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INJ
St Luke 19:41-49
'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem'
Morning Service
The 10th Sunday after Trinity Sunday | August 12, 2007
Dear Saints,
The Gospel text brings us right into the midst of holy week. The events that are recorded for us, and that we have just heard, occur on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Good Friday, one week previous to the Lord's Resurrection. Jesus has just ridden into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey to the acclamations of the crowds singing Psalm 118: “Blessed is He, blessed is He, blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.”
And as Jesus comes over the ridge and sees the Holy City spread before Him, He begins to cry, to weep. Why? This is, after all, the high point of this week, and things are down hill from here. Jesus is about to be thrown into turmoil, a week of controversy, struggle, fighting, any number of illegal trials, beating and bleeding and praying and suffering and, at last, dying.
But here on the cusp of Holy Week Jesus is crying over the city of Jerusalem, and the question remains, “Why is Jesus crying?” The answer, as it always is, is in the text. Jesus tells us, with tears in His eyes, why He weeps, “If you,” he says to Jerusalem, “had know, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” [Luke 19:42]
Jesus is crying because Jerusalem does not recognize Him, their Lord and Savior, because they do not know the things that make for their peace. Jerusalem, and understand that Jesus is speaking of His people who live in Jerusalem, Jerusalem is blind to Jesus, they don't recognize who He is and what He has come to do. They don't believe in Jesus.
And this is made worse by the fact that Jerusalem is the Holy City, the place where the Lord has placed His name. Jerusalem is called, in the Scriptures, Zion [1 Kings 8:1; Zechariah 9:13]; Salem [Genesis 14:18; Psalm 76:2]; City of God [Psalm 46:4]; City of the Great King [Psalm48:2]; The Perfection of Beauty, the Joy of the Whole Earth [Lamentations 2:15]; The Throne of the Lord [Jeremiah 3:17]; Holy Mountain [Daniel 9:16, 20]; the Holy City [Nehemiah 11:1, 18; Matthew 4:5]; and the City of Truth [Zechariah 8:3]. Jerusalem means, in the Hebrew, “the promise” or “the foundation of peace.”
Jerusalem, in other words, is the church, the Lord's chose people. The Lord had sent His prophets and preachers into Jerusalem to preach His Word, and the Lord had built His temple in the midst of Jerusalem. That temple is where the Lord established the Sacramental worship of the Old Testament. Daily in the temple there were sacrifices, fires and smoke and blood. These sacrifices were sermons, the preaching of law and Gospel. The law tells us that sin deserves death, but here in the temple, in the sacrifices we see that the Lord accepts the blood of another in my place, and they people would know that the Lord would, at last, send His own Son to be the substitute for our sin and the sin of all the people. And the church there, gathered around the altar, the temple in Jerusalem, would raise their hearts and voices to the Lord in prayer.
So the people had all of these things, the prophets and the temple, but the prophets they killed and the temple they turned from a house of prayer into a den of thieves. The Lord sent His Word to His people, and they rejected it, despised it, mocked and scorned it, and then, at last, when the Word of God came in the flesh, they crucified Him.
But still we haven't quite answered the question, why does all of this make Jesus cry? We expect Him to be a little upset, but to weep. And now were really getting to it: for Jesus also knows what the result of Jerusalem's blindness will be. He knows the judgment that is coming because of their pride and unbelief. Jesus says, warns, prophecies: “For the days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” [Luke 19:43-44] Jesus knows that unbelief and the rejection of His word has consequences, ghastly and dire consequences. That God's anger burns against sin and unbelief, and that His wrath is hot, and that destruction is sure.
What Jesus promises does come to pass. In March of the year 70 AD the armies of Roman Emperor Titus march against Jerusalem and put it under siege (nothing or no one gets in our out). The siege lasted for six months. The first two of the three walls of Jerusalem fells quickly, but the last, in which the temple was, lasted for months. In the end the only was to destroy it was to burn it, and so the temple of the Lord and the holy city were torn down, not a stone left upon another, and most of the people died. The ancient accounts tell us that there were between 600,000 to 3,000,000 people gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and of these only 97,000 survived.
The ancient historian Josephus tells of these wars and of the fall of Jerusalem, and here's a little historical note, the Lutheran Churches in Germany would read, on the 10th Sunday after Trinity Sunday, a summary of Josephus' account of Jerusalem's fall, the fulfillment of the promise Jesus makes in our Gospel text. I found this week an English translation of the German lesson, and was going to read it to you, but it is too gruesome, too bloody. The horrors of that siege and the fall of Jerusalem are terrible. And this is why Jesus is crying, He knows what's coming. He knows that God's wrath, the wrath that He Himself would know on the cross, the wrath that we have deserved but that He suffered so we would not know it, this wrath against sin will be poured out on His own people.
And here's where the text teaches us, and warns us. There is a prevalent false idea about God that fills the world, and it is this: God is a nice guy, He's nothing to worry about. God doesn't want to cause any trouble, He mostly keeps to Himself; He doesn't get angry. This is what is going on when you ask people if they are a sinner, and they say “Yes”, and then you ask if they are going to heaven. “Yes, of course” is the answer. And how do they get to heaven? God's mercy for the sake of Christ? No, because they are a good person, because they've tried to do what is right.
What this really boils down to is the false theology of God who is not “holy” but just really nice; a god who “forgives” because He's friendly. Sin that is not that serious, hell that is not that bad, God's wrath is not that hot, and we can do what ever we want without worry or thought of God's punishment because, well, because God is a nice guy and surely He would do anything to punish sin or destroy wickedness. But this is a false God, and idol. God gets angry.
It's true that the Scriptures say that God is slow to anger, but this doesn't mean that He's so slow that He never gets around to it.
And, dear saints, I'm worried that this false and deluded notion of God finds it's way into the church, the pride which says, “We are God's people; He will overlook our sins.” The Gospel of God's forgiveness becomes a cloak for vice and an excuse for sin.
For this we have Jesus' warning and His tears; His weeping over Jerusalem. “If you had know, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” [Luke 19:42]
Dear Saints, remember. Remember that the Lord is not joking or toying around when He sends His Word to us.
Remember Noah, and the thousands and thousands who did not heed his preaching for 120 years, and were washed off the face of the earth.
Remember Sodom and Gomorrah, who would not heed the preaching of Lot, and where their cites were is now a monstrous hole filled with the Sea called “Dead”.
Remember Jerusalem. The Lord had looked with favor upon her, sent her the prophets, the Baptist preaching repentance and baptizing, and even the Lord Jesus. The Lord God had given her all the things that made for her peace. He had even poured out His wrath on His own Son so that Jerusalem, together with all the world, would not have to taste it. But in the end pride and unbelief made for her destruction, not one stone was left on top of another.
Remember Jerusalem, dear saints, and repent. The Lord does not take lightly your sin and my sin. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Weep over your sin. And rejoice over your Savior, the one who has stood in the path of your destruction and was destroyed for you. He is your Peace, your Life, your Salvation, your Forgiveness, your Hope of life to come.
The Lord will once again come to judge the world. After this time of patience His holiness will be manifest in the condemnation of unbelief. But we, dear saints, by the blood of Jesus, we will escape this wrath and know the bliss of the inheritance of the children of God. May the Lord keep us in this faith and hope until the glorious day of the resurrection. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller
Hope Lutheran Church | Aurora, CO
