Monday 24th March 2025

As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it,  saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.  Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side.  They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.’

Reflection

Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, wildly acclaimed by crowds of disciples.  They are proclaiming peace in heaven, joyfully praising God.  But peace in heaven does not yet mean peace on earth – the inhabitants of Jerusalem have not caught the vision.  So as Jesus draws near, he laments – he sees the devastation that is in store for the city.   Keening in sorrow as if for the dead, he utters an oracle of woe in line with the prophets of Israel. His words to the inhabitants of Jerusalem are charged with emotion and helpless regret.

If only they had recognised that this was “the time of their visitation from God!” On that day, as Jesus approached the city, God was presenting them with the prospect of future well-being and peace.  But they were dull-sighted.   They had a reputation for killing prophets and Jesus, as we know, would face humiliation and judicial murder.  In the spiritual blindness of the city’s inhabitants, God’s offer was wasted – it was now “hidden from their eyes.”

Jesus saw this and he wept.  He could see the days of calamity that were to come. The rejection of “the things that make for peace” would have disastrous consequences.  The days would come when unspecified enemies would besiege, capture and destroy Jerusalem. The city’s inhabitants would be crushed with inexorable cruelty, its buildings razed to the ground. 

We don’t need too much imagination to recognise that such things are happening in our world today.  A world that is in need of the peace God offers; the peace that was proclaimed with joy by the Christmas angels on Jesus’s birth, and fleshed out by Jesus himself in the synagogue in Nazareth.  This is the peace we actively pray for in our own time, a peace that is sealed by the final revelation of God’s love on Easter Day.

Prayer

Merciful God,
your word pierces the blindness of our world,
and signals the dawn of peace and justice;
bring us to know our place
in the unfolding of your purposes,
and instil in our hearts
the wonder of your salvation.
through Jesus Christ your son, our saviour.
Amen