Day: August 21, 2022

“He beheld the city, and wept over it”

“Jesus wept,” in sorrow for his friend, Lazarus, John tells us in his Gospel (Jn. 11. 35). It is sometimes said to be the shortest verse in the Scriptures and a phrase used colloquially to express a sense of sorrow and regret at something particularly sad and unfortunate. Here Luke, the Church’s spiritual director especially in the Trinity season, tells us about Jesus coming near and beholding the city of Jerusalem and weeping over it. Why does Jesus weep?

“Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation,” Jesus says. We are ignorant, it seems, “concerning spiritual gifts,” as Paul puts it in the Epistle and thus to the nature of our lives in community and in communion with God and with one another. What follows is equally important: the difficult scene of Christ’s cleansing of the temple, “cast[ing[ out them that sold therein and them that bought,” upbraiding them and us for the misuse of the house of prayer, “mak[ing[ it a den of thieves.” Why? So as to re-establish its proper use. “And he taught daily in the temple.” Prayer and teaching go together; they are about the pilgrimage of our souls into the knowing love of God for us, our itinerarium mentis ad deum, “The Journey of The Mind to God,” in Bonaventure’s famous treatise by that name. “Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,/God’s breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,” Herbert says in a wonderful collection of images drawn from scripture, from nature, from domestic life, from the exotic and the intimate but ultimately summed up as “something understood.” Prayer is “something understood”.

We know the story of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple because it is set before us in Matthew’s Gospel on the First Sunday of Advent and, of course, on Palm Sunday. But in both it has to do more with the troubling theme of the wrath or anger of Christ. Here it seems, it is more about the sorrow and sadness of Christ. Jesus weeps for us at what we have not learned or for what we have ignored despite its being present to us because God “hath visited, and redeemed his people” (Benedictus, BCP, p.9). We know but do not know.

The concept of visitation here is spiritually significant. It has very much to do with what God wants us to know, with what belongs to the good of our humanity over and against the things which diminish and destroy us. In the providence of God we are meant to be looking for the things of God, to find “the good in everything,” as Shakespeare puts it (As You Like It), “books in the running brooks, sermons in stone;” in short, reading the providence of God in our lives. It means being recalled to who we are in God, to “know even as also [we] are known” (1 Cor. 13.12). That is an essential aspect of our summer journeyings in the land of the Trinity.

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