The King’s tears for the Church in ruins

Sermon for Trinity 10

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

Palm Sunday is a pretty well-known day in the Church Year, the day when Jesus, the King of the Jews, rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, with the crowds waving palm branches and singing His praises. It was a day of joy, as the prophet Zechariah prophesied it would be, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, Lowly and riding on a donkey. Twice a year we hear the Palm Sunday Gospel, on the first Sunday in Advent and again on Palm Sunday itself.

Today’s Gospel is also from Palm Sunday. But on this day in the Church Year we remember, not the joy, but the tears of Palm Sunday, the tears of Jerusalem’s King for His beloved city as He foresaw its eventual destruction.

Unfortunately, the demise of Jerusalem and the Old Testament Church of Israel wasn’t an isolated incident. It was a harbinger of the eventual demise of the New Testament Church as well, for which the King also weeps. Most of the world’s population will remain unbelieving and will perish. Most of the Church’s members will eventually fall away and perish. But as we also see in our Gospel, there is a solution for the few who will accept it by God’s grace, a solution provided by the King Himself after He wept for His city.

The palm branches had already been waved. The Hosannas had been sung. And the Pharisees had just been rebuked by Jesus for urging Him to rebuke His disciples for welcoming Him as “He who comes in the name of the Lord.” Then, still presumably mounted on that famous donkey, the King looked at the city of Jerusalem as He drew closer to it, and He wept over it. This was supposed to be your time, O city of God, the time of your visitation, the moment when 2,000 years of God’s careful attention and provision and instruction reached their climax in the actual visitation of God, the arrival of the promised Savior. This was supposed to be your hour of glory, when not just a small percentage of your citizens, but the whole city came out to welcome your King, and to praise Him, and to acknowledged Him as your Lord and Savior who makes peace between God and man through His own suffering and death. But now the things that bring you peace are hidden from your eyes.

The hiding of those things from their eyes was God’s doing, and at the same time, it wasn’t God’s doing. Let me explain.

The Church Father Augustine once wrote, “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” That seems contrary to logic. First you have to understand something in order to believe it, right? Not when it comes to the Christian faith. Faith doesn’t come from human reason or logic. It comes from hearing the Word of God. Faith comes first, then understanding. No one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit. First the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God, specifically the Law and the Gospel, to bring you to fear the consequences of your sins and then to trust in God’s promise of the free forgiveness of sins in Christ. Then He enlightens you through the Gospel to recognize and to understand the details about Christ’s person and work, about the fulfillment of prophecy, about His invisible reign over the things that are going on around us.

For hundreds of years the Spirit of God had been revealing His Law and Gospel to Israel, showing them their sins through the preaching of the Law and through the daily necessity of bringing sacrifices to atone for their sins, and showing them His grace in accepting all those sacrifices that pointed ahead to the great sacrifice of the Christ who was to come. But most did not believe that fundamental truth of their utter sinfulness and neediness before God, and most did not believe in God’s promise to save them by His grace alone, free of charge, through the Christ. Their unbelief was not God’s doing. It was their own. Matthew records these words from Jesus to Jerusalem during Holy Week, How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

And so, since they stubbornly rejected God’s promise in unbelief, God hid the details from them, too, about Jesus’ identity as the Christ, about His Palm Sunday ride on the donkey, and about the salvation He was bringing them.

Now, Jerusalem had to reject the Christ initially, and cause Him to suffer, and crucify Him. That was part of God’s plan of salvation. But that still wasn’t the real tragedy for the Jews. They could have come back from that. They could have repented of that on the Day of Pentecost or even later. But the vast majority of them didn’t—hundreds of thousands of Israelites, and millions of their descendants through the ages. Almost 40 years God gave them to repent, but they wouldn’t. And so, as Jesus rides into the city, He foresees, not only their rejection of Him later that week, but their persistent, stubborn unbelief over the next 40 years, their refusal to accept that their sins against God were their biggest problem, their refusal to accept Jesus, risen from the dead, as the Lord’s Christ, and their blasphemy against the Holy Spirit who revealed Him as the Christ through the apostles’ preaching, all of which would lead to the atrocities of the First Jewish War, to the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman armies, and to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Yes, the King foresaw His Old Testament Church lying in ruins, and He wept over it. He was saddened and troubled by it. But as mentioned earlier, the fall of the Old Testament Church of the Jews was a harbinger of the fall of the New Testament Church, made up of Jews and Gentiles. The King’s tears weren’t just for Jerusalem.

As of that first Palm Sunday, God had created and cultivated and carried the Hebrew people on eagle’s wings for about 2,000 years, since the time of Abraham. Does it strike you that He has been creating and cultivating and carrying His New Testament Church for about the same length of time, for about 2,000 years? What does the King see when He looks at Christianity in 2020?

He sees false doctrine being taught and celebrated practically everywhere in His name. He sees that in the Roman Church, His honor as the only Mediator between God and man has been transferred to Mary and the saints. He sees that in most of the so-called “mainline” Protestant Churches, His eternal truth has been traded in for human wisdom and lies of “social justice.” He sees that the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, for the sake of Christ alone, is barely taught anywhere anymore. He sees that “Christian worship” has degenerated into the worship of man, into secular concerts that focus on what people like to hear instead of the ministry of the soul-saving preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the holy Sacraments. He sees Christians, like the first-century Jews, more tied to their heritage, their traditions, and their family connections than to the pure Word of God. He sees baptized Christians walking away from their Baptism, deceived by the world and all the treasures it offers. He sees it. He saw it already on Palm Sunday. And His tears for Jerusalem in ruins flow also for His New Testament Church in ruins, knowing that it will soon be utterly destroyed, knowing that it was all avoidable, and yet knowing at the same time that it wouldn’t be avoided.

But through the tears, the King also saw that not all was lost. He foresaw a remnant that would still be saved and He knew exactly how to save them. The solution, for those who will receive it, is the same for the Old and for the New Testament Church. The solution is Christ, ridding His temple of the things that shouldn’t be there; Christ, restoring His temple as a house of prayer; Christ, preaching and teaching daily in His temple.

Where did Jesus go when He got to Jerusalem? He went to Temple. And we’re told what He found there. The buying and selling of animals for sacrifice, and moneychangers exchanging currency. It isn’t wrong to do those things. It is wrong to do those things in God’s temple. They don’t belong there. God made His temple to be a house of prayer, where people could focus on the worship of God and on the meaning of sacrifices that were being brought, where people could sing God’s praises, where people could hear His Word, where people could seek God’s help, both for their sins and for their other important needs. So Jesus, the Owner of the house, drove out those who were buying and selling there and restored peace so that men could pray and His Word could be heard. And then, in the few days He had left before His betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion, He taught daily in the temple, and all the people were hanging on His words. As a result, there was a remnant of the Church of Israel that believed and was saved, even while the majority ended up in ruins.

The Lord Christ does the same thing in His New Testament Church as it rushes to its own ruin. He still comes into His Temple, His Church throughout the world, wherever the Gospel still is preached and wherever the Sacraments are still rightly administered, and, through the ministry of the Spirit, drives out the things that don’t belong there: commercialism and worldliness, impenitence, selfish ambition, anger, false doctrine, faith in man, fear and despair. And then He fills His Temple with the preaching of the truth, with His Word, with the gifts of His Spirit, with prayer, and with the virtues of faith and hope and love.

And by His Spirit, by His preaching, by the Sacrament of His very body and blood, the Lord Christ preserves for Himself a remnant, a leftover bunch of believers who will not be caught up in the ruin of the visible Church, because they are the true Church, the invisible Church, the Church against which the very gates of hell will not prevail, because her members hear the Word of Christ and heed the warnings of Christ and repent while there’s still time.

Always make certain you are part of that remnant, part of the true Church that escapes the ruin and remains forever, not here on this earth, but in the new heavens and the new earth, in the New Jerusalem that will come down from heaven with Christ when He returns. May the King’s tears for earthly Jerusalem cause you to see just how earnestly He wants you to be found in the Jerusalem that will never come to ruin. Amen.