Trinity 10

Text: Lk 19:41-48

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Now as He drew near, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “if you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” Then He went into the temple and began to drive out those who bought and sold in it, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house is a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’” And He was teaching daily in the temple. But the chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people sought to destroy Him, and were unable to do anything; for all the people were very attentive to hear Him.

This is our text. Let us pray: Dear Father in heaven, you call your church to be faithful. Faithful to your word. Faithful in our use and administration of the means of grace. In the fierceness of your wrath, you punish faithlessness, but in the depths of your mercy you bless faithfulness. Grant us your Spirit, that He might fill our hearts with the trust, humility, and courage to faithfully steward the spiritual treasures you have given us. To you be the glory in the Church by the power of the Spirit through Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.

God demands faithfulness. Because He demands faithfulness, He punishes faithlessness. Our Gospel shows us Jesus’ sorrow and anger over Israel’s faithlessness. He prophecies of their impending punishment. As He says, “The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side; and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave you one stone upon another.” And then He foreshadows their punishment by driving out the buyers and sellers in the temple.

Israel was the Old Testament church. They were to be a nation of priests to their God and His witness among all nations. God entrusted the Old Testament Church with spiritual treasures. He gave them the Law. He gave them the temple with its sacrifices and festivals. He gave them the prophecies of the coming Messiah. The Law testified to man’s deep sinfulness, but the temple through its sacrifices and festivals and worship testified to His grace. The prophecies foretold the final great deliverance He would show His people and all nations. Even as the Law showed man’s sinfulness and revealed God’s holy wrath and condemned all flesh as unholy, defiled, and guilty before the Most High and therefore deserving of death, so also the temple sacrifices and feasts and the prophecies declared God’s mercy toward sinners. They declared that in His mercy God would make peace with sinners. He would reconcile them to Himself and He would do so through sacrificing an innocent, unblemished, holy victim offered in their place for their sins. This sacrifice would make full propitiation for sin and thereby end God’s wrath over sin. This sacrifice would make atonement. It would truly reconcile God and man. It would bring peace.

What wonderful spiritual treasures were entrusted to Israel by God. He wanted them to faithfully steward these spiritual treasures. He wanted them to use them, to teach about them, to glory in them. But Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and clears out the temple because the leaders of the people and much of the nation hadn’t been faithful. Oh, certainly they kept the outward form, but they had forgotten the true meaning and significance of what God gave them. As Jesus says, they didn’t know the things that make for peace. They didn’t understand the point of the sacrifices and feasts. They couldn’t make heads or tails of the prophecies. And so they didn’t welcome the Messiah, the one who truly makes for peace between God and man, when He appeared in their midst. They had become proud. They thought they knew better. Their sinful hearts deceived them. They thought that they could keep the Law without sin. They imagined that the works of the Law and their own traditions—rules about the Sabbath, tithing dill and mint, eating with washed hands—made for peace with God.

They forgot the true things that made for peace—altar and offering and blood—and so became faithless. They were blind to their foolishness and took no correction from Jesus. In fact, in their blindness they killed Jesus and were oblivious to the fact that His death was the offering, His cross the altar, His blood the peace. They were faithless. And so they were destroyed. God gave them a period of forty years in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ was preached in their midst. Many believed and repented and joined the church, but many more hardened themselves in their unbelief. And so God gave them over to their own stubborn hearts, to walk in their own foolish ways. In the height of folly, they rebelled against the Romans. They were blind to the reality that it was doomed to fail. The Christians fled Jerusalem, but the unbelieving Jews stayed in Jerusalem. True to Jesus’ words, they were then surrounded by their enemies, the Romans, and were destroyed. Not one stone of the temple was left upon another. Most were killed or sold into slavery. God punished them for their faithlessness.

Their punishment serves as a warning to us, the New Testament Church. God has entrusted us with the spiritual treasures of the New Testament—Baptism, the Gospel, and the Lord’s Supper. These proclaim and deliver the things that make for peace between God and men—Christ’s atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. They are our precious treasures we must steward faithfully. We must use them as they have been instituted by Jesus and we must teach their meaning.

We must not be faithless. We must not as Israel of old become proud and imagine that we are not so sinful after all and so we do not need the things that make for peace. We must not imagine that our own works, efforts, or good intentions can make peace between God and us. We must not tire of the things that make for our peace but proclaim them again and again.

And yet many churches today do not care about the things that make for peace. They don’t talk about sin, and they don’t talk about forgiveness. They are instead faithless. On one side, lots of churches in our country only want to preach about climate justice and pride parades, while on the other side, they only want to preach about Israeli politics and wars in the Middle East. But where is the sinner’s poor, miserable, lost condition in such preaching? Where is the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross? Where is the baptism for the remission of sins? Where is the Gospel declaring the forgiveness of sins? Where is the Lord’s Supper as a pledge and seal of that forgiveness? Nowhere. They do not care about the things that make for peace and thus they are faithless. Which means that God will punish them, either in this life or on the last day.

God preserve us all! May He grant that the church be faithful not faithless. He demands faithfulness. He warns against faithlessness and punishes it in the end. But here’s the flipside of that: He demands faithfulness and also blesses faithfulness. He wants us to be faithful and so He helps us be faithful and blesses the church when we are faithful. He blesses us now in this life, giving the Holy Spirit, granting us His mercy, guiding all our ways, and He will bless us in eternity with the crown of glory, with a heavenly city, with the tree of life, and with Himself forever.

That should motivate us to be faithful. In humility, we never take it upon ourselves to change what God has instituted. But we keep the things that make for peace front and center, right where God has placed them. Thus, we preach that all men are sinners under God’s wrath. That includes you. No one can make peace with God on his own. You cannot. But try as you might if you stand on your own before God your conscience will condemn you for your unbelief, for your lack of fear toward God, for your failure to pray as ought, for your inability to honor Him with all you do and say, for your disrespect to others, for your envy, hatred, and jealousies, for your lust, for your greediness, for your slanderous tongue, for your judgmental heart, for your covetousness eye. Then there will be no peace for you. You will stand condemned.

That is what we preach. On your own you are a sinner. You are not at peace with God. But we preach that you do not stand on your own before God’s throne, you do not seek peace with Him on your own, but there lies before that throne the things that truly make for peace, an altar and a victim given in eternal and perfect sacrifice—Jesus Christ shedding His blood on the cross for all men and for you and your every sin. We preach that the peace with God that sacrifice has made is yours in the baptism you received for the remission of sins. It is yours when you believe the preaching of the Gospel. It is yours when eat of that sacrifice in the holy communion.

This is faithfulness before our God—to proclaim repentance and the remission of sins in Jesus Christ given in baptism, the Gospel, and the Supper. So where the Church practices these things, believes these things, honors these things, uses these things, spreads these things, rejoices in these things and give thanks for these things, there the church will be blessed by God. That doesn’t mean the world will care. That doesn’t mean we won’t face struggle with the world, indifference from the world, and the ridicule of the world. But if we know God is pleased with us, if we know we enjoy His blessing, then who cares? God will bless the faithful church, often in ways we can’t see in the moment. And He will certainly bless the faithful church in eternity beyond all we can hope for. So let us not be faithless but faithful to one who demands our faithfulness and by Him and in Him we will be ever blessed.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.