God is the One who wants to help you

Sermon for Trinity 10

Jeremiah 7:1-7  +  1 Corinthians 12:1-11  +  Luke 19:41-48

People love to blame God for mankind’s problems. There’s a fire? God’s fault. War and bloodshed? God’s fault. Poverty? Sickness? Hunger? Death? God’s fault. He’s all-powerful, so He’s easy to blame, because no tragedy is beyond His power to prevent. So God must be out to get us!

But you and I know the root of all our problems. It goes all the way back to the fall of our first parents in the Garden of Eden and the curse under which this whole creation lives as a result. And we know something else, too. God isn’t out to get us. God is the One who is trying to help us out of the mess we human beings have created for ourselves!

But He doesn’t force us to love Him or to thank Him or to believe in Him. He doesn’t compel us to accept His help. And so, tragically, even though He reaches out to us with His powerful Word to warn us about our sins and to call us to repentance and faith in His Christ, in whom He holds out to us the promise of the forgiveness of sins and eternal life, even though He sends disasters and tragedies on the world to reinforce for us the seriousness of sin and the urgency of repentance, most people still won’t turn to Him for help.

It’s always been that way—sinful, corrupt man turning away from the only One who can help and is trying to help. And Old Testament Israel is the prime example.

There stood the prophet Jeremiah in the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem, as you heard in the First Lesson this morning. Israel had gone astray. They had been straying for hundreds of years. They had ignored the warning of the Northern Kingdom’s destruction and were headed to their own. But once more God sent His prophet to warn them. Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place. But they didn’t listen. They hated Jeremiah for telling them they were doing something wrong. And eventually, within Jeremiah’s own lifetime, they were practically obliterated by the Babylonian armies, and that temple where Jeremiah stood and warned them was wiped out, just as God said it would be, because they didn’t want His help, because they didn’t want to admit they were the ones in the wrong. All along, God was the One trying to help them. But their own stubbornness and sinful desires kept them from repentance.

Still, because of the warnings of Jeremiah and the other prophets, a relative handful of people were brought to repentance or were preserved in the faith, and a remnant of penitent believers returned to the land of Israel from Babylonia and rebuilt the temple and rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and waited for the Christ to come.

And then, finally, He did come! He rode up to Jerusalem on a donkey! He was there to help them! But Jerusalem, as a whole, would reject Him, put Him to death, and still refuse to repent even after He rose from the dead and kept sending His apostles to them for another 40 years.

This is what Jesus foresaw as He rode up to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And we see how it moved Him, how it moved God Himself, to tears. As He 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. Jesus was the One who made for their peace. Being sorry for their sins and looking to Him for refuge and salvation—those were the things that made for their peace. But they refused to see them. They did not know the time of their visitation. That is, they refused to acknowledge that God had come to visit them for salvation by sending His Son to be their Redeemer. Jesus volunteered to answer for all their sins before God, so that they could go free. But they rejected Jesus, and so would have to answer for all their own sins.

So the joy of Palm Sunday was mingled with great sadness and tears, which shows us that God didn’t want the Jews to reject Jesus, didn’t want, first and foremost, to destroy them. First and foremost, He desired their salvation. But because they didn’t want God’s help, they wouldn’t have it.

So, as Jesus prophesied in our Gospel, Jerusalem would be obliterated 40 years later at the hands of the Roman armies. And not just that, but a worldwide plague against the Jewish people would begin, a plague that has lasted until this day and will last until the end of the world.

And here we make an important clarification: God’s judgment on the Jewish people doesn’t justify anyone’s mistreatment of them over the centuries. No Christian can ever say, God has pronounced judgment on Israel, therefore, I can mistreat them. Far be it from Christians to think such a wicked thing, much less do such a thing! God has used, not Christians historically, but pagans and unbelievers and false Christians to bring earthly judgment on Israel, and so it must be. And no Christian can ever gloat or rejoice when Israel suffers, with an, “Aha! They got what was coming to them!” No, that’s an unchristian sentiment. We can and must mourn their mistreatment and their destruction, just as Jesus did in the Gospel, even while we recognize the horrible justice in it, as Jesus also did.

But most importantly, when we consider Israel’s destruction, we must take God’s warning for ourselves. He’s serious about your salvation, too, and desires your daily repentance. Once you have come into His kingdom through Holy Baptism, as all the Israelites once had by virtue of the covenant of circumcision, He sends out warnings, too, when you turn away from His commandments and go your own way. When such warnings come from hearing the Law, from hearing the Ten Commandments, don’t be like Israel and harden your ears to God’s truth. The Jeremiah who stands at the gate and warns you is sent by God, the One who is trying to help you, so that you continue in repentance and faith, so that you may avoid the destruction that is coming on the world.

Last week, you heard St. Paul’s warning to the Corinthian Christians to learn from Israel’s examples of impenitence followed by destruction. Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. Take his warning to heart, and know that all the hardships and tragedies of this life are not coming from a God who is out to get you, but from a God who, first and foremost, desires your salvation and is trying to help you. Learn that from Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem.

The second part of today’s Gospel also shows God trying to help Jerusalem, even though some people thought just the opposite. We see it in Jesus’ zealous cleansing of the Temple.

It likely happened on the very same day, Palm Sunday, although possibly the next. Jesus arrived at the Temple and saw people buying and selling, right there in God’s house, right there where they were supposed to meet God and bring sacrifices of atonement for their sins and give thanks to God and ask Him for help. What’s more, Jesus had teaching to do—His last few days of it before His crucifixion. There were still believers in Jerusalem, and some who would become believers through His teaching. But who could teach, who could listen, who could mourn his sins and ask God for help with all this noisy commerce going on? So Jesus made some people very angry. He drove out the people who had turned His house into what He called a “den of thieves.”

Now, some people saw that minor bit of destruction on Jesus’ part as overly aggressive and mean. How absurd! This was the love of Jesus on display! This was Jesus’ zeal for the people to whom He was sent by the Owner of that house, of which He Himself, as the Son of God, was also co-Owner. It was God trying to help in ridding His temple of the distractions of bleating animals and loud salesmen, so that the people could hear, and learn, and focus on their sins and on God’s great plan to redeem them by the blood of the Passover lambs which would be slaughtered later that week, which pointed to the blood of The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. See His seriousness in trying to help His people, even though His actions seemed harsh.

Jesus is serious about your salvation, too. He’s the One who’s trying to help you. He wants you to hear what He has to say to you through His Word and His called servants. He wants you to be able to receive His body and blood without the distraction of worldly interruptions—and by worldly interruptions, I don’t mean crying babies or fidgety children. I mean, forms of worship that distract from the Gospel. Or worldly distractions that are brought into this sanctuary. Or the worldly distractions that keep people from this sanctuary. And so sometimes God comes with a bit of destruction or earthly trouble to cleanse our lives of such things and to refocus our attention where it belongs, on Christ our Helper and on His holy Word and Sacraments.

Why? Because, first and foremost, He desires your salvation, to keep you from falling where so many people, even His chosen people Israel, have fallen, to preserve you from the judgment and destruction that are coming on the world. When you’re tempted to turn away from God’s warnings and from His urgent pleas to stay with Him, to receive His gifts of love, because they aren’t the things you want to hear, remember Israel. Remember Jerusalem. Remember Jesus’ tears and His urgent cleansing of the temple, and know that it still isn’t too late. Listen to Him now. He has ridden into our building again this morning to teach and preach and to hand out His gifts. God is not your enemy, or at least, He doesn’t want to be. He’s the One who’s trying to help you. Look to Him for help, and you won’t be disappointed. Amen.