Christ’s fervent love for His corrupted Church

Sermon for Trinity 10

1 Corinthians 12:1-11  +  Luke 19:41-48

The Gospel takes us back to Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. It’s a sad text as Jesus literally stops and weeps for Jerusalem. It’s also a strikingly violent text as Jesus drives the buyers and sellers out of the Temple in Jerusalem. There’s a powerful message here for Jerusalem and for us. A lesson from Christ’s fervent love for His corrupted Church.

That fervent love reveals itself, first, in His deep sadness over the Church’s demise.

Now, everyone remembers the donkey and the palms of Palm Sunday. Not as many remember the tears. After the crowds sang their Hosanna’s, after Jesus received and defended their praise of Him, His thoughts turned to the even greater multitudes in Jerusalem who wanted nothing to do with Him. As Jesus drew near, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “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.”

What was it that caused God to weep over Jerusalem? Its day had come. It had waited a thousand years, from the time of King David who first conquered Jerusalem for Israel. Prophet after prophet had announced this day when God would come to His Temple, when the King would ride into His city on a donkey to save His people. All the Old Testament Laws—the priesthood, the Temple, the sacrifices, the dietary restrictions, the Sabbath Day—all pointed to this, to the coming of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, not to destroy, but to save His people, His Church, His holy city, the Daughter of Zion.

But she didn’t recognize the things that made for her peace. Those things were repentance—sorrow over her sin and humility before God—and faith in the One whom God the Father had sent into the world to bear her sin, to bear the sins of all people and to earn for them the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Here was the Son of God, at the gates of His beloved city. And she didn’t know Him or desire Him.

Worse yet, even after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection and ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the vast majority of Jerusalem and the Jews would continue to reject Jesus as the Christ and as the Redeemer. That’s the real tragedy Jesus foresaw. Not that they would crucify Him in a few days. For that they could be forgiven. No, He foresaw that they would stubbornly continue in their unbelief and perish eternally for it. And for that, Jesus wept.

He even wept for the earthly judgment that would come upon Jerusalem. He foretells Jerusalem’s destruction in our Gospel, the destruction that took place at the hand of the Roman armies in 70 A.D., about forty years after Palm Sunday. He sees the siege of Jerusalem, just as the Jewish historian Josephus later described it in his Antiquities. He sees the chaos and terror within the city. He sees the food running out and the multitudes dying of hunger, of disease, and by slaughter. He sees the city walls leveled and the temple destroyed, all because you did not know the time of your visitation. They didn’t know that God had visited them in the flesh to speak to them, to help them, and to save them. Not because no one told them about it—they did! —but because they chose not to believe the message. They chose to go on believing the devil’s lie, that they didn’t need a Savior like Jesus, that there was another way for them to be saved. And for all that, Jesus wept.

Learn this lesson from Jesus’ tears: He never wanted the Jewish people to be destroyed. He took no pleasure in it. On the contrary, He wept over it. Even though He knew their every sin, even though the Jewish leaders had already mistreated Him and slandered Him, even knowing the horror of the coming week and of the crucifixion itself, Jesus still wanted them to be saved, still wanted to hold out forgiveness to them. But forgiveness requires faith, and faith comes through the message of Christ, and they just kept rejecting the message.

How does this apply to us today? First, it should terrify those who stubbornly cling to their sins and refuse to hear Jesus. Far too many people today believe the lie that God won’t actually punish the impenitent, that God is far too loving and far too good to bring judgment on people, that He may weep over our backsliding, but He’ll never actually hold us responsible for it. But see, Jesus wasn’t just weeping in sadness over His people’s disobedience. He was weeping because their unbelief would lead to their destruction.

This text should also terrify false prophets within the corrupted visible Christian Church and those who hold to false doctrine, who comfort themselves with the notion that they’re Christians simply because they call themselves Christians or belong to a Christian Church, even though their doctrine is no longer the doctrine of Christ drawn from the Scriptures of the apostles and prophets, even though they don’t actually sorrow over their sins or rely on Christ Jesus alone to be able to stand before God. The empty protest of “We are the Church! See how ancient we are, see how many we are!” will do them as much good on the day of judgment as it did the unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem when the Roman armies surrounded the city.

