Hi All
This might seem a bit of an odd thing to share as we head into the Passion and the death.
I just find this reading of the Gospel so appropriate: Jesus wept.
Also there is Psalm 137 - By The Rivers Of Babylon.
I've put my thoughts together on my site here: Daily Bible Verses | Jesus Weeps Over Jerusalem | Jesus Wept Meaning He Prayed For The Loss And The Futility | Jesus Wept | King James Audio Bible KJV – Listen To the Bible! | King James Audio Bible | KJV | King James Version
Basically, it is with a thought of the terror that is to come to the people of Jerusalem - because the empire.
This is the reflection - here it is:
Jesus is so very sorry for a city and a people he loves that he must weep at the sight of Jerusalem. Here is the centre of Jewish faith, while the Jews are the people to whom he has directed most of his teaching, and they are the first chosen people of God.
There is such tragedy here. Peace could be so very attainable, if only they knew and could accept the ways of living at peace, but they cannot. Nor are they alive to presence of Jesus among them. It seems inevitable: just as prophets of old were rejected, so too will Jesus be.
Jesus foretells the Jewish revolt and the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem. He has tried to instil in his Jewish listeners an ethos of peace and humility, together with an entirely new notion of the Kingdom of God. He has taught an end to pride and sectarian rivalries. He has told his listeners to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God’s what is God’s – a kind of separation of church and state, of the religious from the secular.
The memory of the Maccabean revolt has, though, lingered in Jewish consciousness, and pride renders the Roman subjection intolerable. Some Jews are going to rebel. There will be infighting, the rebellion will be crushed, and the Temple razed, never to be rebuilt, and there will be great bloodshed. The Jewish faith will be forced to change, to reconstruct itself in new ways, and Christianity also will be affected: while the Christians actually flee Jerusalem during the rebellion, the loss of the Temple marks a diminishing of Jewish Christianity – of the church first led in Jerusalem by James the brother of Jesus – such that henceforth a Pauline Christianity will predominate, including converts of the diaspora but also strongly geared to Gentiles.
Christ’s is an emotional, human response to this great tangle of history. We might find ourselves alerted in these verses to just why it is that Christ’s offering of himself as the sacrificial lamb must be here in Jerusalem. It seems the whole of salvation history is gathered together here at this nexus point. It seems good also, that rising above the upheaval, there is the overarching figure of the cross, victorious, all-conquering, eternal.
BY the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. (Psalm 137)
This might seem a bit of an odd thing to share as we head into the Passion and the death.
I just find this reading of the Gospel so appropriate: Jesus wept.
Also there is Psalm 137 - By The Rivers Of Babylon.
I've put my thoughts together on my site here: Daily Bible Verses | Jesus Weeps Over Jerusalem | Jesus Wept Meaning He Prayed For The Loss And The Futility | Jesus Wept | King James Audio Bible KJV – Listen To the Bible! | King James Audio Bible | KJV | King James Version
Basically, it is with a thought of the terror that is to come to the people of Jerusalem - because the empire.
This is the reflection - here it is:
Jesus is so very sorry for a city and a people he loves that he must weep at the sight of Jerusalem. Here is the centre of Jewish faith, while the Jews are the people to whom he has directed most of his teaching, and they are the first chosen people of God.
There is such tragedy here. Peace could be so very attainable, if only they knew and could accept the ways of living at peace, but they cannot. Nor are they alive to presence of Jesus among them. It seems inevitable: just as prophets of old were rejected, so too will Jesus be.
Jesus foretells the Jewish revolt and the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem. He has tried to instil in his Jewish listeners an ethos of peace and humility, together with an entirely new notion of the Kingdom of God. He has taught an end to pride and sectarian rivalries. He has told his listeners to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God’s what is God’s – a kind of separation of church and state, of the religious from the secular.
The memory of the Maccabean revolt has, though, lingered in Jewish consciousness, and pride renders the Roman subjection intolerable. Some Jews are going to rebel. There will be infighting, the rebellion will be crushed, and the Temple razed, never to be rebuilt, and there will be great bloodshed. The Jewish faith will be forced to change, to reconstruct itself in new ways, and Christianity also will be affected: while the Christians actually flee Jerusalem during the rebellion, the loss of the Temple marks a diminishing of Jewish Christianity – of the church first led in Jerusalem by James the brother of Jesus – such that henceforth a Pauline Christianity will predominate, including converts of the diaspora but also strongly geared to Gentiles.
Christ’s is an emotional, human response to this great tangle of history. We might find ourselves alerted in these verses to just why it is that Christ’s offering of himself as the sacrificial lamb must be here in Jerusalem. It seems the whole of salvation history is gathered together here at this nexus point. It seems good also, that rising above the upheaval, there is the overarching figure of the cross, victorious, all-conquering, eternal.
BY the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. (Psalm 137)