Why Christ wept over Jerusalem in Holy Week
It was not too late for them to repent – nor is it too late for us.
It was not too late for them to repent – nor is it too late for us.
Editor’s Notes
The following part of Our Lord’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is read on the 9th Sunday after Pentecost.
It was previously published as part of the chapter on Palm Sunday.
The passage from St Luke’s Gospel also includes the cleansing of the Temple, which Fr Coleridge explains happened on the following day – being associated with Our Lord’s cursing of the Fig Tree. We will provide Coleridge’s chapter on the most unusual of Our Lord’s miracles separately.
Finally, we provide below Fr Peter Gallwey SJ’s brief comment on Our Lord’s lament over Jerusalem, taken from The Watches of the Sacred Passion, Vol. I.
“Thy enemies shall compass thee round and beat thee flat to the ground, because thou hast not known the day of thy visitation. All that happened at the taking of Jerusalem, though so appalling, is as nothing to what shall go on in the everlasting prison-house of Hell. The Christian, the child of Heaven, deliberately renounces his birthright and his God, and chooses Satan for his master, and now has what he has chosen. He is in the hands of Lucifer and his fallen angels.
“Thy enemies, lost child of God, shall compass thee round and beat thee flat to the ground, because thou hast not known the day of thy visitation, thy day of privilege, when salvation was easy, when the Mother of God and ten thousand saints and angels were ever ready to pray for thee; when thou couldst have had forgiveness by saying from thy heart the one word, “peccavi”. Alas! alas! The serpent deceived me.”1
In this Part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ’s lament reveals both His sorrow and the justice of divine retribution.
That sin’s blindness invites judgment, but still stirs compassion in the Heart of Christ.
Why His tears are shed not for Himself, but for Jerusalem’s refusal of grace.
He shows us that God delays vengeance in hope of repentance, but will not delay forever.
The Procession of Palms
Passiontide, Part I, Chapter II
St. Matt. xxi. 14-17; St. Mark xi. 1-11; St. Luke xix. 29-44; St. John xii. 12-18.
Story of the Gospels, § 132
Burns and Oates, London, 1889
Headings and some line breaks added.
Sung on the 9th Sunday after Pentecost
Our Lord casts reserve aside and enters Jerusalem as Christ the King
What was it about Palm Sunday that most surprised the Pharisees?
Being 'lifted up' on the Cross was Christ's glory and desire
View of Jerusalem
It will naturally occur to us how aptly the thoughts which are suggested by these words of our Lord, concerning the stones crying out, harmonize with those others which were used to the proud and ungrateful Jews at the beginning of the Gospel, when St. John told them not to build on the fact that they had Abraham to their father, because God was able of those stones to raise up children unto Abraham.
They also prepare very beautifully for the incident of which we are next told by the same compassionate Evangelist who has preserved the words of our Lord on which we have been dwelling.
The remarks of the Pharisees in criticism on the enthusiasm of the disciples with which these Pharisees found so much fault, must have put before our Lord’s mind the whole history, as has been said, of the treatment which He had received from the authorities of the holy nation, and this would naturally suggest the mournful thought of the retribution which was to fall on them in consequence. Their neglect and coldness was soon to appear to all the world ripened into the blackest hostility, and at last into the crime of His murder, which was to bring on the nation and city a temporal chastisement, such as the world has never heard of before or since that time.
Just at that point of the procession which was moving on to Jerusalem, we are told that a turn of the road round one of the shoulders of the Mount of Olives, spread before the eyes of our Lord the sight of the beautiful city itself in all its magnificence, bathed in the warm glow of the afternoon sun. Jerusalem had never been more glorious to outward show than at that time of her history, when the restorations of the Temple by Herod had lately been completed with great splendour. It lay there before our Lord, with all its towers and pinnacles, its golden roof and marble porticoes, hiding all the sin and ingratitude that had been, and the far greater sin that was to be accomplished within so short a number of days, in the blaze of its splendour, as if angels had built its walls and none but saints had thronged its courts.
Could anything be more worthy of the majesty of Him for Whom it was built? Alas! the show was fair indeed, and there were no longer the outward abominations of idolatry in the Temple and the city which had been shown in the vision to Ezechiel.
‘Every form of creeping things and of living creatures, the abominations and all the idols of the house of Israel painted on the wall round about… seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel that stood before the pictures, and every one a censer in his hand, and a cloud of smoke that went up from the incense… and women sat there mourning for Adonis… and five and twenty men having their backs towards the Temple of the Lord and their faces to the east, and they adored towards the rising of the sun.’2
Those visible abominations were done away after the great chastisement of the Captivity, but what were they in comparison to the guilt of the murder of the Incarnate Son of God, which was already accomplished in the hearts of the Chief Priests, and in which the very people that were now crying Hosanna were so soon to claim their part in the fearful cry, ‘His Blood be on us and on our children?’
