Sermon: Trinity 10 – 2023

13 Aug 2023

Text: Luke 19:41-48

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

“When [Jesus] drew near and saw the city, He wept over it.”  Jesus is coming to Jerusalem to be crucified.  But He is not mourning for Himself.  He is mourning for the city.  He is mourning for whom the city represents.  He is mourning for the very people who were plotting at that very moment to kill Him.  He mourns for Judas.  He mourns for the priests and scribes and the council.  He mourns for His nation, led astray by wicked leaders.  He is mourning for the unbelievers.

This not only shows us that He is God – for He knows what is coming in Jerusalem’s future (its destruction forty years down the road), but He also has divine compassion for the very enemies that He has come to save by means of His blood.

And our Lord’s own statement shows why He is so filled with sorrow upon reflecting on Jerusalem: “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace.”  Jesus is reflecting on the name “Jerusalem” – which means “City of Peace.”  In fact, the “Salem” part of the word – which means “peace” – is where our church got its name in 1871, only six years after the end of the War Between the States.

But just as we Americans are no longer at peace with one another, neither was Jerusalem as our Lord approached it.  And in fact, Jesus is the Prince of Peace who has come to restore peace: peace between God and man, and peace between men: peace between nations, and peace between individuals.  Jesus has come in the likeness and image of God His Father to restore that likeness and image, which we lost at the Fall, back to us, to heal the separation between God and His beloved creatures (which is why the temple curtain in Jerusalem was torn in two when Jesus died, restoring our broken unity, and making peace). 

And so the coming of Jesus to die violently on the cross as a bloody substitutionary offering is the greatest act of peacemaking in the history of world.  And in fact, after our Lord dies and rises again, He will greet the disciples with the words: “Peace be with you.”  God has visited the world for this very purpose – to come to Jerusalem, and to be sacrificed for the sake of a New Covenant of peace.

And this peace is offered not only to Jerusalem, but to the entire world.  “For God so loved the world,” says Jesus, “that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”  This Good News is first given to His own nation in its capital: Jerusalem.  And Jesus tells the church to spread this Good News from there, to Judea and Samaria, and from there, to the very ends of the earth: to Jews and Gentiles the world over.  For the peace prophesied in the very name “Jerusalem” is a peace that transcends all nationalities, languages, and borders.  God has not only visited Jerusalem, but also the world.  But it will be in Jerusalem, the place where God planted the temple, where this outbreak of peace will begin – with the planting of the cross, and the planting of the Seed of the body of Jesus into the tomb, from which He will re-emerge as the reigning “King of Salem,” the Prince of Peace, saying “Peace be with you” to His disciples – which includes us.

But yet, our Lord weeps.  For though many of His own nation will indeed follow Him, as will many Gentiles – even to this day there are a couple billion disciples of the Prince of Peace – there are many more who do not.  Though the gift was offered to each person on the planet, there are many – including those in Jerusalem itself, “who [do] not know the time of their visitation.”

As for Jerusalem, Jesus knows what is coming.  Forty years after His death on the cross, His resurrection from the tomb, and His ascension back to the Father, forty years after His apostles begin preaching this Good News of the visitation of God to the world, forty years after our Lord’s coronation with thorns and the establishment of the kingdom of peace, the Jewish nation will rebel against Rome, and their cruel Roman overlords will besiege the city, starve its people, and level its temple, with “not leave one stone upon another” in this City of Peace.

And again, this judgment from God will come, “because [they] did not know the time of [their] visitation.”

Dear friends, what does it mean to “know the time of [our] visitation”?  It means we know who Jesus is.  We know that He is God and man.  We know that He is the Prince of Peace who has visited us.  But even the demons know this much, “and shudder.”  We also know – and believe – the purpose of this visitation, “the things that make for peace.”  We know who Jesus is, and why He came.  And we recognize His continued coming to us in His Word and in His Sacrament.

Judas was at the first celebration of the Lord’s Supper, but he did not know his visitation.  He rejected the very peace that Jesus offered even him.  Jesus still comes, still visits, still invites every person on the planet to be restored to the image and likeness of God.  The risen Christ is still saying to us: “Peace be with you.”  He still calls us to reconciliation: with God and with other men.  He calls us to relent of our evil, to say, “What have I done?”  He calls us to reject the “lying pen of the scribes,” to stop listening to false prophets who pervert God’s Word, to reject the world’s wisdom and instead turn to the “folly” of the cross.  He bids us to reject the world’s abominations and its phony “peace, peace,” when “there is no peace” among those who do not know the time of their visitation.  He invites us to recognize where true peace is found.

Dear friends, on this day, yet again in His Word, Jesus is visiting you.  Jesus is inviting you.  Jesus is extending His gift to you.  Jesus is offering peace to you.  And Jesus is asking you to receive it “by faith.”  For “whoever believes in Him will not be put to shame.”  Jesus invites you to “submit to God’s righteousness,” that is, the righteousness of God that is given to you as a free gift – a peace offering from the nail-scarred hands of God Himself, given to you in His flesh: a covenant of His body and blood that we eat and drink as part of the eternal banquet of peace.

“For Christ,” dear friends, “Christ is the end,” that is, the completion and fulfillment, “of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”  May you know and love this visitation, and may we all know and confess this Good News of the “things that make for peace.”  Peace be with you.

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.