Jerusalem will fall, but the Lord still seeks to cleanse it

Sermon for Trinity 10

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

We always think of Palm Sunday as a joyful day, don’t we? We march around the church with palm branches in remembrance of the crowds that followed Jesus down the Mount of Olives as He rode on that donkey toward the holy city of Jerusalem at the beginning of Holy Week, with palm branches as the royal carpet laid out before Him. That all took place as Jesus rode down the Mount of Olives, at the beginning of that famous ride. But the first part of today’s Gospel took place during that very same ride as it came to an end, as Jesus drew near to Jerusalem. There was nothing joyful about His approach to the city; quite the opposite. He wept over it and predicted its fall. But then He entered it and cleansed the temple. There’s much we can learn from this account from Luke’s Gospel, not only about the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day, but about the other Jerusalem, too—and not the one you can locate on a map. Very simply, Jerusalem will fall. But the Lord still seeks to cleanse it until then.

And as he drew near, he looked at the city and wept over it, saying, If you only knew, in this your day, the things that would bring you peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.

This was supposed to be Jerusalem’s day, Jerusalem’s time to shine. Her King was coming to save His people from their sins, to make peace between God and man. God had been working on this city, for this city, for a thousand years, since the time of King David, who first conquered it for the people of Israel. God had chosen one nation, one people to be His. With this nation alone, out of all the nations of the earth that had all gone their own way and were all on their way to hell, God had made a covenant of salvation. He had chosen Jerusalem to be their capital city and to be the home of His Temple and His altar, the one place on earth where God promised to be found, to be gracious, to be merciful, where He promised to hear their prayers and act on their behalf. One place on earth: Jerusalem.

But Jerusalem was about to commit a sin before which all her former sins paled in comparison. She was about to crucify her King and her God. And worse than that, far worse—because she could be forgiven even for that—she was about to reject His Holy Spirit who would call them to repentance and to believe in Christ crucified for the forgiveness of sins. But she wouldn’t. Almost all the Jews would continue to reject the very foundation, the very stone on which Jerusalem was built: Christ, the Rock. He would have brought them peace. But they didn’t want to know His peace.

And so Jesus wept. He lamented. The word “wept” here is not a single tear streaming down the face. It’s an audible sobbing, God sobbing over the people to whom He had given every benefit, every advantage to know Him, to know His goodness and to trust in Him, but who were determined to reject Him. But His weeping isn’t for Himself as the rejected One. His weeping is for them. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will put up an embankment around you and will surround you and besiege you on every side. And they will raze you to the ground, you and your children within you; and they will not leave one stone upon another within you, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”

You know what this sounds like? It sounds a lot like the prophet Jeremiah who lived through the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of its first Temple some 600 years earlier. In fact, when Jesus refers a few verses later to the “den of thieves” that the Temple had become, he was quoting from the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 7. I encourage you to read that chapter when you get home, where God foretold the destruction of the first Temple because of the Jews’ persistent disobedience to His covenant. God had the Babylonians come in the first time to destroy Jerusalem and its Temple and to carry the Jews away into captivity. But He brought them back from that captivity, because the Christ hadn’t yet come, and He had to come, from the tribe of Judah, to be born in Bethlehem, to minister among the Jews in the land of Israel, to suffer and die and to rise again from the dead, all while Israel remained a distinct nation, all while the Temple remained in place and the Law of Moses remained in force. The destruction of the first Temple was only temporary; it would be rebuilt and reconsecrated with God’s approval and blessing. But the destruction of the second by the Roman armies would be permanent. Jerusalem will fall, and it will not rise again—not as the capital city of God’s people, not as the home of righteousness.

What do we learn from Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem? We see God’s heart for sinful man, especially those whom He has worked so hard to teach and to train, those for whom He has done so much above and beyond what He had done for any other people, those whom He had raised from infancy as His own children. They were sinners who deserved condemnation, but in spite of all their sins, God had given them the way of salvation. He had sent His Son to them, His greatest gift. But by rejecting the one way of salvation—repentance and faith in Christ Jesus—they sealed their own doom. And even then, God was not happy about their destruction but sobbed over it.

And so we also learn that, in spite of His great love and compassion, God does carry through with the judgment He threatens against those who transgress His commandments and who will not seek refuge in Christ. If a person or a people will not repent of their wickedness and turn to Christ for forgiveness, determined to mend their evil ways, then God’s patience will eventually run out, and judgment will eventually come.

But even though He knew what would happen, we don’t see Jesus turning the donkey around, do we? He pressed on toward Jerusalem and into Jerusalem so that He could offer His life as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. He did it for the sake of the few who would believe among the Jews, and because, although Jerusalem itself would be destroyed, the Gospel would go out from there and spring up from there and fill the earth, spreading among all the nations. As Isaiah prophesied in chapter 2, For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. Out of that doomed city of Jerusalem, a remnant would be saved and would bring the Gospel of salvation to all nations.

This is what the prophet Daniel saw in his interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream during the Jews’ captivity in Babylon, right after the first temple was destroyed. A stone was cut out without hands, which struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay (during the days of the Roman empire) and broke them in pieces…And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. Yes, no stone would be left upon another in Jerusalem, because they stumbled over Christ. But Christ, the chosen and precious Stone, would be the foundation of the Church that would spread throughout the whole world.

Knowing that, Jesus went ahead into the city, determined to save any and all who would put their faith in Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through the Gospel. According to Mark, He went into the temple later that same day and inspected it, but it was late, so He left and came back the next day and found it as Luke records, full of the noises of commerce, people buying and selling inside the temple grounds.

So He drove them out. He overturned the tables and chairs of those who were buying and selling. This was not the intended purpose of God’s house. “It is written (in the prophet Isaiah), ‘My house will be a house of prayer.’ But you have made it a ‘den of thieves’ (as Jeremiah had lamented). Remember, under the Old Testament, that one building, that one temple in that one city was God’s promised dwelling place on earth. Not that it contained Him or restricted Him. But it’s where He chose to be merciful, to hear prayers, to accept sacrifices, to reconcile sinners to Himself. And it was at once a beacon for the nations, who all worshiped false gods and idols, the one place on earth where all people were invited to come and find the true God, to learn His commandments, to learn how He wanted to be worshiped, and to learn about His promise of salvation in the coming Christ. No other temple, no other building, no other altar was permitted, only this one. Talk about a special place!

But the chosen people were acting just like pagans and treating this special place with contempt, filling it with noise and commerce and shady practices, too. No, that couldn’t be allowed. Jerusalem would eventually be destroyed, but before that, Jerusalem and its temple still had an important role to fulfill in the world! He had just a few more days left during that Passover week to preach and teach and show Himself as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, the Passover Lamb, innocent, and yet marked for slaughter. So with the temple cleansed of the noise and distractions, with the quiet and the reverence restored, Jesus taught there daily right up until the end. And the people were hanging on his words.

How does all this apply to us today? Well, Jerusalem fell, as prophesied by Jesus, and the Gospel grew from there to fill the world. On the rock of Peter’s confession, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus has built His Church, as He promised. And that Christian Church is now the spiritual Jerusalem, where God dwells by His Spirit, where His Gospel is preached, where Christ is present, not in one place, but wherever His Gospel is preached and His Sacraments are administered.

But this Church—this outward Church throughout the world—will also fall one day, because it has turned away from Christ its Head and invented its own doctrines and followed its own false teachings. All Christians have access to God’s Word and to the Christian confessions that the Church has always confessed. But so many have walked away from the doctrine of Christ. So many have betrayed the name “Christian,” and often with false teaching so blatant that it destroys the very foundations of Christianity. Jesus weeps for the Christian Church, too, as He once wept for Jerusalem. because He knows it isn’t salvageable, that even most who call themselves Christians won’t be saved from the coming destruction of the world, which includes the destruction of the apostate church.

But He knows a remnant will be saved. The true Church, made up of true believers in Him, can never fall but must be victorious in the end, as Scripture promises and as we see fulfilled in picture-language in the book of Revelation. And so Christ, through His Word, still enters His Church and cleanses it. He teaches us that the Church is not to be turned into a house of merchants or a den of thieves, trying to sell itself to the world or filling itself with noise and distractions. Every church that bears Christ’s name must be a house of prayer for all nations. People must be able to pray when they come to church. People must learn reverence for God when they come to church, must learn how to worship Him in Spirit and in truth. They must be able to learn in church about the God who has revealed Himself in Holy Scripture. People must be able to come and see how Christians love one another, according to Christ’s commandment, and how we seek to build one another up in love and good works, and how we bear the cross with patience as we await the King’s return, when He will claim this Jerusalem as His own and bring us into the New Jerusalem in all its glory and perfection.

Yes, Jerusalem fell, but the Lord still entered to cleanse it before its fall. And this Jerusalem of the outward Christian Church will also fall, but the Lord still enters to cleanse it before its fall, so that the remnant may still be saved. Take the warning Christ gives in today’s Gospel and don’t allow yourselves to become complacent, as if it were enough to belong to a Christian church. Live each day in repentance. Live each day in faith. Live each day remembering that judgment is coming on the world and even on the Church. But also remember that you don’t have to be among the masses who will be judged. Christ loves His Jerusalem and has given her everything she needs to avoid that judgment. You have His Word. Treasure it. And keep it! And you will be found among the remnant that will enter the New Jerusalem. Amen.