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"Making Jesus Weep"
Passover. Passover in ancient Jerusalem. It was really quite a scene when Jesus came to Jerusalem at that Passover time on what we now call Palm Sunday. People were waving all their palm branches around about him as he on a donkey began to move towards Jerusalem . . . shouting his praises, throwing their cloaks down before him, as he goes over the edge of the mount of Olives and down into the Kidron Valley, looking over across from Bethany and Bethphage, to the holy city, to Jerusalem, and to its temple. It was really quite a scene.
And quite an event in the lives of all kinds of people who were in Jerusalem that day. Not only those in the crowd with Jesus, but those in the crowds of people who flocked to the city and who lived there. Passover week was like Independence Day for us. Like July the fourth for us. If they had had fireworks at that time, they would have been popping off everywhere. It was the time for the celebrating Israel’s liberation from bondage, from slavery from Egypt. Even though it had been thirteen hundred years ago, they still celebrated it as if it were yesterday. Their deliverance, under the leadership of Moses, their deliverance from slavery. Their liberation, their march to freedom. For hundreds of years, they had gathered here in Jerusalem. This same celebration, year after year, just as Muslims today gather at Mecca for the Haj, for the pilgrimage of a lifetime. It was, for them, as it were, the pilgrimage of a lifetime. One professor, the late Joachim Jeremias (Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus), estimates that in Jesus’ day, the population of Jerusalem is around 50,000. Fifty thousand people. But that at Passover time, the crowds swelled with over 120,000 visitors. A population of 170,000 people, crammed into the town and the surrounding villages. All celebrating. Celebrating with food and with wine and with songs of praise. Remembering their deliverance under Moses. Remembering the glory days of the kingdom under the great King David a thousand years before. And shouting with shouts of expectation that God would somehow bring a new deliverer, a new king, a new leader, a new liberator, into their midst, to deal with the oppression that they now felt. For a hundred years, they had been under the rule, under the thumb of the Romans. And they wanted freedom. They wanted out from this bondage. And so they cried out, "Hosanna! Hosanna!" Not just a religious cry, but a political cry, the two of them wrapped up inescapably together: political and religious. "Hosanna!" It means, "Lord, save us. Lord, deliver us." In every single sense of the word, deliver us – religiously, politically – so that we might find peace. So that we might find "shalom." And as they cried it out on this particular day, on this particular day that we now call Palm Sunday, they directed their cry towards this Galilean peasant who came into their town. They directed their cry towards Jesus, as if he were the one who could fill the shoes of Moses. As if he were the one who could fill the shoes of King David. As if he were the one who would provide the liberation that they were so desperately seeking. "Jesus, Hosanna! Lord, save us. King Jesus, be our savior and our deliverer." It was a remarkable day. And it could easily have been for Jesus an intoxicating day, all of this adulation directed toward him, but even as they sang his praises, Jesus’ mind was elsewhere. His mind, his heart, was looking out across the Kidron Valley, looking out toward Jerusalem. So that, in the midst of this celebration, what we find (in our passage of scripture in Luke 19) is that Jesus is weeping. Jesus begins to weep. While others celebrate, Jesus weeps. Weeping because many people have missed out, and will miss out, on the full nature of the liberation that God wants for their lives. Weeping because he could see into the future what others could not see, some forty years beyond this time. He could see into the future the desolation, not the liberation, but the desolation of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. A desolation that would come in the year 70 and which would scatter God’s people far and wide, including those who would at that time put their trust in this Jesus. And he thinks about what will happen in the future, and as he weeps, he says that he weeps for two reasons. Because these people neither "recognize the day of their visitation," nor recognize "the things that make for peace." Jesus, on this Palm Sunday, weeps because the people in the city, and perhaps some of those around about him, do not recognize the day of their visitation or the things that make for peace. "As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, `If you even knew had recognized on this day the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another. Because you did not recognize that time of your visitation from God." Luke 19:41-44 This visitation from God was something that Jesus clearly connected with his own presence in Jerusalem that day. As the pilgrims shouted, "Hosanna!" to him, as they directed their praise to him, do you remember how there were some in the crowd that day, those religious leaders, who asked Jesus to stop the crowd from singing his praises? Effectively silencing them from declaring Jesus to be the one who would save them as Moses and David had done in the past? But Jesus wouldn’t do it. Instead, he turns to those who wanted to silence them, and says to them, "I tell you, if these were silent, if this crowd were silent, then the stones themselves, the inanimate creation, would rise up and shout the praise of the one through whom creation came into being." But they didn’t see it (perhaps they couldn’t see it), that he was the one. There were many others in the city who couldn’t see it either. They missed it. This day of their visitation. The impact, the enormity of the impact of the life of the one who was entering the city that day. Perhaps they couldn’t see it because God was nowhere in their lives. There were some people back them for whom God was nowhere in their lives. Perhaps they couldn’t see it because they were too