He Wept Over It - Luke 19:41-44

INTRODUCTION

Today is Palm Sunday. We call it Palm Sunday because, in the Gospels of Matthew and John, it is recorded that the people waved palm branches as Jesus entered Jerusalem and they laid them on the path that the donkey trod that Jesus was riding on. The use of the palm branches was a part of the celebration of the people who were cheering Him on as He entered Jerusalem. The palm is used to picture goodness and victory. King Solomon used the palm branch as decoration and it was often put on coins that were used for the money 0f the realm. The palm branch next shows up in Revelation 7 where we see it being used to honor the Lamb upon the throne by the great multitude from many nations. They hold the palm branches in their hands in recognition of the King of kings who is enthroned in heaven.

In Luke’s account, we do not have the palm branches recorded but we are told that Jesus enters on a donkey and His disciples lay down their cloaks on the road for the donkey to walk over. This is a sign of submission to a conquering king, to a great hero of the people to whom is being given honor and glory for the task he has performed and for the coming works of honor he is expected to perform. It is clear, either with palm branches or cloaks that here in the Gospels, Jesus is being honored and there is great excitement and joy at His coming to Jerusalem.

It is natural for us as well to join in on this happy chorus of praise and honor being shown to Jesus as He enters. We celebrate Palm Sunday and in a week we celebrate Resurrection Sunday and in between we will celebrate Good Friday. It is springtime and the weather is finally warming up and we are happier about our surroundings. We are thinking of Jesus here as the bringer of life and the person in which we have our own new beginnings. There is joy and there is celebration for this. We sang this morning, quite well I might add, Hosanna, loud Hosanna. A cry of praise and adoration for the coming King! There will be church cantatas this week and Easter re-enactments and rejoicing that the King has come. Just like the Jews in Jerusalem, we cheer on as Jesus finally arrives.

This excitement and praise, however, seems to be out of place. We pick up on that as we look at our passage this morning in verses 41-44. To have been such a great time of celebration and honor and glory for Jesus, something must be off for Him to have experienced this and then immediately to have turned around and wept. Could it be that these Jews who have cheered Him into Jerusalem missed something? Could it be that there is something going on here that is not what it seems? We know that the answer to both of these is yes, and we also know that those Jews who were there as Jesus entered Jerusalem were only seeing what they wanted to see. They were seeing the Jesus they wanted Him to be. They were actually in the very presence of God and did not recognize what that meant. The question comes to us as well of how often do we meet Jesus and not recognize Him in our daily lives? Do we, like the Jews of His day, see the Jesus that we want to see and not the Jesus who is? I would submit to you that as we look at this passage this morning, we will see that as Jesus is entering His passion week, that passion is not just the passion of His suffering at the hands of Pilate and the priests, it is also the passion of a God who ardently desires to provide salvation. Jesus comes to us presenting Himself as the way to make peace with God; and therefore we must recognize Him and respond in obedience and compassion. We will see this in three points this morning: First, we will see the Tears of the Savior where Jesus weeps over these people who do not see; Second, we will see the Tragedy of Missed Opportunity where Jesus has presented Himself as God in the flesh and not been recognized; and Third, the Trials of Rejection where we will see the consequences of failing to recognize Jesus. Again, those points are the Tears of the Savior, the Tragedy of Missed Opportunity, and the Trials of Rejection.

I. THE TEARS OF THE SAVIOR (v. 41)

Our passage begins in verse 41 with a surprising and, in some ways, alarming reaction of Jesus. As He is entering the city and being celebrated and honored as the coming King, He reacts by turning and looking over the city and weeping over it. To paint a picture of the scene here a little, we have to take into mind the geography of Jerusalem. Now, I have never been there, and I don’t know if anyone here has ever been there, but Jerusalem is in a hilly region. You can be on one side of a hill or a mountain and not be able to see the rest of the city. This is what is described for us in the prior verses. As they near the city of Jerusalem, the houses start to get closer together, and there are food stands and markets that start becoming more frequent along the path. The number of people seems to be increasing, and you notice that, in general, things are getting busier. Technically, you haven’t entered the city yet, but you know you are getting close because everything is getting busier. Jesus and His disciples get to such a point in the road, and Jesus sends a couple of His disciples ahead to get a donkey so that He might ride it into the city. They aren’t downtown yet, but they are entering Jerusalem, and Jesus knows the prophecies that have been given about Him, and this is what He must do to fulfill these prophecies and begin this week that will end in His sacrifice on the cross.

