“THY VISITATION”
Saint Luke 19: 41-48
10th Sunday after Trinity: 20 August Anno Domini 2017
Father Jay Watson SSP
Though God is the God of the wilderness, the desert, even the God of the void and black nothingness of outer space, He is most surely the loving: creator, designer, and artist of beauty, order, coherence, harmony, and melody. The Lord is the Maker of form, of incarnate solid matter. In the beginning was The Word and The Word was with God and the Word was God. The Logos made all things visible and invisible. The Son of God created ex nihilo His epic masterpiece of life…and then Man—the sentient, reflective, communing pinnacle of life, in the image of The Blessed Trinity; in His image. Even had the “fall” never occurred man would have joyed in gregarious companionship. Man would have dwelt with man—in families, clans, parishes, villages, and cities.
Jesus is the Savior of man, not mankind (concrete not abstract)…that is of individuals whom He then places into His family. Jesus is not lost and needs not be found. He, The Shepherd comes to the lost. He comes to where they are. He comes to the city…to the cities of man.
He came to His own city, His own special and chosen city of Jerusalem. This city of Peace was unique and typological of His Own Body and Blood. And in it, for centuries He taught His people through His Prophets and Priests about the cleansing and forgiving power of blood when attached to His Word of absolution. The city of Solomon, of David, of even Abraham himself—Mount Moriah where a “substitute” for blood was given in place of Isaac. That city.
And He wept over it. It was their day of visitation, that is, the individual souls that were there, were again being visited by God. Many, most, rejected this gracious visit of forgiveness and life.
Until a person dies in the faith, in a state of Grace by virtue of God’s Grace given freely because of Jesus’ Law Keeping and Blood Atonement at Calvary for all that person’s sins…there will be visitations. The story of the Universe has been and will be The Lord visiting His creatures.
Every day is combat for a Christian. Every day is judgment day for non-Christians. The former are visited first by Law, insofar as the life in this mortal coil is “…poor, nasty, brutish, and short” due to the devil, the world, and sinful “old Adam” natures. There simply is: aging, disease, loss of loved ones, sorrows, setbacks, and tragedy. The wages of sin is death. But then, Christ visits those selfsame Christians and reminds them that they are Saints, that they belong to Him. That they are experiencing nothing that is uncommon to their fellow believers and that He Himself knows everything they’re feeling and dealing with because He bore all of it in His own sinless Body and carried it to the Tree to purge it away in pain and death—His suffering and sacrificial offering. He visits His own with Gospel; with proclamation of His love and forgiveness. That anointing of peace runs down your heads like precious olive oil, myrrh, cassia, a veritable spikenard of regenerating righteousness as your Baptismal garments are daily placed upon you by the Hands of Jesus and His visitation in The Word. He visits you this morning at His Holy Banquet Table where you are the honored Bride at this nuptial celebration. It is from His Holy Chalice and His Holy paten that you truly receive the only Peace that matters—His precious Body and His Sacred Blood.
These things are indeed “hid” from the eyes of the pagan, the rejecting. But they are as Saint Paul says in Romans 1 without excuse. And your own sinful nature is also without excuse for doubting.
Dr. Francis Pieper was correct. There are no atheists and there are no agnostics. Even the most stubborn rejection of the supernatural, the supra-natural, in deference to science, empiricism, and human logic and wisdom is itself a “Baal,” a deity, that is enshrined in the heart of the “educated” heathen. The day will come for those who reject Christ’s tears and open arms, and His breath of life…the day when the trench is not only cast “about” them but will open deep for them. Then the weeping will be theirs and theirs alone—for eternity and with gnashing of teeth.
But for you Brothers of The Nazarene, you have been rescued, REDEEMED, from Satan’s “den of thieves.” Jesus visits you today…now. His Peace to you + in washing. His Peace to you in absolution…I forgive you + in His Holy Name. His Peace to you in His Body and Blood. The weeping is over.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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