And when He drew near and saw the city He wept over it, saying "Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes". (Luke 19:41-42)

The gospel proper this morning is one of a series in which Jesus explains why the Jews were going to reject Jesus as the Messiah and why the Old Covenant with the Jews was being supplanted by the New Covenant in which the Church would be the New Israel.

Two weeks ago we read about the inability of a corrupt tree to bring forth good fruit. Last Sunday we read the story of the two brothers, one the so-called prodigal son, who represents the Gentiles, and the other, the older son who represents the Jews. This morning we have Christ fore-telling the destruction of Jerusalem, which is paralleled in Mathew's gospel as well.

From the time of Abraham, who meets Melchezidek, the king and high priest of Salem, site of the future city, Jerusalem figures greatly in the story of God's dealings with his people. The name Jerusalem literally means "city of peace." "Salem" in Jerusalem is a form of the word "Shalom," "peace." So there is clearly sad irony in Jesus' words when He says, "If you had known, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!" The Prince of Peace had come to them. But the city of peace did not recognize or receive Him.

And so, in the gospel this morning, Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem for the last time before His death. He looks down on the city and weeps. Jesus does not seem angry, but sorrowful. He cries the way a parent cries who sees that his child has gone terribly wrong. He weeps as a husband or wife would weep over a spouse who has rejected him for another. He weeps out of love because the very chosen people of God are rejecting Him. I believe that Jesus weeps here both as God and man. Not only did He take on our flesh and blood but also our soul and spirit and mind and emotions. His heart aches when His people turn away from Him.

Jesus is saddened by a knowledge of over what is going to happen to the Jews. In the year 70 A.D., just forty years after this Gospel, Jerusalem will be sacked and utterly destroyed by the Romans after a rebellion against the Roman Empire. According to ancient historians, over one million Jews were killed. The weak and young were all put to the sword. The young and strong were carried off into bondage and made slaves. The great temple was profaned. The Romans sacrificed a pig on the altar and, mocked God by burning pig fat as a profane offering. After slaying the temple priesthood, the pulled down the walls of the temple. Only the so-called wailing wall remains to this day.

The church fathers saw this as the judgment of God. The Roman legions were His instruments in executing the sentence. Israel had rejected the Messiah, the Prince of Peace and set off on a course of violent rebellion which culminated in the utter ruin of the Jewish people. God allowed them in their free will, to become the people they wanted to be. They did not know the time of their visitation. God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, visited them and walked among them. It was their day, and they willfully rejected it.

Let us not think the Jews were not religious. St. Paul says in the Epistle, "I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they, being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God" in Christ. They were passionate for God, but they tried to justify themselves before God on the basis of righteousness under the Law. They foolishly trusted in a self-constructed legalistic system, which perverted the Law and closed off any reliance on grace. As a result they ended up rejecting the very one their Law prophesied. All their religious passion was misguided and misdirected.

Salvation had to be much more complicated that the message of this lowly rabbi, Jesus. In fact it offended them to think that's how God would visit them. They stumbled at this stumbling stone of the Gospel, and so the stones of the temple and the city were demolished around them. Their lives were taken from them.

This is a clear and sobering call to repentance for you still today. For it shows that God's judgment is real and is nothing to be trifled with. What happened to the Jews in Jerusalem in the 1st century is a miniature picture of the choice which confronts every human being. What happened to Jerusalem is what scripture teaches awaits the unbelieving world on judgment day.

Do we rely on our own works, our own righteousness and obedience to get to heaven, or do we rely on Jesus Christ? Is our religion is like the false, man-centered religion of the 1st century Jews? Do we look for God primarily in "signs and wonders?" or do we accept Christ on faith? Do we model our lives on the Word of God or on the dictates of the culture? Is worship something sacred and holy to us, or is it "ho-hum" and something we do when we have nothing better to do?

It these weaknesses rule our lives we are like the Jews, who did not know the time of their visitation. Ever since it ceased to be a capital crime to be a professed Christian there have been those who come into the Church who are not truly committed to the cause of Christ. There have always been those who neglect worship, preaching and the sacraments. Such individuals are effectively missing the hour of their visitation.

Those who think that God somehow owes them financial success or who use the church for financial gain are themselves financially are like those who bought and sold in the temple. They are missing the hour of their visitation.

Christ alone is the source of peace. Christ comes to us in the proclamation of the Word, in water of Baptism and in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He is the One who brings reconciliation between the sinner and God. It is Christ and Christ alone who gives the peace that passes all understanding.

To every person who lives, Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit says: "this is your day, the day of your visitation", as it is written, "Behold, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation."

Scripture also says "Behold I stand at the door and knock" This is the moment in which Christ is coming to you in His Gospel, knocking at the heart's door. He promises to dwell in the hearts of all who will let Him in. For our Lord has cleansed the temple. When Jesus drove out the moneychangers and those who bought and sold in the temple, it was a sign of what He was about to do on the cross of Calvary. For there on the cross Jesus Himself experienced the righteous anger of God against the world's sin and drove it out in the temple of His body. Jesus made Himself unclean in our place. He took all of the greed and the self-righteousness and the callousness and every other sin and made it His own. St. Paul writes that He who knew no sin became as sin for us.

Jesus had said of His body, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." Though the temple in Jerusalem remains destroyed, Jesus could not remain in the grave. He is now bodily raised in everlasting glory and honor, the new and eternal dwelling place of God for you. Jesus is the true temple. Christ is your temple. The risen body of Christ is full of holiness and righteousness and cleansing. When we are baptized into Him, those things are also ours. We, the whole Church, are now the body of Christ. And therefore each of us individually, and the whole Church collectively are the temple of Christ's Spirit, who dwells in us through faith by grace. We are safe from divine judgment because Christ has paid the price for us.

"If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!" This is one of the saddest passages of the bible ! To reject the time of divine visitation is to reject God's offering of his only Son, Jesus Christ, offered up for the forgiveness of sins, for our peace, for our rest, for restoration and reconciliation to the Father.

May each of us be given grace to hear the Gospel, and to place our trust in Christ alone and not in ourselves, that by God's grace we may live by faith in this life and dwell eternally in the new Jerusalem above in the life to come.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN