“CHRIST’S VISITATION IS NOW”
Saint Luke 19. 41-48
The Tenth Sunday after Trinity: 12 August Anno Domini 2007
Fr Watson
Jerusalem means “city of Peace.” The only real peace is peace with God. This concord with the Lord is called “righteousness.” Jerusalem was the city of David, but it was more than one King’s legacy. The Holy Trinity had selected Jerusalem to be “the Place,” and “the Location” of His presence. Yes, God is omnipresent in power, but He chooses to be present in His “hands on” Grace where He chooses. The Lord’s Zion was in Jerusalem, specifically in the Temple, more specifically, in the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Testimony resided. Both Law and Gospel resided behind the huge curtain. In the golden box the Ten Commandments pulsed with the inflexible, uncompromising demands of a perfect creator. But covering the box, between the Cherubs, was the Mercy Seat. This covering (the “seat” the “lid”) was made holy by blood—the blood of sacrifice. Through the life, which is in the blood, the sins of Israel were atoned for and the Lord would “tabernacle” in a great cloud of incense and light over the ark.
No obedience by His people meant no peace, no righteousness, and no life. They were like you. They thought they did a pretty good job of obeying the text of the Law, yet they broke the Commandments every day in their hearts, if not in their words and deeds as well. You are like those Jews for you also do not Love God with all your heart; you do not love your neighbor as yourself. The Law must be kept. The “sentence” of death and hell, must be paid, for that is the penalty for destroying God’s perfect world and rebelling against the perfect Father.
You don’t keep peace. You are not “right” with God in and of yourselves. You don’t keep the Law and thus you should shed your blood, your life, and be sent outside the “Garden” for eternity.
But that does not happen to you. You pray that it will not happen to anyone living. You have been placed here in this earthly Jerusalem which is the Church Catholic so that you might have peace and have it abundantly.
You can’t shed blood for yourself that would do any good—you are guilty and soiled and deserve to shed blood to be sure—but your actions are not the perfect keeping of the Law nor the perfect sacrifice. Your blood is diseased and tainted. You certainly cannot atone for the sins of anyone else; a sinful world, past, present and future.
“And when He was come near…” writes the blessed Saint Luke. God comes to Jerusalem. God comes to His church. God came to them then, and to you now in your time. God does not come as the Avenger, the God of Power and Punishment; He comes in real flesh and blood to give the same; to give Himself; to give “Righteousness.” The blood of God came with the death of God, the Son. The last sacrificial Lamb was Jesus. And, although He knew was “Agnus Dei,” that was not why he wept over David’s city.
The Lord’s love is not abstract. Jesus loves in physical emotion and physicalHe cries. He cries for the same reason He did when Lazarus had died. The Lord’s humanity naturally reacts with His love for all. For God so loved the world. Jerusalem is not just that one city that was contained within the walls of stone on that day in the year 30 A.D., Jerusalem is the world of God’s creatures, all of whom He loved and died for. Jesus weeps over sin. Jesus weeps with true sadness over the misery, brokenness, pain and dying of His creatures. Jesus weeps with bitter pain over those who reject Him and His oversight.
This oversight of God is the “Bishopric” of Christ. Jesus is both your High-Priest and your High He is the Shepherd of Shepherds and the Bishop of your Souls. The Good Bishop cries because so many of the people (the sheep) of Jerusalem reject Him; then and now. And yet, this Water from God, this salt-moisture from God’s tear-ducts is the water of life. Only the work of Christ placed into the font in a Church makes the Water Holy. The Work of the Lord is His Word and vice-versa.
He weeps because He knows many will reject Him and His Gracious Salvation until they die. He weeps because He knows that His first Earthly Zion, the actual City of David, will be destroyed in the year 70 A.D. and that His tent of stone (the re-built Temple) will be pulled to the ground. He weeps because He loves His people and hears, sees, and feels their weeping; from the weeping of Abel’s blood all the way to your weeping and finally to the weeping of the last human ever to be born in sin.
The Lord has visited you. He once “visited” Elisabeth and the Baptizer. Both His physical Presence and His Word, “Gospelled” so beautifully in Mary’s Magnificat, caused the un-born John to leap in joy; in faith. John and his mother knew the time of their visitation; for them, the oversight of their Bishop had begun.
The Lord visited the city of Jerusalem for the last time in his public ministry that fateful day. For His visitation would not be only in Water but in Blood. After sobbing for the rejecting “sons of Belial” He made many “Sons of the Most High” by bleeding like a stuck lamb. As a picture of what He would do on the Cross, He entered the Temple, “made with Hands,” with His own Body, “The Temple not-made with hands,” begotten not made. He drove out all that was of man. He forced out self-righteous, work righteous, bartering, bargaining, earning, participatory, synergistic, cooperative man. He left God; Himself. Salvation is not achieved by commerce and industry and work and “you.” Salvation is won by Jesus on the Tree, and then given by Jesus through Scripture and Supper to you.
The cords which the Master used “as whips” to drive out mendacious merchants of “self,” would, in a far more severe form, be used on Him in several days to rip the flesh of God and to produce the flow of God’s red blood; all Jesus’ work and merit.
Come now and receive that same Body and that same Blood and know how much you are loved and pardoned. Your “visitation” is now. Rest in peace under the visitation; the “Bishopric” of the Bishop Christ Jesus.
In the Name of The Father and of The + Son and of The Holy Ghost