Hilton Head Island, SC - March 14, 2023
First Presbyterian Church
Mark 13:1-8; Luke 19:41-44
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it. Luke 19:41 (RSV)
It was unexpected. It always was unexpected. As many times as Jesus had come up the road from Jericho, and perhaps He had done so at least three times a year for most of His life, it was always a thrill to come to the crest of the mountain and then to look down and see the splendid city.
The mountain? The Mount of Olives, the long ridge which shields the city from the desert on the east. East of the Mount of Olives scarcely a blade of grass will grow, but from there west, across the range of the mountains of Judah and down onto the Mediterranean Plain, the Plain of Sharon, where blooms the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley, it becomes increasingly green and lush. The Mount of Olives marks the border between the city-dweller and the bedouin, between the settler and the nomad, between life with roots and life with no roots. It is the place where the world of the Mediterranean ends and the world of the Judean Desert begins.
The city? Jerusalem, the capital, the heart of the Holy Land, the center of the universe for every Jew who ever lived. It was the magnet of the people of Israel, the lodestone of Judaism.
In the first century of the Common Era, almost all Jews going from the Galilee in the north to Jerusalem in the south went down the Jordan Valley to Jericho and then up the mountain road to Jerusalem. They did not travel the more direct route along the crests of the mountains in the center of the land, because that way they would have to go through Samaria, and Jews did not -- and still do not -- voluntarily make that journey. In the first century, Samaria had Samaritans, and now it has Palestinians, and either way, no Jew would choose to pass through it unless there was a compelling reason to do so. So in the first century every Jew going from the Galilee to Jerusalem did what every Jew had done for seven centuries: they went down the Jordan Valley, and then they left Jericho and climbed the four thousand feet of mountains, from 1300 feet below sea level to 2400 feet above sea level. When they got to the highest point, they were on the Mount of Olives, and then they could look down on THE City, the Holy City, Jerusalem the Golden, with milk and honey blessed.
I shall never forget the first time I made that journey. There were seven Christian clergy from New Jersey in the group, and Rabbi Morrison Bial, who had organized our tour, and Walter Zanger, our American-Israeli guide. We were in Walter's Volkswagen bus, and it clearly was not used to hauling nine men up four thousand feet of mountains. By the time we got to Bethany, on the southern shoulder of the Mount of Olives, it was protesting loudly. But Walter had often made that trip, and he knew how to time it, so we began singing "The Holy City" at just the right point, in order that when we finished as we came around the last bend, there it would be, spread before us.
Last night I lay a-sleeping, there came a dream so fair,
I stood in old Jerusalem, beside the temple there;
The children all were singing, and ever as they sang,
I thought the voice of angels from heaven in answer rang:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lift up your voice and sing!
Hosanna in the highest, Hosanna to your king!
This was Walter leading the singing, Walter the Brooklyn-born Jew, Walter the ordained rabbi, Walter, the Ultra-Israeli, Walter, the by-then agnostic and perhaps even atheist, but he knew what that music means to Christians. Anyway, he loved the music, and so he carefully prepared the New Jersey parsons for their heart-stopping moment. "Hosanna to your king!" --- and there it was! No longer was it a city in the eyes of the imagination; now it was a visual feast actually to be seen!
Tears instantly welled up within me that first time. I got kind of teary when I was working on this sermon last Monday afternoon. When you ride up the east side of the Mount of Olives, and you reach the crest and look down, the sight you see is like nothing else on or beyond this earth.
Do you love cities? I confess that I am enthralled by cities. If I had to say which city of all those places I have ever visited is my favorite, I think I would fall into a catatonic state, because I could not do it. Here are some most favored: Jerusalem, for certain; Chicago; New York; Glasgow, Boston; San Francisco; London; Paris; Rome; Berlin; Vienna; Prague; Oslo; Stockholm; Helsinki. Finally St. Petersburg, in which I once spent a grand total of eight hours.
Whatever anyone feels for any city anywhere, it is probably a pale copy of what most Jews felt and feel for Jerusalem. Jerusalem has everything going for it that all these other places have, but for Jews it has even much more. It is the spiritual capital as well as the political capital of their world, the place around which the life of the Jewish people has always revolved, the location of the temple, the place in which God was believed to dwell. "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God!" Time begins and ends in Jerusalem, the world finds its geographic center in Jerusalem, the human race is to find its fruition and its salvation in Jerusalem.
...And so it was, presumably on that first Palm Sunday almost two thousand years ago, Jesus wept when He came around the southern shoulder of the Mount of Olives, and there before Him lay the great and glorious Temple Mount, so painstakingly constructed by King Herod a generation earlier. The temple was one of the most magnificent public buildings of the ancient world. It was not included among the Seven Wonders of the World, because the First Temple was not that impressive, the one built at the time of the Seven Wonders; but the Second Temple, the one constructed by Zerubbabel and Ezra and then greatly expanded by Herod, surely was the eighth wonder.
