“TEARS OF WATER AND BLOOD FROM HIS HEART”
Saint Luke 19: 41-48
10th Sunday After Trinity: 9 August Anno Domini 2015
Father Jay Watson SSP
Sins mocks and old Adam practices blasphemous sarcasm. Evil laughs—chortles like an inane defective.
You sin when you laugh in prideful condescension at others’ misfortune, missteps, and mistakes. This is because at the heart of your sinful nature you laugh at God and His commands. You practice a vaudevillian and sit-com laugh track to His demands for your obedience and compliance.
Yes you laugh at your neighbors pratfalls (schadenfreude) and at sexually impure humor and so-called “entertainment,” but your most damning laughter, that which drives nails back into Christ’s wrists, is when you laugh at the First Table of The Law as if it’s only suggestive and capable of being adjusted when your scheduling and desires conflict.
Do you just smile and chuckle if one were to “call you out” for not keeping The Lord’s Day Holy by attending Mass rather than opting for something else? Do you laugh when musicians, celebrities, comedians, and…well everybody you come into contact with…uses the Lord’s Holy Name in vain? And if you love The Lord above all things and trust only in Him, why do you worship the golden calves of family, country, and retirement funds? That laughter doubts Christ’s person and work as much as the laughter of the crowd in Jairus’ anteroom.
And for all your sinning, The Christ weeps. God cries when you jeer. The Lord forgives when you rail and rant with hatred and rage. Repent and believe.
Christ came to the city of Jerusalem. Christ always comes to seek and to save His own in every city, town, hamlet, village, house, and person. He comes to…and weeps over, the sin and unbelief which He finds. Repent and believe. The Prince of Peace comes to make you His New Jerusalem—His Church from “above,” i.e. His peculiar people that now have peace in His forgiving Blood, and Body—given and shed.
If one only laughs like an idiot in revelry and carnal partying than one won’t know what true peace and joy are. The sacrificial love and giving Grace of a true Man…an incarnate God/Man will me hid from their eyes. The unbelieving Jews rejected The Christ’s visitation. They did not believe that God was really present in the flesh, and in the Words of Jesus’ forgiveness…right there…for them!
The Devil tempts one to trust in oneself and not in Christ. The stronger you feel in your own capabilities the more you’re comfortable and prone to laughing at Godly Law. But you dear Saints are Jesus’ own family—blood of His Blood—and thus “in Him” you weep at your trespasses and cry out “Kyrie eleison.” You confess your sins in thought, word, and deed, and you crave His absolving Hand of Peace.
The pagans of 1st century Jerusalem had their earthly city and heathen temple destroyed by Roman pagans. They worshiped Moses and their own capabilities to either keep the Law. They laughed at Messiah and thus were not children of The Father but of Belial.
Jesus does the cleansing of polluted temples. Any structure which does not believe in Him and His sole propitiatory saving Blood must be overturned and driven out by His Law. He cleanses Jerusalem temples and seeks to purify all towns, parishes, and men of false teaching, profane and coarse laughter based on hatred of neighbor, and self-righteous hypocrisy.
Satan’s trench and war machinery will be used against all unbelievers. Satan will compass [them] on every side like a roaring hell-lion with demon wolves.
But Jesus speaks Gospel to you. Peace! I bring you my tears of Holy Baptism to bind you to me; to bring you into me. My tears wash away your dirt of sin and your stains of unrighteous laughter. “I shall wipe away all tears from your eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying.” [Rev. 21.4] Laugh with real forgiven joy because I give you the water of + life, to lubricate your own tear ducts for repentance and faith in Me.
Augsburgers, your enemies attacked Me. And in your place I was surrounded, bound fast, and cast onto a horrid tree of shameful pain. I was laid in the ground so that you might this day be called forward to My banquet table. You confess your own visitation dear brothers and sisters, for I have visited you and I visit you now.
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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