busy to think about important things, and to come to grips with what was happening right there in front of their eyes. Perhaps they couldn’t see it because Passover, for all its religious content, had long ago lost its religious content for them. For many of the people, Jerusalem was not the height of religious activity. It was the height of the economic year for them. Sort of like the horse races at Keeneland are for us in Lexington. You know on the television, people speak about the economic impact for our city of special events – for example, "The final four NCAA basketball tournament is in town, and it’s going to bring millions into our city." So too: "The Passover is here again and those 120,000 people, well, they’re all looking for bed and breakfasts and they’re all looking to buy their sacrifices. This is an enormous economic boon for our fair city, Jerusalem." And there were some who would be completely lost within that aspect of it. Or perhaps, perhaps, there were some who missed seeing this event as a "visitation from God" not just because of those reasons, but they missed it even though they knew who Jesus was – even though they grasped the significance of who he was, they simply did not want him in their midst. As if they were so caught up in all their religion that they didn’t want, or see the need of this Jesus liberating them from anything. They had a vested interest in things the way they were. And anyone who would rock the boat, anyone like that, was not someone they were looking to for liberation. Some of you may remember Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And one of the characters, Ivan, who tells his friend Alyosha, that he has written a short story about Jesus returning to earth in the sixteenth century. Jesus coming back to live among his people, however briefly. "My poem," he says to his friend, Alyosha, "is called the Grand Inquisitor. It’s set in Seville, Spain, in the days of the Inquisition, I mentioned, the sixteenth century. Days when the Catholic church was trying to regroup after the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation and in the name of Christ, some horrible things were happening as they tried to pull things together. And as they tried to rid the church of those they deemed to be heretics. In this community, the Grand Inquisitor, the one leading the inquisition, was the cardinal. Ninety years of age. The Grand Inquisitor. And Jesus appears in the community. Suddenly, he appears in the community. People don’t recognize him at first, of course, until he does they kind of things that Jesus did. He begins to perform miracles of healing, and eventually he heals of girl of seven years of age and the people all of the sudden begin to say, `This is him, this is Jesus in our midst,’ and it’s like Palm Sunday all over again. There are cries of adulation and they want to honor this one who is with them. But off, off to the side is the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, looking at this scene of adulation, looking at this figure whom he guesses too may well be Jesus in their midst. But he does not join their adulation. Instead, he has this figure arrested. He has this figure thrown in a dungeon and there in the dungeon he begins to interrogate him. But it’s unlike any other interrogation because the one being interrogated says not a word. This is how Ivan tells the story, "In the pitch darkness, the iron door of the dungeon is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself slowly comes in and with a light in his hand, he stands there alone. The door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway for a long time, a minute or two, and gazes into his face. At last, he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks. `Is it you? You?’ But receiving no answer, he adds at once, `Don’t answer. Be silent. Indeed, what can you say? I know too well what you would say, and you have no right to add anything to what you said of old. Why then, why have you come? To hinder us? Because you have come to hinder us, haven’t you? And you know that. But do you know what will happen tomorrow? I do not know who you are and I don’t care whether it’s you or whether it’s a semblance of him. But tomorrow, I will condemn you and burn you at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who today kissed your feet, tomorrow, at the faintest sight from me, will rush to keep up the embers of your fire. Do you know that? Yes, maybe you do know it,’ he added with earnest reflection, never for a moment taking his eyes off the prisoner. And he goes on and on and on, speaking to this figure, until he says this to him: You came to give them freedom. To give them a responsibility that I do not think they can bear. DR: And do you see what’s happened? He, within the church, has taken over the leading of the church, taken it away from Jesus, whose church it is. You want to give them freedom but I don’t think they deserve it or can handle it. I know better than you." So he can not allow this Jesus to disturb the church which he himself is the ruler of. Then Ivan draws this story to a conclusion when the Inquisitor stops speaking. He waited some time for his prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. The old man, the Grand Inquisitor, longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But he suddenly approaches the old man in silence and softly kisses him on his bloodless, aged lips. That was his whole answer. The old man shudders. Something trembles at the edge of his lips. He goes to the door, opens it and says to him, "Go. And come no more. Come not at all. Never. Never." And he lets him out into the dark squares of the town and the prisoner leaves. "And the old man?" asked Alyosha "Well," says Ivan, "the kiss burns into his heart but the old man adheres to his idea." "And then," cries out Alyosha "And you with him? You too?" You too, as well? So what would we do if we were there? If he came into our midst once again? If he visited with us in flesh and blood? Would we really be numbered amongst those who sang his praises that day or would we be numbered amongst those who would arrest him, or perhaps more likely, we would be numbered amongst