On the other hand, Jesus’ tears over Jerusalem should melt the heart of the wretched sinner as he sees Christ’s compassion and His fervent love for sinners, not wanting them to perish, but eagerly desiring that they come to repentance so that they don’t have to receive their well-deserved punishment, because Jesus has already received it for them and now holds out forgiveness as a free gift.

Now let’s turn, briefly, to the second part of today’s Gospel, as we see Jesus’ fervent love for His corrupted Church in His fervent zeal to cleanse what remains, in the time that remains, so that some might still be saved.

Matthew and Luke simply say that “then,” after weeping for Jerusalem, Jesus went to the Temple and drove out the moneychangers, etc. Mark explains that Jesus went to the Temple on Psalm Sunday, looked around, but it was late. So He returned the next day and did the driving out.

Jesus found the Temple full of non-religious activity. Moneychangers. People buying and selling doves and other sacrificial animals. So He drove out buyers and sellers alike. He overturned the tables of moneychangers. He overturned chairs of those selling doves. My house is a house of prayer, He cried. “My house!” My house! Not yours to do with as you please. Not yours to set up your shops in, and worse yet, to try to steal from one another in, sellers looking to charge too much, buyers looking to pay too little. My house isn’t for any of those things. My house is for prayer. It exists so that people can pray and learn about the true God, watch the ministry of the priests, contemplate sin and grace and the sacrifices which pointed to the true sacrifice of the Christ, who is now here. But instead of that, you’ve corrupted the purpose of the Temple and turned it into something different, into something evil.

And then, with the short time remaining before Good Friday, Jesus began to teach the people in earnest, there in the newly cleansed Temple. And His teaching was heard by many, and believed, if not by many, then at least by some.

How does this apply to the Church today? There is no longer a single temple where God is to be sought and worshiped, and we no longer have the regulations from the Mosaic Law about what the structure of the temple is to be like. What we have is the reality to which the Temple in Jerusalem was pointing: We have Christ, the true Temple of God, and we have the Holy Christian Church throughout the world, where Christ has promised to be present in the ministry of His Word and Sacraments. He hasn’t told us what our buildings are supposed to look like, but He has told what our gatherings are supposed to look like: on the one hand, called and ordained men, reading the Scriptures, preaching the pure Word of Christ, baptizing, administering the body and blood of the Lord Jesus together with the bread and the wine, hearing confession, absolving the penitent, excommunicating the impenitent, teaching, correcting, rebuking, instructing; on the other hand, people gathering, listening, pondering, praying, singing, supporting, receiving the ministry of the Word with meekness, with gladness, and with joy.

Where Jesus comes and sees anything else, anything different, happening in His Church—teaching of false doctrine and error, tolerating false doctrine, practicing sin, tolerating sin and impenitence, Christian churches focusing on social programs instead of on the Gospel of the free forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ crucified and risen again, worship practices that are designed to entertain rather than to foster prayer and reverence, practices that detract or distract from the objective truth of the Gospel—where Jesus sees these things, He comes, not with a whip, but with the rebuke of His word. Stop it! The Church is My house! And it is to be a house of prayer, where non-Christians can come and hear the truth about who I am, what I have done, what I command, and what I promise, and so be brought to repentance and faith and baptism. The Church is to be a house of prayer, where Christians can come and be fortified in the truth, and comforted with the forgiveness of sins, and encouraged by one another, and strengthened to bear the cross with patience. Many churches will refuse this cleansing, but some will be cleansed, and the truth of the Gospel will never be entirely buried, because Jesus fights for His Church, and that means that some will yet hear the truth and be saved before the day of judgment arrives.

Jesus still weeps for His Church—for the visible, corrupted Church which includes both true believers and hypocrites on this earth, knowing that many who called themselves by His name on this earth will perish in unbelief. And He continues to cleanse and purify the Church through His Word, never allowing the false, apostate Church to overwhelm the true believers within or to entirely obscure the truth of His Gospel. Let the lessons you have learned today penetrate your hearts. Let the love of Christ for His Church—for you!—instill in you a love for Him in return, and along with it, a constant wariness of the corruptions that led to the demise of Jerusalem. The Church on earth will always have its corruptions. May God mercifully preserve us from them! Amen.