Grace and peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
On Palm Sunday Jesus rides toward Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He began in Bethany and Bethphage on the Mount of Olives and processes nearly two miles to Jerusalem. As He drew near the city He sees and weeps over it. What brings Jesus to tears? He says, “If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For 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.” Jesus foresees the destruction of Jerusalem. Nearly forty years after this, in 70 A.D., around the time of Passover, the Roman general Titus will besiege Jerusalem. They will surround it, cut off supplies to the city, and drive the Jews to starvation. In August of that year the Romans will have breached the city, massacred the Jews who hadn’t starved in the siege, and destroy the second temple. This would have been around the same time when, six hundred and fifty years earlier, Nebuchadnezzar entered Jerusalem in a similar fashion, burned Solomon’s temple to the ground, and carried away captive those who remained in the city. For these reasons the church hears Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem every year on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, because this Sunday typically falls mid-August. We hear of Jesus’ tears and His prophecy so that we may heed the warning the Jews of Jesus’ day failed to heed.
Jesus says that the Jews did know in their day the things that make their peace—that is, the things that would bring them peace—nor did they know the day of their visitation. Jesus is describing not only His coming to Jerusalem, but His entire ministry, as God’s visiting His people for mercy. It’s language that recalls God’s gracious visitation of Israel at the exodus. At the end of His life, the patriarch Joseph told His brothers, “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Gen 50:24). He confirmed that prophecy by an oath, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here” (Gen 50:25). They embalmed Joseph and put his remains in a coffin as a reminder of God’s promise to visit Israel in grace. The bones of Joseph, long preserved, served as a testimony to God’s promise that He would visit them in mercy and bring them into the land He had promised to the Patriarchs. When Israel left Egypt, Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had placed the children of Israel under solemn oath, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here with you” (Ex 13:19). God visited His people just as Joseph had foretold. He rescued them from Pharoah and their bitter slavery. He fed them in the wilderness with manna. He gave Israel His law and the divine service of the tabernacle. Those gifts not only separated Israel from the other nations to that they could be the Lord’s special possession. Those gifts continually directed their faith towards God’s promise of a future visitation when the Lord would fulfill the law and the sacrifices, bringing perfect righteousness and complete forgiveness for all who believe.
Jesus’ public ministry, especially this final week of His public ministry, is that visitation to which all previous divine visitations directed the Jews. Yet they do not know the things that make for their peace. They don’t recognize God’s gracious visitation. God gave the law to show the need for a Savior. They turned into an instrument for imagining they needed no Savior because they thought they fulfilled it. The sacrifices were given to point to the sacrifice of the Messiah and the peace He would bring between God and penitent sinners. They turned the sacrifices into a mechanism of making peace with God, imagining that faith in the only true atoning sacrifice to come was unnecessary. God had given them the Tabernacle for these sacrifices. He had given them the Temple so that His Word might be taught there. He had given them His house as a place of prayer. They turned it into a den of thieves, setting up shop for their sinfulness in the very place where sinners were to hear God’s Word and present their requests to God. They blinded themselves to their great need for God’s grace, thinking they needed no mercy. They shielded themselves with self-righteousness so that they could not see in Jesus God’s gracious visitation.
Jesus weeps for Jerusalem, because if God’s gracious visitation is rejected and despised, the only visitation that is left is condemnation and wrath. He doesn’t harbor an absolute hatred for anyone so that He doesn’t desire their salvation. He weeps because He desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:4). His tears show that He is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (2 Pt 3:9). This is why He goes straight to the temple upon arriving in Jerusalem. He went into the temple and began to drive out those who bought and sold in it, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house is a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’” Although Jerusalem’s judgment draws near, He cleanses the temple so that in the final days of His earthly ministry it may be what He intended it to be. He teaches daily in the temple about the very things that the chief priests and scribes despised and rejected so that more would hear the gospel and believe, and by believing, avoid the wrath to come, both temporal and eternal. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people seek to eliminate Him, so recalcitrant they have made themselves against God’s gracious visitation. But they were unable to do anything; for all the people were very attentive to hear Him. The people hung on His words because they wanted the things that made for their peace with God.
Jerusalem was destroyed—along with everyone within her walls—because she did not know the time of her visitation. Jesus’ prophecy is written for our warning. God continues to graciously visit people through the preaching about His Son. He offers them the atonement Jesus acquired on the cross and the perfect righteousness He earned by His perfect life. St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians are for everyone when He says, “We then, as workers together with Him also plead with you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For He says: ‘In an acceptable time I have heard you, and in the day of salvation I have helped you. Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation’ (2 Cor 6:1-2). Every day that God gives us is the day of salvation, the day for us hear God’s Word, read it, and meditate on it, because that’s how He visits us in mercy. We must repent of those times when we put off meditating on God’s word, thinking we’ll do it tomorrow, for today is the day of salvation, not tomorrow which may not come. Nor are we to receive the grace of God in vain, imagining that we can keep on sinning, that we can repent and amend our ways tomorrow because tomorrow is not the day of salvation. If we receive God’s grace in vain, we do what the Jews did and heap more judgment upon ourselves. No, we let Christ cleanse the temple of our thoughts and the house that is our heart, so that He may teach us His Word and conform our thoughts and our hearts to the things that make for our peace. For in His Word, He teaches us the things that make for our peace with God: the forgiveness of sins and the righteousness not of our works but of faith.
Along with the things that make for our peace, Christ gives us His Holy Spirit. He gives gifts to each of us which we are to use for the profit of all. Among the Corinthians He gave the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, gifts of healings, the working of miracles, prophecy, that is, preaching the Word, discerning of spirits, different languages, and the interpretation of languages. Although He gave a diversity of gifts, it was the same Spirit who gave them all according to His will. The Corinthians had received God’s gracious visitation in the gospel and God had graciously given them these gifts for the sake of the church and for the sake of others. They were not to use them, as the Jews had used God’s gifts, for self-righteousness and self-conceit. They were to use them to point themselves and others to Christ. So is with all who believe. The gifts differ from person to person. The gifts differ for the time and need of the church. They DO differ, for the Spirit stopped giving many of those gifts once the church had been planted and the gospel preached throughout the world. No matter what gifts the Spirt gives to you individually, we are to use them to serve the church, to serve our neighbor in love, and built one another up in Christ Jesus and the new life He gives us. But the chief gift the Holy Spirit gives is that of faith, so that receive Christ’s gracious visitation each day in His word, so that we remain steadfast in the things that make for our peace with God, so that each day we confess, “Jesus is Lord,” who has visited His people with salvation and mercy. Amen.
The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.
