The 10th Sunday after Trinity Sunday | August 16th, 2009
Dear Saints,
“When Jesus drew near and saw the city of Jerusalem, He wept over it.” So our Gospel text begins this morning. Jesus cries. There are a couple of times that we hear of our Lord weeping in the Scriptures. The other time is the famous and very short verse: “Jesus wept” from the 11th chapter of John (11:35).
As we begin to consider this text, it is good for us to first think a bit about the fact that our Lord Jesus cries, that He has tears rolling down His face, that He weeps. Isaiah the prophet even calls the coming Messiah, that is, our Jesus, “A Man of Sorrows”:
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3)
I have run across the false idea that it is a sin to be sad, to mourn, to cry. We might even be ashamed to be sad. We think that to be a good Christian is to be happy all the time. You've seen this before, a person begins to cry in front of you, and they say, “I'm sorry.” Perhaps weeping is the only good work that people apologize for.
A good work, that's what weeping is. I suspect that we could weep and cry for sinful reasons, but weeping and crying is essentially a good work. I know that because our Lord Jesus never sinned, He always did what was good and right, and He wept.
So do not be ashamed of your tears. We Christians weep with one another, we mourn with one another, we grieve with one another, and we comfort one another in all the troubles that come upon us in this life.
But there is more that we want from this text, namely, we want to sort out why Jesus is weeping. In the John text Jesus is weeping because He heard the sad news that His friend Lazarus had died, but the tears that we hear about today flow for another reason.
This text in Luke 19 follows the Lord's Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. He travels up and over the Mount of Olives and the roads are surrounded by joyful crowds singing “Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the Highest!” The Lord's enemies are there to try and silence the crowd, but Jesus says, “It cannot be stopped. If these should keep silent, immediately the stones would cry out.”
Now, in the midst of all of this jubilation, this singing and dancing and rejoicing, we would expect that if we were there, walking alongside Jesus and His donkey, that we would look up and see a smile on His face, that He would be filled with joy to be surrounded by His followers and all these people that love Him. But when we turn and look to Jesus we see that there are tears on His face. Coming down the Mt of Olives and riding up toward Jerusalem, Jesus is looking at Mt Zion and the temple and the city and the people there, His beloved people, and He weeps. Why?
Jesus weeps because He knows their unbelief, they do not believe that He is the Savior. Jesus weeps because He knows their ignorance, that they do not know that He is coming to save them. Jesus weeps because He knows that they will reject Him and kill Him. He is not weeping for Himself, however, but for the people, because they are cutting themselves off from His mercy and His grace and His love. And Jesus knows that their unbelief will end in destruction, that the Roman armies will come and destroy the temple and the city and the people.
In fact, that is why this text is on the 10th Sunday after Trinity, this is the Sunday which falls the closest each year to August 10th, which is the day that Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 AD. Just as Jesus promised came to pass:
"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." (Luke 19:42-44)
But it is not just this temporal destruction that Jesus is weeping about, but the eternal destruction that follows. All the souls that would perish in unbelief in this disaster, in fact, every person that dies in unbelief anywhere has, in the end, eternal and unending damnation. And over this our Lord weeps.
Make no mistake, this destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the unbeliever is the work of God. Over and over we see it in the prophets, the Lord sees the pride of a nation, even of His own people, and He promises to destroy it, to wipe out the people or the nation or the city. The Lord will destroy every attempt of man to be god or reach god. He has pride in His sights and He shoots it down in every place and every land.
God is not some nice guy like the world likes to think of Him. He is holy, and so He is angry at sin and unbelief and pride, and He, over and over in the Scriptures, threatens to destroy pride and punish sin and pour out His wrath on all idolatry and ungodliness.
But He doesn't want to. This work of casting down the prideful and destroying the wicked is (to give it its theological name) the “alien work of God,” or the “strange work of God.” God will destroy all forms of unbelief, but this makes Him sad, in fact it makes Him cry. This is why Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem.
He came to save, not destroy; to rescue, not ruin. He came so that the wrath of God over sin could be poured out on Him and not on His people. He came to be killed, not to kill, but the people would not have Him, and so they fled from the refuge so graciously provided and rushed head-long into their own destruction.
So we are warned that unbelief will not remain unpunished, and that the Lord hates pride. But more than that, dear saints, we are comforted. Comforted by the tears of our Lord Jesus because in them we see His heart, what He wants and desires most of all, and that is our salvation.
If I could ask your indulgence for a personal story. When I was a teenager I was grappling with the Scriptures and trying to understand them, but I always had this difficulty: I couldn't figure out how I could get to heaven. It seemed to me like the deck was stacked against me. I knew what was right and what was wrong, but I could never manage to do everything I knew I should. It seemed to me (and this is the important part for what we're talking about) that God was against me. That I wanted to get to heaven but that He was putting up any number of roadblocks. “Don't do this. Do this. And do it with your whole heart.”
It was all law and no Gospel and so it seemed like God wanted to destroy me. But then, in a marvelous flash of comfort, I found these words: “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1Timothy 2:3-4) and I realized, all of a sudden, that God wanted my salvation, that Jesus desired that I would come to heaven, that God was for me, not against me, and can you imagine the relief? Now I was able to see that my making it to heaven was exactly what Jesus wanted for me, what He had won for me, it was the reason that He came and lived and died and rose again, so that I might dwell with Him forever.
I pray, dear saints, that the Holy Spirit would give us all that comfort this morning as we think on the tears of Jesus, for in those tears we see what the Lord desires most of all: to have you in heaven. May He have his desire with us. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