To the south of the Temple Mount was the City of David, the original settlement of Jerusalem, placed there because of a permanent supply of water from the Gihon Spring. King Hezekiah had built a tunnel from the spring down to the Pool of Siloam, under the city wall and into the city. In the event of an enemy siege, the people of Jerusalem would always have water.
To the west of the Temple Mount Jesus saw the city itself, the thousands of homes and shops and streets and small squares. There was Mount Zion, where in four days Jesus would celebrate the Passover with His disciples. To the north of it, just outside the western wall of the city, was a small hill, barely visible in the distance. It was an insignificant hummock called Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, because many people thought the rocky outcrop looked like a human skull. But at that moment and from that place it was lost in the landscape, a minor interruption in an otherwise magnificent vista.
As Jesus looked below him, he saw the Kidron Valley. In the Kidron Valley there was a grove of olive trees, and a garden was there, called Gethsemane, the Olive Press Garden. After their Seder dinner, Jesus would go there with his disciples.
That was all in the future, and this was now. As Jesus surveyed the Holy City from the Mount of Olives, He was suddenly overcome by a piercing internal awareness, the knowledge that this city which He so much loved was doomed. Within a few decades it would be utterly destroyed by the Romans in a wrathful demonstration of raw military power hurled against rebellious Jews.
All this Jesus foresaw as He looked across the Kidron toward the doomed metropolis. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," Jesus cried out, "the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me again until the time comes when you will say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord'" (Luke 13:34-35).
It is a terrible thing to know disaster is coming to someone or something, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. How many parents have expressed their anguish to me over the self-destructive behavior of their children. The parents know that calamity is imminent, but there is not one thing they can do to deter it. How many wives or husbands have shared their grief over the behavior of a wayward spouse, knowing that it would result in some kind of collapse, and they are powerless to prevent it. The agony is unparalleled, the anguish is dreadfully exquisite.
So Jesus, gazing for nearly the last time at Jerusalem from the singular vantage point of the Mount of Olives, perceived in an instant the horror which lay ahead for Zion, a terror He was completely unable to prevent. "If you, even you, had only recognized on this, my day of triumph, the things that make for peace! You are Yeru-shalayim, the City of Peace, but now peace is hidden from your eyes! 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 with you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation by God" (Luke 19:42-44).
Whatever any of us might feel in a situation like that, it could only be a fraction of what Jesus felt that day as He looked across the valley toward Jerusalem the Golden. Because, you see, He knew as none of us can know! He saw what none of us can see! We might suspect; He knew! Given a certain set of circumstances, there are always a very few who can be certain of what shall transpire, because they clearly understand the signs of the times, and Jesus was one of them.
Standing on the Mount of Olives and looking down on Jerusalem, Jesus perceived to His utmost sorrow that in only a few decades the holy city of God was about to experience its nearly total destruction. It is an horrendous thing to know for a certainty that a great calamity is coming, and at the same time to be powerless to prevent it.
"For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is the beginning of the birthpangs" (Mark 13:8). This is what Jesus saw from the Mount of Olives; this is what He knew it meant to perceive Jerusalem as it really was. There was no illusion for Him; there was only the searing truth of an inevitable collapse yet to come.
Many years ago in Jerusalem I walked by myself through the Old City, down into the Kidron Valley, and up the side of the Mount of Olives. I wanted to see the church whose name from Latin is Dominus Flevit, or, as it would be called in English, The Lord Wept. It is a famous landmark, although it really is just a chapel. It was designed in the shape of a teardrop.
When I went into Dominus Flevit, there was a group of German Roman Catholics with their priest. He was leading a short mass, and I sat in on their service. Behind the altar of Dominus Flevit is a large picture window, and through it one sees the Jerusalem horizon, with the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Church of All Nations close by in the Kidron, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre far off in the distance. To be there in that peaceful setting, hearing praises sung to God and His Son in the Teutonic tongue, was a moving experience for me; I find I forget more and more things as time goes on, but I shall never forget that.
That was the scene Jesus saw, but without the mosques and churches and cars and the many hotels of West Jerusalem, sadly slicing the skyline into serrated shreds. There is an eternal quality to the building stones of the Holy City, honey-colored blocks of limestone, which give a rosy tint to everything. It is not real, Jerusalem, but it is very real. From its streets have echoed shouts of "Hallelujah!" and "Hosanna!", but from them have also issued innumerable shots fired in anger. The City of Peace has known warfare for much of its four millennia of existence. It evinces too much passion and too little reason.
Nevertheless, it is Jerusalem, and it is the center of the world. Without it, there almost certainly would be little knowledge of God, or only the most rudimentary kind of knowledge. Jerusalem produces the best, and then destroys it; it nurtures the best, and then transforms it, turning it into new formations never previously dreamed.
"As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it." Jerusalem still elicits tears, both of inexpressible joy and of ill-defined sorrow. But it is --- forever --- Jerusalem.