“PEACE THROUGH TEARS”
Saint Luke 19: 41-48
10th Sunday after Trinity: 5 August Anno Domini 2018
Father Jay Watson SSP
It’s not peace through strength. That’s the way of the sinful world and selfish heart. That’s why there are wars; why you can never kill enough enemies to finally be free of them; and why man’s ego loves a god of power and payback. The God/Man on the tree bleeding and suffering for you, has strength, oh to be sure, but He tells you that your peace is through tears. His tears. His sacred water, moisture, life, attached to Word, Wine, and yes, + Water.
What is the city which God cries over? The Lord made the world and He made all the people. His creations re-create when they build and construct cities and towns and villages. Eden was perfect but man’s cities are not. The Lord loves all of His creatures. The Lord loves Moscow, Tehran, Caracas, Paris, and Ho Chi Minh City every bit as much as He loves D.C., Chicago, Billings, or Kansas City. He loves all His Saints now and then.
But of all the places that ever were, it was Zion, the hills which were first inhabited by Canaanite tribes, later by Jebusites, and finally by the people of Judah commanded by King David, that God loved the most because there He anchored (planted) His Name. It was in Jerusalem that He attached His forgiveness to the altar, to the temple, to the blood of sacrificial animals—all for the forgiveness of the sins of His way-ward children. It was in Jerusalem that His Ark with the Law, was tabernacled. It was Jeru…SALEM, that is, the city of Peace! Peace as in one, oneness, with The Father—atonement. It was in the city of David, where even earthly peace, was achieved its full beauty under David’s son, Solomon—Shalom—i.e. Salem. It was the place that the 40-day old Christ was brought. The Virgin offered Him to be redeemed but without a lamb. He The Redeemer was the paschal lamb. He would teach in the Temple of Jerusalem, heal in the Temple of Jerusalem, and cast out money changers in the Temple of Jerusalem. The Temple was God’s city in the midst of the earthly Jerusalem. The place of God’s presence—His actual presence—for His sheep. His presence is in His Name—Jesus, and in His Work—forgiveness in the Word by way of The Blood and Water. The tears of God wash away your sins.
The opposite of Peace is war, strife, chaos, noise always noise. Your daily sinning throws fuel into Satan’s roaring fire of discord. To put out this, not forest fire, not wild-fires in several states, but this world-wide conflagration and your own burning fever of trespass…God weeps, God cries, God gives His Water of relief through absolution.
Yes, God wept at Adam’s fall, Abel’s death, and all the other tragic things which occurred to His Hebrew Saints of the First Covenant. But now in these latter days He speaks to you in His Son, Christ Jesus—Emmanuel. Now, with Incarnated Body and Blood forever more, He speaks, teaches, admonishes, forgives, loves, feeds, and washes with actual physical touch and presence. Through His Word and His Sacramental Word, Christ weeps for you, on you, and into you. In the Greek Evangels, Jesus weeps. He wept right before He resurrected Lazarus from the dead, He wept over Jerusalem, i.e. over the people who rejected Him and did not know that His visit to them, His Incarnated Visitation to the world, was God’s Redemption and Holiness unto life everlasting for all those receiving This Galilean Rabbi. And He wept at the death of His most blessed guardian Saint Joseph of Nazareth. Like the last example, Jesus without a doubt cried many more times. Of course He did…He was and IS MAN, in perfect Union with being GOD. He wept in pain, He teared up if sand blew into His eyes, and He wept in joy over the repentance of each and every one of you.
Unlike the false teaching sectarians who tend to spiritualize everything, which is also what your Old Adam does, because turning Jesus into a far-away coach, so that sinning becomes more easy, and your own heroic efforts to “do more and better” become your “trophy for participation,” we say No. Christ is present. Christ loves. Christ is earthy and gets down into the mud and muck and mire with you. He gets down into the 6-foot deep holes of all your pain and losses with you. Christ cries for you. Tears when you sin, yes, but joyous, Gracious tears when you repent and receive Him in His Word. You destroy the things for your peace. You sin. Sin destroys faith in a noisy, war-like cry of an ape. But the quiet, humble, and gentle Lamb of God comes to you, visits you (this morning) and makes for your Peace by giving you Peace to hear and to eat.
The only peace for the huge earthen embankments of war and bloodshed that the Roman army erected against the old Temple and old city, comes from the Holy embankment of Golgotha. Calvary’s Sacrificial Lamb overcomes the thunder and terror of Sinai. Not the two stone tables in the Ark, in The Temple, in the no-longer-there and never to be there again Jerusalem, but The Rock which the builders rejected—Christ’s very Body and Blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. The Son of God Rock which shed water for Moses and the Israelites in the desert of sinful life so that they would have their real thirst slaked! Jesus is your visitation. He, The Visitor with Life and Light is Peace enfleshed. Placed into your flesh you have The Peace which passes all understanding. The Tears of God from His eye-ducts, and most assuredly from His pierced, wounded, and bleeding side—straight into the font, the chalice, and the Scriptures.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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