord who comes to us in His Word. The Lord has made His holy dwelling among us – in Word, in the water of Baptism, in the bread and wine of the Sacrament.
The Lord, who came with great zeal to cleanse His Father's house comes to us with equally great zeal, to cleanse our hearts and minds of all sin. He comes with the message of repentance and salvation by faith. With great zeal He comes to expose our sin, for with equally great zeal He comes to give us the total and complete forgiveness that He won for us by dying on the cross. With great zeal He knocks us down by His Law, and with equally great zeal He lifts us up with His Gospel, for He has paid the price for our sins, not purchasing us an animal in the temple courts but has redeemed us, lost and condemned persons, purchased and won us from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.