So the preparations are made and people begin recognizing them and they begin cheering Him on, waving palm branches and laying down their cloaks. They are excited to see Him coming into the city and they are hoping that He will be bringing an end to the Roman occupation that has so plagued them. They see Jesus as the conquering hero and the one who will deliver them from their political oppression. The Jews are a proud people and it has been far too long that they have been under the hand of an occupation. Jesus has proven that He has been sent by God and some may even see Him as the Messiah but their understanding of the Messiah is a great political leader and Jesus has come as the greatest spiritual leader ever, the true Messiah. They have met Him walking their own streets and yet they haven’t truly recognized Him.

Jesus, though, as He begins descending the other side of the Mount of Olives, the hills around Jerusalem line up just right and He is given a view of the whole city of Jerusalem. I am told that this is truly a breathtaking view. In my preparations I read of a tourist spot called the Mount of Olives Observation Point. To this day, there is still a place along the road into Jerusalem where as you begin descending the Mount, a vista of Jerusalem is laid out in front of you. While we don’t see anywhere near the splendor of the city or of the temple that were there when Jesus saw it, the view from this observation point is still breathtaking today. When Jesus sees this, He weeps. Do not make the mistake here of picturing Jesus seeing the city of Jerusalem and silently shedding some tears as He considers what is about to happen to Him. That is not at all what is being recorded for us in Luke, and only in Luke by the way. The Greek word that is used here for wept might better be translated “cries out in anguish” or “loudly laments” or “sobs and wails uncontrollably.” This is the strongest Greek word used in the shedding of tears in sorrow. It is already an incredible rarity that we have the fact that Jesus wept recorded for us. The only other places are in John 11 when He wept over Lazarus and in Matthew where it doesn’t say Jesus wept but it does talk about the sorrow He expresses over Jerusalem. Luke, though, records for us that the God and Creator of the universe, through whom, to whom, and for whom all things were created, bursts out in a wracking wailing fit as He looks upon Jerusalem. Don’t miss this incredible expression of God through the humanity of Jesus. There is a deep, deep sorrow that bursts forth from Jesus when He looks at a city full of God’s covenant children and realizes that they have already and will continue to reject Him. The crowd is rejoicing, but Jesus is weeping.

Jesus puts on display for us His love and compassion for His creation. He truly loves Jerusalem and the men, women, and children who are there. Even while they are cheering Him on as He enters, He knows that it is only because of what He can physically give them and do for them that they are cheering. They do not have the desire to have a right relationship with God. God is not in their calculations right now. Throwing off the oppression of Rome is what is on their minds and Jesus can do it and they are cheering Him on that He might do it. They are lost. They are lost in this world and they are lost spiritually to the point that they can’t even recognize God walking the street in front of them.

Here, though, we see that the tears of Jesus reveal God’s heart toward the lost. In 2 Peter 3:9, we read The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. In 1 Timothy 2:3 & 4, we read, “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” God loves His creation so much that He sent his only begotten Son into the world to save it, to save His people, to save you and me. And that is one of two big applications for us here. God loves you. We don’t talk about it a lot because it has been overdone in modern Christianity, but God loves you and me, our children, and our children’s children. We are His people, and even when we don’t recognize Him, acknowledge Him, or outright ignore Him, He still loves us and weeps over us so that we might open our eyes and see. As His child, you need to realize that you cannot go far enough away from Him that His compassion does not reach you. Psalm 23 tells us that surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. God pursues us with His love and mercy. We don’t deserve it. Sometimes we don’t want it. Sometimes, we are convinced that we do not deserve it, but the compassion of God toward you and me, His children, is unending. The second thing to see here is that God loves the lost sinner. Jesus is crying out over those who do not see, and we are really given no indication that they will ever see. Their hearts are hardened, and yet they are loved. Their sin is hated by God, and because they are sinners, they will be cast out of His presence for all eternity, but God loves them. His justice demands that their sins be paid for in full, either by themselves or someone else, and they can’t, don’t, or won’t recognize someone else right in front of them, and yet our God and Father weeps over them. Do we weep over them?

II. THE TRAGEDY OF MISSED OPPORTUNITY (v. 42)

Jesus doesn’t stop at weeping, though. As we go into verse 42 and look at our second point, the Tragedy of a Missed Opportunity, we have recorded for us a lament of Jesus. Lament is a fancy way of saying that you are expressing grief and sorrow. There are several Psalms that are laments where the Psalmists are sad about their sin or about feeling abandoned or about being oppressed. There is a whole book called Lamentations that tells us about how sad the author is over the destruction of Jerusalem the first time it happened. It is interesting to note that this lament of Jesus will end with the prophecy of Jerusalem’s second and final destruction.

