This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, the Sunday before the crucifixion. Palm Sunday was the start of four days intensive of prophetic warning by Jesus to the Jewish nation and to Jerusalem.
Jesus began that Sunday by riding a donkey down the hill from Olivet into Jerusalem, declaring himself prophetically the King of Peace. However, he stopped half way down, with Jerusalem spread out before him, and, seemingly incongruously, prophesied the destruction of the city. It was a prophetic lament, spoken with tears. It was detailed; the city would be besieged and taken; not one stone would be left on another; the people, including children, would likewise be destroyed. For even as he rode the donkey it was rejecting his offer of peace.
The next day, Monday, Jesus cursed a fig tree that bore no fruit. It withered and died. The fig tree was the historic symbol of the nation, and Jesus was clearly enacting in stark parabolic manner what was to happen to a nation in which he could find no fruit. He followed this up by going on to cleanse the Temple, and with violence, saying it had become “a den of robbers”. In so doing, he was giving a foretaste of what was to come.
In the two or three days that followed Jesus would not allow this strong prophetic theme of judgement to rest. Using parables he spoke directly and at length with the rulers of the nation about their fate. In the parable of the tenants he told them about the tenants of a vineyard who refused to give the owner the fruit due to him, and who successively ill treated the owner’s servants and finally killed his son in order to get the vineyard for themselves. Consequently their end was to be destruction. It was abundantly clear to the rulers that the parable was directed at them. Jesus went on to pronounce seven lengthy and severe woes on the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, concluding with another lament for Jerusalem, “O Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets, how often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks but you were not willing. Look your house is left to you desolate”. Finally, in his “Apocalyptic Discourse” Jesus, gazing at the majestic Temple, the wonder of Jerusalem, prophesied that not one stone would be left standing on another.
All this should not be seen simply as a hard act of condemnation by Jesus, but rather as a persistent attempt to get the leaders to see the predicament that faced them and to repent. It was a last attempt to save the nation, an act of grace. The destruction had to come if the nation continued to reject him and the things that belonged to its peace. Jesus did not want that. Sadly the national leaders not merely rejected him, but crucified him. The destruction therefore came, exactly as Jesus prophesied, It came in AD 70 with a Roman siege and appalling destruction and loss of life. That is what judgement meant.
Thus Jesus towered over the nation as prophet to the nation in the last week of his earthly life. He was the Amos of his day, the Jeremiah of his own generation, and had the same message. There was reluctance and heartbreak in the message because judgement is an utterly devastating matter and not something God seeks. This truth of judgement seems almost obscured from our own generation – the reality and appalling nature of judgement. The awfulness of sin, the appalling consequences of rejecting God and his Christ, and the consequences of disdaining the peace-giving commandments of God are not registered very deeply by a self indulgent generation, even a consumer Christian generation. This message of the horror of judgement, however, was going to be brought to humanity even more deeply in the death of Jesus on the Friday of that same week.
For our generation the cross this Easter will be more important a meditation than ever. We cannot treat the things of God lightly, nor the awful fact of judgement – that is the message our own nation finds difficult to read.
Bob
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