those who are caught in the middle, simply passing him by, one way or another. Making Jesus weep. Because we prefer things our way. Religion our way. Jesus on our terms and not the living, breathing challenging, liberating Jesus who really did risk his life to come to this earth. Jesus wept because people were missing – for all their activity, for all their noise – were missing the day of their visitation when God in human flesh came to touch them on that Palm Sunday. But not only that, he wept, too, he says, because they did not recognize "the things that make for peace." As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you even you had recognized on this day the things that make for peace." The peace that Jesus speaks of here has a three-fold thrust to it. It’s always vertical. It’s always horizontal. And it’s always inward. Vertical, peace with God. Horizontal, peace within our relationships with one another, with each other. And inward: peace in our hearts that springs from this peace with God and this peace that we are called to have with one another. A peace in every dimension, that can only come not through force, not through brute exercise of power, but only strangely, paradoxically, through self-sacrifice. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for us. The giving of his life to you and me. Dying for our sins so that we might have peace with God. But not merely that! Jesus’ sacrificial life is also a demonstration of the life to which he calls us, and of the relationship that he wants us to have with one another, with those whom he has created, made in his image, no matter who they may be. This sacrificial life is the way of peace. And the people in their zeal for a liberator have missed it. Missed that the true liberation of our souls and of our communities comes when we live lives that follow Christ to the cross. So Jesus wept, as they missed it. Ernest Gordon was a prisoner of war in World War II in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Thailand, on the river Kwai. The story was made famous quite a number of years ago by a movie called Bridge on the River Kwai. But in real life, there really was a prisoner of war camp there, and in a book he wrote called Miracle on the Kwai, Gordon writes of his experience. Among other things, he describes the utter deterioration of civil life in the camp as the daily work turned into slave labor, and as food rations became scarce. Disease and death, he says, were everywhere but not only that, as time went by he watched as all sense of cohesion among the prisoners began to dissipate; as all sense of community began to disappear and the soldiers reverted to the law of the jungle. They were literally living in the jungle, and now the law of the jungle became the rule of life in the camp as all order began to disappear. They became like animals when it came to food, time and again fighting over scraps of food, for anything that they could get. It was dog eat dog, every man for himself, he says. Until something remarkable began to happen. In fact, a string of remarkable events began to happen but they were bound together by something in common. Some person or another, instead of grabbing for what they could get, entered into an act of sacrifice; gave his life sacrificially to another. Gordon tells of one such story like this. He says, "The day’s work had ended. The tools were being counted as usual. As the party was about to be dismissed, the guard shouted that a shovel was missing. He insisted that someone had stolen it to sell to the Thais. Striding up and down before the men, he denounced them for their wickedness. Screaming, he demanded that the guilty one step forward. No one moved. `You’re all going to die,’ he said. `You will all die." To show that he meant what he said, he cocked his rifle, put it to his shoulder and looked down the sights, ready to fire at the first man at the end of them. At that moment, a solitary soldier stepped forward, stood stiffly to attention and said calmly, `I did it.’ The guard kicked the helpless prisoner and beat him with his fist. Still the soldier stood rigidly to attention with blood streaming down his face. His silence only goaded the guard to more rage. Seizing his rifle by the barrel, . . . he brought it down on the soldier until he sank limply to the ground and did not move. The men at the work detail picked up their comrade’s body, shouldered their tools, marched back to the camp. When the tools were counted again at the guard house, no shovel was missing." Ernest Gordon concludes, "Death was still with us. No doubt about that. But we were slowly being freed. Liberated from its destructive grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that make for life and those that made for death." (pp.90-94) As Ernest Cosby wrote,
Making Jesus weep. Surely that’s the last thing that any of us here today want to do on this Palm Sunday, on this day of praise and celebration and liberation. Making Jesus weep by failing to recognize him as our true liberator, by failing to welcome him on his own terms, to do with our lives those things that will truly grant us freedom and turn us into folks who can liberate others. Making Jesus weep, missing this day, this day of our visitation by God. Making Jesus weep by failing to recognize the depth of his sacrificial love for us, which bestows on us, each one, a dignity that no one can take away. Making Jesus weep by failing to recognize the inescapable nature of his call, to become peacemakers ourselves. Through sacrificial service to God and others. Making Jesus weep by failing to recognize the things that make for peace. No! Surely making Jesus weep is the last thing that you and I want to do! Rather surely, what we want to do is to bring Jesus joy – and this we can do even today: by knowing that today is the day of our visitation, when God comes to us as well in Jesus Christ, and beckons us to welcome him and embrace him as he is, to do with us as he wills, and we can bring him joy by pursuing those things, those sacrificial things with our lives that make for peace. Let us bow before God in prayer.
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David A. Renwick