Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity
Audio File for the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 10, 2020
“He beheld the city and wept over it”
“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion,” the Psalmist says in a great and moving passage. A psalm of the exile, it captures vividly the sense of longing for what was and the difficulty of how to carry on in the face of loss. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” We cannot help but feel the pathos in the lines, the sense of remembering what was once deeply treasured and now seems utterly lost and gone. In another work of epic poetry, written by Virgil many centuries after the Psalms, Aeneas, ship-wrecked upon the Libyan shores of North Africa, comes to the great city of Carthage. He sees engraven upon the walls of Queen Dido’s palace the story of the destruction of Troy, from which he has fled to found the new Troy which will be Rome. “Is there,” he says to his comrade, Achates, “anywhere on earth that does not know the story of our troubles?” These are, he famously says, “the tears in the nature of things,” the human sorrows that touch our minds (Virgil, Aeneid, I. ll. 460-463). Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
These moving passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and pagan antiquity contrast and illuminate the lacrimae Christi, the tears of Christ. “He beheld the city and wept over it.” What follows is viewed as a prophecy about the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD by the Romans under Titus and recorded by the historian Josephus. No doubt, that event was the occasion for the tears of many in Israel.
What are his tears? In John’s Gospel, “Jesus wept” at the grave of Lazarus, his friend. He enters into our sorrows and sense of loss. His tears are tears of compassion. In the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, “when he saw her he had compassion on her,” we are told. His tears which precede the raising of Lazarus are tears of compassion, too, it seems. But is it so here in Luke’s account of his weeping over the city of Jerusalem? Why does he weep? Because “thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” It is a poignant statement, an indictment of Sion, of Jerusalem. Why? Because of our ignorance of what belongs to our truth. The Gospel here needs to be seen not only in terms of the Gradual Psalm but in the light of the Epistle.