Our Lord weeping
And when He drew near, seeing the city, He wept over it, saying:
‘If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy day, the things that are to thy peace, but now they are hidden from thy eyes! For the days shall come upon thee, and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee and compass thee round and straiten thee on every side, and beat thee flat to the ground and thy children who are in thee, and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone, because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.’
The words of our Lord breathe all the mercifulness and compassionateness of His Sacred Heart. Mere human feeling might have prompted some recrimination, some expression of satisfaction at the revenge which they were heaping up for themselves, by their crimes against Him, some denunciation of just punishment and the like. Or He might have dwelt on His own great torments, which were more immediately future than the long-delayed vengeance which was to be meted out to them in the justice of God.
Instead of these feelings, He has only tears for the calamities of the people. The image before His mind is that of the miserable city fallen into the hands of her enemies, the trench dug round her, the wall beaten down, and the devastation so complete that not a stone is left upon a stone. He is silent about their cruelties to Himself, and even about their ingratitude to God, and He attributes their evil fate not so much to sin as to ignorance—‘because thou hast not known the day time of thy visitation.’ It is like His first word from the Cross, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,’ and it anticipates the strain of compassionateness which is uniformly observed, even in the reproaches of the Apostles after the Day of Pentecost, when they dwell on the ignorance of the people and of their rulers, at the same time that they reproach them with their murder of our Lord.
We should remember that, in the eyes of God, there is always this side in all human sin, although at the same time the guilt remains and the punishment is exacted—the ignorance of the enormity and the partial though still culpable blindness of the sinner. It is this latter which forces God, as we are so often told, to withdraw more and more of the light which has been neglected or misused, and which is called at one time His hardening of the heart, and another the wilful hardening of the heart on their own part.
When Holy Scripture speaks of the justice of God, it is the sinner that hardens his heart and turns away from light. When it speaks of the misery and affliction of the sinner, it is the ignorance and blindness which make him so great an enemy to himself, and the worker out of his own destruction without fully knowing what he does. And our Lord’s words imply the truth of the long-suffering and patient mercy of God, Who waits so long to see if men will even at the last moment recognize His gracious visitation and allow themselves to be saved by Him.
For it seems to be signified that, even then, it was not too late for the wicked city to find peace and salvation from Him, and also that there is a last limit to His forbearance, a moment when the cup is at last filled to the brim and will indeed overflow in vengeance, because the measure of sin is consummated.
Entrance into the city
‘And when He was come in to Jerusalem the whole city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the people said, This is Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth in Galilee.’
They had used language far higher concerning Him when they had sung their hosannas about the Son of David, the King that cometh in the name of the Lord, and the like. Then they were carried away by a Divine impulse and scarcely measured their words or knew what they were saying. Now they estimate His greatness more modestly, and are content with the simple statement, which was true indeed, but also far short of the truth. St. Mark tells us that:
‘He entered into Jerusalem to the Temple, and having viewed all things round about, when now the eventide was come, He went out to Bethania with the Twelve.’
St. Matthew, who writes more concisely here, and gives an historical summary of the events rather according to their importance than according to the order of time, places immediately after the entrance into the Temple the cleansing of the same Temple by our Lord. But it seems clear enough, from the accounts of St. Mark and St. Luke, that it was not on this day of His solemn entry into Jerusalem and the Temple that the cleansing took place. It appears to have been on the afternoon of the day after His arrival at Bethany that the Procession of Palms was made, and that the Temple was purged on the following day.
Our Lord was now occupied on a Divine act, that of presenting Himself to His Eternal Father as the Lamb of the great Sacrifice, the true Pasch, which was to be separated and put aside so as to be kept for four days before the actual Sacrifice.
End of Part V of our Passiontide and Holy Week focus on the Triumphal Entry.
In the next part, we see Christ rebuking his enemies again for their churlishness towards the children singing his praises.
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The Procession of Palms
Our Lord casts reserve aside and enters Jerusalem as Christ the King
What was it about Palm Sunday that most surprised the Pharisees?
Being 'lifted up' on the Cross was Christ's glory and desire
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Fr Peter Gallwey SJ, The Watches of the Sacred Passion, Vol. I, pp 159-160.
Ezechiel viii. 10-16.