If You Had Only Known

Luke 19:41-44

February 22, 2023 (Ash Wednesday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

On the side of the Mount of Olives, along the traditional Palm Sunday route, is a small, tear-shaped chapel called Dominus Flevit. That’s Latin for “The Lord Wept,” and though this particular chapel was built in 1955, there is evidence on the property of this spot being a place of worship since at least the seventh century (Luker, An Illustrated Guide to the Holy Land, pgs. 112-113). This small chapel is one of my favorite places in Israel, party because of the view you have from that spot on the Mount of Olives—you can see Gethsemane, the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from here—but also because it represents such a tender moment in the life of Jesus. This chapel is meant to remind us of the passage we read tonight, of the moment when Jesus is preparing to enter the city amidst celebration and singing, but Jesus himself is not singing nor celebrating. Instead, Jesus is weeping. As he pauses to look at the city of Jerusalem, his heart breaks and he says, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes” (19:42). If you had only known what would bring peace. As he enters the city for one of the last times, Jesus shows his heart and his desire for Jerusalem: peace.

Tonight, we begin the 40-day journey we call Lent. For some of you, Lent may be a new idea, and you’re not quite sure what to make of it, especially this Ash Wednesday thing. Basically, Lent is a 40-day period of time that the ancient church set aside to prepare ourselves for Easter. As you’ll hear in a few moments, originally it was a time during which people who had committed serious sins would repent and prepare for their baptism on Easter. Today it’s sometimes treated either as a burden or a joke because we focus overly much on what we are supposed to “give up” for Lent. Usually that’s something like chocolate or social media. When I was in seminary, I tried to give up homework for Lent; my professors did not agree with me on that one. But whatever it is, when the forty days are over, we go right back to that thing we gave up. And that misses the point of the whole practice. It should be that if we give something up, it’s so that we can become more like Jesus. These forty days should not just be a test of endurance, to see if we can go that long without chocolate. They should be a time of shaping, molding, and drawing nearer to the Savior. So this year, during this Lenten season, you can give something up if you want to, but in worship we’re going to instead focus on taking something on—new practices that will shape us more into the likeness of Jesus. For the next several weeks, we’re going to focus on an aspect of Jesus’ last week that is often overlooked, but it’s something that seems to be key to not only understanding Jesus’ final days on earth but his very nature and character. During this season we’re going to walk very slowly through those last days, that Holy Week, and discover what it means to “Fight Like Jesus.” What was it Jesus was really fighting for during that week? And I think he tells us what that is during an event on Palm Sunday that even most of the commentaries gloss over. It’s when Jesus stops halfway down the Mount of Olives and weeps.

We’re going to look at this so-called triumphal entry more on this coming Sunday, but just for a moment let’s make sure we understand the context here and what’s going on around Jesus. Luke has told us that Jesus has joined a group of pilgrims who are going to Jerusalem for Passover. We don’t know how big the group was, and the movies usually picture it as a huge group, but it’s not enough to bring out the Roman soldiers, so apparently it wasn’t large enough to be perceived as a threat by the authorities. Jesus has borrowed a colt to ride on and as he made his way down the steep slope of the Mount of Olives, people began to not only sing psalms, they began to direct their signing toward him. “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” (19:38) is a quote from Psalm 118, but the choice to sing it at this moment is not an accident. Many of the people, probably spurred on by his own disciples, believe that Jesus is a fulfillment of this promise.

And while the Roman soldiers don’t seem to be around in force, the religious authorities are. Some Pharisees, the ultra-orthodox group among the Jews, come up to Jesus and ask him to tell the people to stop singing about him, to which Jesus replies, “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (19:40). And at that moment, Luke says, Jesus turns a corner and catches a glimpse of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, the city where God chose to put his name. Jerusalem, the city of prophets and kings. Jerusalem, the city Jesus loves. I still remember the first time I got a glimpse of the holy city, way back in 1995 on my first trip to the Holy Land. Like Jesus in this account, we had been to Jericho and came up what today is “the back way,” a narrow winding road through the Judean hills, and suddenly we came around a corner and there was the city, all spread out in front of us. Unlike Jesus, I didn’t weep, but then I didn’t have the burden of the city on my heart like he did. When Jesus sees the city, he is overwhelmed with the reality that what he came to bring, they have rejected.

What Jesus then sees in his mind’s eye is horrific. He describes it this way: “The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another…” (19:43-44). He is given a glimpse of what did, in fact, happen, some forty years after this moment, when the Roman general Titus utterly destroyed the city, tore the Temple down and literally left very few stones where they had been. That’s why the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall is so sacred to modern Jews; it’s the only thing left from the Temple, and it wasn’t even part of the actual Temple. It was part of the retaining wall that held up the platform on which the Temple stood, on which the Muslim Dome of the Rock stands today. No stone left on another is exactly what happened—you can still today see some of the results of that destruction to the south of the Temple Mount—and Jesus sees it all in a moment. which breaks his heart. He weeps over the city, but not so much because of the coming destruction. The destruction is only an outcome of a much deeper problem: “You did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you” (19:44). Or, as he said a moment before, they did not recognize what would bring them peace (19:42).

I wonder if maybe the reason we often rush past this image, this statement, is because we think we already know what Jesus means by “peace.” When we pray for peace for Ukraine, we are praying that the war would stop. When we pray for peace in a conflicted family situation, we’re praying that the people would get along, that they would stop fighting. When someone goes home to be with Jesus, sometimes we say they are “at peace,” and that usually means they’re not having to fight whatever disease or infirmity they had anymore. Every time we think of “peace,” we generally understand it to be an absence of conflict, the end of war, the end of fighting. Of course, as we know from world history and from our own personal history, that kind of “peace” never lasts very long. There is always another conflict right around the corner. So when angels ang at Jesus’ birth about him bringing “peace to those on whom his favor rests” (2:14), did they mean just a temporary absence of conflict? Did Jesus come to bring something that really doesn’t last?

