You don’t have to be a part of the Church’s demise

Sermon for Trinity 10

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

On the 10^th Sunday after Trinity, the Church has historically remembered the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, because Jesus prophesied it in today’s Gospel. Speaking to Jerusalem from the back of the donkey on Palm Sunday, Jesus wept and said, 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. As the all-knowing Son of God, Jesus could see where things were headed for Jerusalem, not just in general, but very specifically He could see some 36 years into the future, as Jewish rebels began to revolt against the Roman government and eventually overtook the city of Jerusalem. He could see some 40 years into the future as the patience of the Romans with the Jewish rebels ran out. And the armies of Titus besieged the city in April of the year 70, resulting in the city’s inhabitants resorting to violence toward one another, murder, and even cannibalism. By the end of August, the Romans were ready to enter the city. And they tore down the walls, and the temple, and burned the city to the ground. And so ended a thousand years of Jewish occupation of Jerusalem (minus the 70 years of captivity in Babylon, of course). So ended the Jewish priesthood, and the temple worship, and the rites and rituals of the Law of Moses, never to be resurrected again. Jesus saw it all coming, as clear as day. The destruction of the city was inevitable, from God’s perspective.

Why? Why was it inevitable? Because God sees beforehand everything that everyone will do. And Jesus saw what the people of Jerusalem would do. If you only knew, in this your day, the things that would bring you peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes…You did not recognize the time of your visitation. What would have brought peace to Jerusalem? Acknowledging their sinfulness before God. Repenting of their wickedness. Seeking mercy from the God of Abraham instead of relying on their family tree. Believing in Jesus, the Christ sent from God to redeem them from sin, death, and the devil. That’s what would have brought them peace.

And they had multiple opportunities to obtain that peace! They could have not crucified the Son of God at the end of that Holy Week. But that was only one opportunity. For the next 40 years or so, the Gospel would be preached in Jerusalem. The Christian Church would have a presence there, gathering in the temple and in other places, showing from the Old Testament Scriptures how Jesus had fulfilled the prophecies about the coming Christ, preaching repentance and the forgiveness of sins through Jesus, even to those who had crucified Him.

But over and over again, they refused to recognize the time when God visited them for salvation, first through Jesus directly, and then through the apostles whom He had sent. They heard the Word of God…and then ignored it, or stoned those who preached it, or put them in jail, or put them to the sword, or chased them around from one city to the next, trying to stir up the whole world against these horrible, terrible Christians who were preaching the Gospel of free salvation and eternal life for all people of all nations through faith in Christ Jesus.

And so, after giving them 40 years to acknowledge and receive the crucified and risen Christ whom God the Father had sent to Israel, God worked through the government of the Romans to bring final destruction on the city of Jerusalem and to remove His ancient people from their homeland for good. The people who reside on that piece of land today are not the covenant people of the Old Testament. They’re foreigners to the covenant God made with Abraham and with Moses, regardless of whether they can trace their earthly ancestry back to Abraham or not. No, God saw to it that Jerusalem, with its Old Testament significance, was permanently destroyed.

I said at the beginning of the sermon that the Church remembers the destruction of Jerusalem on this day of the Church Year. And we do. But we don’t celebrate it, as in, rejoice over it. Because our Lord Jesus didn’t rejoice over it. He wept over it! As he drew near, he looked at the city and wept over it. Their rejection of the Messiah wasn’t God’s doing. It was theirs. Their destruction was inevitable from God’s perspective, because He knew what they would do. But from their perspective, it was entirely avoidable. The Holy Spirit called out to them through the preaching of the apostles. He even gave miraculous signs in His early Church, as St. Paul discussed in today’s Epistle, as proof to the Jews that the preaching about Jesus was from God. They weren’t prevented by God from believing. They owned their unbelief. And Jesus wept over it, because God wanted to save them. But they didn’t want to be saved by Jesus.

It’s useful for us to reflect on these things. Because what happened to the Jews and to Jerusalem will also happen to the Christian Church in its outward form. Jesus predicted the infiltration of many, many false prophets and false christs into His Church. He predicted that weeds (false Christians) would be sown by the evil one right in the midst of the wheat (the true Christians). He predicted that the love of most would grow cold, that many would be deceived and would abandon the true teaching of His Word. He predicted the working of the Antichrist, not outside the Church in some world government somewhere, but right in the midst of the Church, and He predicted the great apostasy, the great falling away, the great rebellion within the Church, leaving her just as desolate as Jerusalem was left by the Roman armies.

Does God want to see things turn out this way? Of course not. As little as He wanted to see Jerusalem rejecting the Christ and suffering the consequences. But He knows the choices that people will make, and He allows His word to be opposed and His warnings to go unheeded. He doesn’t force people into submission and obedience during this time of grace between His first and second comings.

So, why preach on this text? Why meditate on this text or pay any attention to it, if the Church, in its outward form, is going to end up in ruins, just like Jerusalem did in 70 AD? Because! It doesn’t have to happen to you! Jerusalem, as a city, perished for its unbelief. But many people in Jerusalem heeded Jesus’ warning and repented and were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Many of those Jewish Christians got out before the destruction came. Just because the Church in its outward form will perish doesn’t mean that the true Church, in its true form, will perish. On the contrary, Jesus assures His disciples that the gates of hell will not prevail against My Church. That isn’t a promise that the large institutionalized Christian Church on earth will be victorious in the end. It’s a promise that there will always be a faithful remnant of true believers within His Church, and that they will be victorious against the devil and every enemy.

And how does Jesus preserve this faithful remnant within His Church? By doing the very thing He did after He predicted the demise of Jerusalem. He pressed onward. He entered Jerusalem. And He cleansed the temple there of all the distractions and all the wickedness and all the things that were getting in the way of people hearing His teachings and praying to God. And then He taught. He taught, right there in the temple that would eventually be destroyed. He taught all those who would listen. And even His enemies couldn’t prevent Him from teaching. Because while Jerusalem would eventually perish, not everyone in Jerusalem had to perish. Some could still be saved. And the only way for them to be saved was for them to be able to hear and meditate on His Word.

And so, even though we know that the outward Church, influenced as it is by the Antichrist, will be destroyed together with the rest of the world, we press onward. We don’t get drawn in by the outward Church with its prestige and glory. We don’t get depressed when we see the outward Church failing. No, we press onward, as we are able, to make sure that the Church among us, the Church where we gather, is clean of outside distractions, clean of wickedness, clean of false doctrine, clean of lovelessness. We make sure that the Gospel is taught here where we gather, that the truth is spoken, and that lies are exposed. And those who are able gather around the Word and Sacraments of Christ. And those who aren’t able to gather here among us gather with whoever will join them wherever they are to hear the Word of God and to put His Word into practice in whatever ways they can. We make sure that we who gather together around the ministry of the Word are living in humble repentance and genuine faith, and that we’re living in the world as the light of the world and as the salt of the earth that Jesus made us to be.

When we do that, we have the Lord’s assurance that He won’t remove His Gospel from us, nor will He remove us from that faithful remnant that will remain after the outward Church is destroyed. When we see to it that our own church is continually cleansed, and that the Word of God is taught rightly among us, and that we, as Christians, are praying diligently and leading holy lives in the world, then we have nothing to fear from the impending destruction of the outward Church and of the world. We can simply go about our business here, joyfully worshiping the Lord, looking for opportunities to serve our neighbor, to encourage one another, and to be a witness in the world that Jesus is the Christ, and that there is a Jerusalem here on earth that welcomes Him into our midst, a Jerusalem that will not be destroyed, a little gathering of a faithful remnant, which all people are invited to join. Amen.