Jesus, amidst His sobbing tears, says, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” Of all the places there were and are on the earth, the God of heaven condescended to come down out of heaven and come onto the earth and be incarnate, that is, take on the flesh and bones of a human being in no other place than Israel, among the very people He had called out of poverty and famine to be His very own people. The very people who He led out of captivity and on whom His presence was visible for 40 straight years and every year after that in the Tabernacle and Temple. God came down to these tiny, insignificant people and called them His own, and when He came as Jesus Christ to walk among us, He came to them. He came to them proclaiming the truth of the Gospel. He came to them, showing them signs and miracles proving His power over all creation and all created things. He came to them as a human in the flesh but claimed to be the Alpha and Omega, the God of things. These devout people who knew the very word of God like we know lyrics to songs they don’t even play on the radio anymore saw this and did not recognize Him. We talked a little about this earlier, but they did not recognize Him because they were looking for relief from earthly troubles. They were looking for a fix to the income problem they had of too many months left at the end of their money. They were looking for salvation from the tyranny of the Romans so that they could once again have the identity and pride of being their own nation, and if they could only get that, God would bless them with prosperity beyond belief…in this life. They took the promises that were made to Abraham literally and not spiritually. Abraham was to be a blessing to the nations and if only Israel could get out from under the rule of the Romans they could be that blessing. Many of the Israelites think that they are not being blessed because they can no longer have true worship at the Temple, as commanded by the Law of Moses. God will never bless them if they don’t worship like He commanded them and until someone comes along who can fight for their rights to worship God properly, they cannot be blessed by God and cannot be the blessing on the nations that they are meant to be.

Jesus was the answer to this. He has shown that He has the power in the miracles and signs that He has done. He has butted heads with the religious leaders enough that people know He is up for a fight over what needs to be done to correct the religious worship mess of the nation. It only takes a little leap to add to that the real possibility of a political uprising, a rebellion against Rome to really cleanse the nation of the Gentile, heathen scum that makes the whole place unclean.

Weeping, Jesus says, “If only you, even you who are My people, would have known.” If only you would have known that there is nothing in this world that will satisfy you and there is nothing here that God needs. If only you had listened to my voice and heard me say that worship is in spirit and in truth. If only you, my people had seen me for who I really am, your mediator with God the Father, and if only you would have seen what it is I am offering: Peace with God. Not peace with the world, not peace with yourself, not peace in your work, or in your finances, or in the politics of your nation. I came to offer peace with God. You are so blinded by this world and all its trappings that you missed the opportunity that walked down your very streets, and you rejected me, and you will reject me all the way to the cross.

Jesus is lamenting over the fact that He presented Himself as the thing of peace that will bring the relationship of God and man back together. He will be the bridge that that makes the uncrossable chasm of sin crossable again. The God-Man who walked ont he very same dirt that you and I walk on has been presenting Himself as the lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world and instead of realizing their sin and adultery in all their cares and seeking of peace from this life, they focus on those things as the answer and they make Jesus the centerpiece of their earthly plans.

Lest we judge these Israelites too quickly and too harshly, it would do us well to ask ourselves where we seek peace. How do we look to Jesus to solve the problems in our lives? If He would only intervene in Washington D.C., maybe we could a government that ran the way it should and an immigration system that actually worked. If He would only open the mind of my co-worker so that she could truly understand God then my work environment would be a lot better. If Jesus would only help my boss to see how important I am to the operation I work in, I might get a raise and my bank account wouldn’t be so empty. If Jesus would only bring me someone who is willing to listen and who won’t ask too many questions, and who will easily accept everything I tell them so that I can evangelize to them, then I would spread the Gospel.

It is sad but true that we all boil down Jesus to be the answer to our earthly problems, forgetting that all of those earthly problems are the result of the main problem of sin that leads to separation from God. No political, social, or personal freedom will make us free and at peace, only spiritual reconciliation with our Father in Heaven. Freedom from the pressures of the workplace and the pressures of deadlines or the pressures of finances can bring us peace, only freedom from sin can bring us peace. We too can miss what truly brings peace even when we know the one it is who brings that peace for us. For us who believe, what makes for peace are repentance and faith, surrender and submission to our Lord Jesus Christ in all things.

III. THE TRIALS OF REJECTION (vv. 43-44)

For those who continue to seek peace from this world, Jesus goes on in verses 43 and 44 to prophecy about the coming wrath of God on their rejection. This brings us to our third point, The Trials of Rejection.

In these two verses, Jesus lays out exactly what will happen to this magnificent city that is the home to the people of God because of their rejection and hard-heartedness. Little did those who were listening know that in less than 40 years, in 70 AD, this is exactly what would play out when Rome laid siege to Jerusalem.