Well, of course not, we might say, but the peace he came to bring will only happen at the end of time, when he returns and all wars finally come to an end. Yes, that is when we will get the “absence of war” peace, but if that’s what he was talking about here, why then did Jerusalem get punished for not recognizing something that hadn’t yet come? Maybe Jesus meant something different. As I’ve said often lately, while the Gospels are written in Greek, Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, a version of Hebrew, and he certainly thought in Hebrew ideas. His speech and his life are bathed in the Hebrew scriptures, and he was raised in an observant Jewish home. And in that home and in that culture he would have learned the word shalom. We often translate that as “peace,” but in reality it means a whole lot more than just the absence of conflict. To wish someone shalom is to wish them harmony, health, and wholeness in every aspect of their life. “Shalom exists when all our relationships are flourishing: our relationship with God, with each other, with creation, and even with ourselves. It is the state in which everything is as it ought to be, as God intends it to be” (Porterfield, Fight Like Jesus, pg. 24). True shalom encompasses all of life, “and it can never coexist with injustice” (Porterfield 24-25). And it’s that vision and hope of peace that, I believe, is on Jesus’ mind as he weeps over Jerusalem and as he heads into that final week.

But that shalom is not possible for people who have rejected God (cf. Bock, Luke [IVPNTC], pg. 314). Jesus says to Jerusalem, “You did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you” (19:44). And because they didn’t recognize it when he came, “now it is hidden from your eyes” (19:42). Destruction is coming (cf. Bock 314). That’s a pretty heartbreaking statement, a sad pronouncement. No wonder Jesus is weeping! It’s God’s arrival in the person of Jesus Christ that brings true shalom, and if we miss that, if we miss him, we miss the peace that only the Prince of Peace can bring (cf. Isaiah 9:6).

Are we in danger of missing it again, missing him again? In Jesus’ world, there were many different factions, groups in religious and political life who couldn’t get along. The Pharisees were the lawkeepers, making sure everyone followed the letter of God’s law. The Sadducees were more likely to go along with Rome so as not to get anyone upset, to make sure their position and power were protected. The Essenes thought everyone was corrupt and so they set up a community out in the desert and waited for the end to come. Meanwhile, politicians were scheming and trying to get ahead, to be noticed by the emperor, and most of them saw an assignment to Judea as either a punishment or a short-term stepping stone to a better placement. They were so busy fighting for their place in the world and each of them were so sure that their viewpoint was the right one (and all the others were wrong) that they couldn’t see “the time of God’s coming” to them (cf. 19:44). I’m so glad we don’t live in a world like that, aren’t you? Of course you know I’m being sarcastic. We, too, live in a world where politics is a world of protecting power, of trying to get more power, and of being so certain that you are right that you can’t even listen to another viewpoint. And God’s people don’t even get along. We argue online and offline about whose viewpoint is the most “Biblical” and when we disagree, we label the others as heretics or worse. Two weeks ago, a spiritual awakening broke out at Asbury University and it wasn’t long before people on social media were picking it apart and arguing about whether it was genuine or not. We can’t even agree on what’s a move of God and what isn’t. Jesus described his world this way: “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel…You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence” (Matthew 23:24-25). I wonder what he would say to our world? We’re so busy being right and making sure others are wrong—even or maybe especially our brothers and sisters in Christ—that we can miss “the time of God’s coming” to us.

Into that world (theirs and, I believe, ours), where battle lines have been drawn and everyone is an enemy, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). He had taught that lesson all of his life, and yet at the end of this Holy Week, the most violent things will be done to him by people who have likely heard him teaching off and on for the last three years. I have had people over the years tell me they don’t like the violence of Holy Week; they prefer to go from the celebration of Palm Sunday to the even greater celebration of Easter. And my usual response is we can’t understand Easter if we don’t go through Holy Week. The triumph of the empty tomb is made even greater by the willing surrender of the peacemaker. He triumphed over the violence of the world by going through it and coming out the other side triumphant (cf. Porterfield 22). And so Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, and over America, and over Terre Haute. “If you, even you, had only known what would bring you peace…” (19:42).

So we come to this night, to Ash Wednesday, to a night where we allow ourselves to be marked by ashes as a sign of our mortality, as a sign of our sinfulness. Tonight we will be marked by ashes in the sign of the cross. Tonight by coming forward, we are committing to be followers of the one who is the Prince of Peace promised by the prophet Isaiah. We are marked by ashes as a sign that we want to die to who we are and emerge as someone shaped by Jesus. The imposition of ashes tonight should remind us of Paul’s word: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). “For he himself is our peace…His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross…” (Ephesians 2:14-16). Tonight, will we follow the Prince of Shalom? Will we seek to be people of peace?

In just a few moments, we’re going to sing a new song, a song of confession and a prayer for God to have mercy on us. It’s a good way to start the Lenten season, this season when we want to become more like Jesus. I recognize this is not the Jesus we usually focus on. It may not even be the Jesus we like to look at. But it is the Jesus who is. While others were celebrating and singing on that first Palm Sunday, anyone who looked over at Jesus would have seen that, as he entered the city he loved, he was still wiping tears from his eyes (cf. Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 216). Tonight reminds us that being like Jesus might require a broken heart and some tears on our part as well.