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Sermon for Trinity 10
Jeremiah 7:1-7 + 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 + Luke 19:41-48
Today is a joy-filled day, as is every Sunday when we are blessed to gather together with Jesus as He comes to us in Word and Sacrament with His teaching, with His love, and with His forgiveness. It’s an especially joy-filled day as we celebrate this morning with the Holguin family the baptism of their little girl.
It was, in many respects, a joy-filled Palm Sunday when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and heard the praises of the multitudes, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
But not everyone was singing praise to Jesus on that day. St. Luke tells us that the Pharisees scolded Jesus for accepting the praises of the people. Sadly, the unbelief of the Pharisees was characteristic of the unbelief of Jerusalem as a whole, which is why there wasn’t much joy in the Gospel you heard this morning. Instead, there was weeping on the part of Jesus, a prophecy of destruction, and an angry overturning of tables in the temple.
Jerusalem was the city of God, the place where God chose to dwell among men. He attached Himself to this city, and specifically to the temple, to the altar of sacrifice, to the holy place and the most holy place. This was God’s self-chosen “home” on earth. Not a home because He needed a place to live, but because mankind needed a place to dwell with God. That temple was to be, as Jesus says, quoting from the Old Testament, “a house of prayer for all nations.”
Jerusalem was the home of God’s people Israel, the capital city of the Church on earth, the very symbol of the Old Testament Church of God. It was where the people of God dwelled, His covenant people, the ones to whom He had revealed Himself, the ones with whom He had made a covenant of salvation through the sacramental sacrifices, through circumcision, through His holy law.
Jesus had been to Jerusalem many times. He had spent much of His three-year ministry in and around the city. He had taught in the Temple day after day. But as He entered on Palm Sunday, He couldn’t help but weep for His city. 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.
What did Jesus mean by, “in this your day”? He meant that for a thousand years, since the founding of Jerusalem as the capital city of Judah, all of Jerusalem’s history had been leading up to the arrival of God’s own Son in the flesh at Jerusalem’s gates, her Messiah, her King riding in with salvation.
And what were those things that made for Jerusalem’s peace? The righteousness of Christ and the precious blood of Christ that would soon be shed on the cross; the New Testament in His blood that He would give to His disciples; the holy Baptism by which He would forgive sins and save His people from sin, death, and the devil.
But Jesus foresaw what would happen—not only His crucifixion at the hands of the Jews. They could have been forgiven for that, and thousands of them were forgiven for that on the Day of Pentecost when they were baptized. No, Jesus foresaw that, even after His resurrection from the dead, even after His apostles would preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins on the Day of Pentecost, the vast majority of Jerusalem would continue in unbelief and would even go on to persecute His Christians, killing some and driving the rest out of Jerusalem, until all the Christians had to flee the city.
So Jesus wept, not for Himself or for His Christians who would be persecuted. He wept for those who would do the persecuting, because they were the ones who would be destroyed for their own unbelief. They were the ones who would answer before God for all their sins, for their idolatry and for their violence. They were the ones who would suffer God’s wrath, even though, all along, Jesus held out His arms toward them, pleading with them to trust in Him, to take shelter behind Him and His cross, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But they were not willing.
And so the destruction of Jerusalem would certainly take place, some forty years from that day. Utterly wiped out by the terrible decree of God, working through the Roman armies to destroy those who chose to remain in their sins, who wanted nothing to do with Jesus, who did not believe in Jesus the Christ and Him crucified and risen from the dead. Notice that God didn’t call upon His Christians to wipe out unbelieving Jerusalem, nor were they at all responsible for its destruction. Instead, God ordered history in such a way that the pagan Romans carried out His will and His judgment against Jerusalem, so that those who rejected Christ and persecuted His Christians would be judged by God without mercy. And yet, even still, even though it was God’s will to destroy unbelieving Jerusalem, Jesus’ tears for the city reveal that God didn’t originally want to destroy Jerusalem, but that Jerusalem should repent and be saved.
But not all the Jews would reject Christ. Some would be converted. Some would repent and believe in Jesus, some sooner, like those on the Day of Pentecost, some later, like the Apostle Paul, who started out as the persecutor named Saul. How would they be converted? Only by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God as it was preached, and working through Baptism as it was administered.
And so Jesus went into the city to preach and teach the Word of God with every day He had left before His crucifixion. He went to the place that was designed for such teaching, to the house of God, to the Temple. And what did He find? He found the Temple to be a marketplace, full of buyers and sellers, full of merchandise, full of noise, and devoid of the worship of God for which it was intended. So He overturned the tables and chairs of the money changers and drove them out. He rebuked those who were buying and selling and wouldn’t let them carry their wares through the house of God, where the people were to hear, see, learn, and pray. If any would be saved from their sins and brought to faith, it would only happen through the preaching of the Word of God, so Jesus cleared away all the manmade obstacles to His teaching, and then spent the rest of the week teaching those who would listen.
My fellow Christians, the Jews of Jerusalem were destroyed for their unbelief. The Apostle Paul compares the Jews to natural branches of a cultivated olive tree that were chopped off, and now salvation has come to us Gentiles; we have been grafted into that tree like wild olive branches, grafted in by hearing the Gospel, by being brought to repentance and faith and Holy Baptism, fed and nourished in the olive tree by the body and blood of Christ and by the preaching of His holy Word.
But there is a warning for us here, as Paul writes to the Romans: You will say then, “Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in.” Well said. Because of unbelief they were broken off, and you stand by faith. Do not be haughty, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either. Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?
God’s wrath against Jerusalem should not make us proud, but very humble. God’s rejection of His covenant people of Israel should inspire us to praise the grace of God all the more, who has called us to faith purely by grace, by free divine favor and mercy for the sake of Christ. And it should also inspire us to pray for the conversion of all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. Old Jerusalem fell so that a New Jerusalem might arise, the City of God, the Church of Christ, made up of people from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue, who enter God’s City, not by works, by only by faith in Christ Jesus.
Praise God for His gracious gift of Holy Baptism by which all of you have entered His New Jerusalem, grafted into the tree of life which is Christ Jesus our Lord, just like little Kamila was this morning. Be assured that Jesus desires your salvation every bit as much as He desired the salvation of Old Jerusalem. They didn’t fall because they sinned too much. They fell because they refused to repent of their sins and believe in Christ. You stand by faith. Now go forth and live each day in contrition and repentance, letting your old Adam, with his evil desires, be drowned and die each day, so that a New Man may daily arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. Amen.