In 66 AD, the Jews rebelled against the Romans and forced them out of Jerusalem. The Jews took ground in the areas surrounding Jerusalem and were well on their way to setting up their own little empire again. General Vespasian was dispatched by Caesar Nero to Jerusalem with his legions and for three years they pushed the rebels back into the city. General Vespasian became Caesar in 69 AD and sent General Titus to finish the job he started. So on April 14, 70 AD, around the time of Passover, Titus besieged the city and built a wall around it. This was the style of warfare at the time. You walled off a place and waited for them to surrender because they starved or thirsted to death. In verse 43 Jesus said that, “the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side.” General Titus did just that and Jerusalem was hemmed in to the point that anyone who left the city was immediately killed by the Romans, man, woman, or child. The siege lasted 5 months and Jerusalem fell. The Romans entered and destroyed the city. Caesar Vesparian’s orders were that he wanted to make it impossible for anyone to believe that Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. Josephus, a Jewish historian, records that the streets ran red with blood of the people and there was not left one stone on top of another. The second temple was completely annihilated. In verse 44, Jesus said that the enemy would, “tear you down to the round, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you.” Three towers were left, raggedly filling the skyline where the city of Jerusalem once stood so that all who looked upon these might know the wrath of Rome against those who rebel.

Jesus gave this prophecy to point out that there is a cost to the rejection of God, there was a cost to the rejection of Himself. Jerusalem was going to pay that cost, and they did. No other army, king, or leader in history destroyed Jerusalem to the extent that Titus did. The cost that Jesus is weeping over and prophecying about here, though, is not just the destruction of the city but the eternal destruction of all those people who did not recognize Him. There is a terrible human cost of this judgment and the human cost is not just life on this earth but the cost of eternal damnation. It had to hurt for the God of creation to condemn this city, His city, His Temple, His people to eternal separation from Himself.

It is with this in mind that we are reminded as well that failing to recognize divine opportunities has consequences. When we fail as God’s people to recognize Him, we fail to be the people who God desires us to be. When we fail to be those people, we are no longer effective members of the Kingdom of God. When we don’t recognize Jesus in our daily lives, we end up pursuing ourselves rather than God. Pursuing ourselves only leads us to the creation of idols and the distancing of ourselves even further from God.

So, how do we recognize God’s visitation today in our lives? We don’t have Jesus walking down our streets, showing us who God is and what He desires, or do we? God’s ultimate revelation of Himself to the world was through Jesus, and while we don’t have the physical presence of Jesus with us as the ancient Jews did, we do have the full revelation of who God is in His word. We ought to realize that every time we pick up the Bible, be it on our phone, tablet, or the hardcopy book on our nightstand or desk, we are interacting with God because every word in this book is God telling us who He is, and who we are in relation to who He is. Maybe we don’t feel that every time we read the Bible, but every word is given by Him so that we might know Him. Every time we pick up the Bible is the time of our visitation.

Not only that, but He has given His Holy Spirit to dwell within us. This fact cannot be understated. The God of the Universe dwelt on earth in flesh and bone as Jesus Christ. When He ascended into heaven, the Father and Son sent the Holy Spirit to dwell on earth in each one of His people. The God of all Creation lives in you and me and when we hear that small voice in back of our heads telling us that our tone isn’t very Godly, or what you are thinking of is sinful and shameful to God, or you should pray for that person you just met, or you should help that person you just met, or when you have that feeling in your bones that you ought to tell someone about who Jesus Christ is, you are having the time of your visitation. The voice of God is not going to ring out inside your head, but when you know the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do and you do the wrong thing and feel guilty, you have been visited.

We are also visited by God through the circumstances and divine appointments in our lives. No matter how painful or how joyful, God places circumstances in our lives that we must walk through and be formed by. God is visiting us in those events and we have the option of responding with fear and anger or with open hearts seeking to know our God of salvation.

It is easy for us to miss these opportunities, though. We are all too easily caught up with lesser concerns, and though they may be important, they distract us from our real focus. All too often, I have turned to the Bible to find something that will help me with a situation I am in rather than turning to the Bible to know who God is. All too often I have ignored that urging of the Spirit only to lose the moment and the opportunity to be God’s servant. All too often, I have let situations dictate my feelings and my responses rather than realizing that they have been given by God as a way of shaping and forming me. I expect God to work in a certain way and when He doesn’t, I am hurt and resentful. God isn’t being very fair in my mind and I miss the opportunity of the time of my visitation.

CONCLUSION

I mentioned at the beginning that we call today Palm Sunday. We also call this the first day of Passion Week. The word Passion comes from the Latin pati which means suffering. This week is the week of Jesus’ suffering. Don’t forget that a passion is also an ardent desire. This week that Jesus was entering into during that Triumphal Entry is the week of God bringing His greatest desire to completion, the salvation of His people, people He loves enough to weep over and lament at their destruction. People that He desires would find peace and freedom from sin in Him. Recognize God as this God. See His presence in your daily life and the compassion that He has for you. If you do not believe in Jesus as your Savior, today is the day of your salvation. Turn to Him and repent. If He is your Savior, recognize Him in all things and know that He is the thing that makes for peace. Amen

Closing prayer focusing on spiritual discernment and responsiveness to God's presence