08/16/20 Tenth Sunday after Holy Trinity Jesus teaches us Law and Gospel Luke 19: 41-47a 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.

Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

In a very real sense, our Gospel-text for this tenth Sunday after Trinity provides a brief instructional manual—complete with graphic illustrations —on how you and I should read and understand Scripture. In his Apology to (or “defense of”) the Augsburg Confession, Luther’s co-worker Philip Melanchthon wrote that all of Holy Writ can be divided into two major teachings—the Law of God and the Gospel of Christ. Both those teachings are clearly presented in our text from St. Luke’s account. God’s Law is really the preparatory teaching of Scripture. Jesus summarizes it in this way, that we are to love the Lord with all our hearts and souls and minds, and we are to love our neighbor as ourselves; and the primary purpose of this Law, St. Paul tells us, is to show us our sin and our need for a Savior. The Law brings wrath, Paul says; it announces God’s judgment upon us; it condemns us to death for our sins and for the fallenness into which we are born—for the evil which infects our very being. The Gospel of Christ, on the other hand, is all about not what we do but what our Savior-God has done for us and what He now offers to us. The Gospel tells us of God’s Son who was born of the holy Virgin Mary and who made Himself our Substitute under the Law. In our place, He lived a life of perfect love for His Father in heaven. In our place, He showed perfect love to all those around Him, including even His enemies and those who sought to kill Him. And for you and for me—as our Substitute—He shed His life’s blood on the cross of Calvary as the atoning sacrifice for the sin of the world. From first to last, the Gospel presents to us Christ Jesus and what He has done for us—the divine pardon He has procured for us, the share in His resurrection-life that He offers us. Law and Gospel—condemnation and redemption, our sin and our triune God’s saving love, our fallenness and our Lord’s offer of forgiveness and life in Christ: in a most vivid way, these two doctrines are placed before us in our text. I As our Lord approached the city of Jerusalem, Luke tells us, He began to weep, because He knew all-too-well the judgment which His people were bringing on themselves by their rejection of His offer of grace. “(D)ays will come upon you,” Jesus says through His tears, “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.” He had come to proclaim to them the Good News of the Kingdom of God. He had preached to them the Lord’s plan of salvation. He had offered to them full and free forgiveness and eternal life. Some, to be sure, had come to faith in Him and received His gifts. But for the most part, His own people rejected His message of saving love. In the coming decades they would instead follow those who urged them to rebel against the Romans in order to establish their own, earthly version of the Kingdom. And they would bring terrible judgment on themselves. The Jewish historian Josephus has left us a heartrending account of the destruction of Jerusalem which took place some forty years later. All of what our weeping Savior prophesies here came true. The whole city was torn to the ground by the Romans. Almost the entire population was killed, and the few survivors were sold into slavery. The Law works wrath, St. Paul says. But there is also the purest Gospel here in Luke’s picture of the tears of Christ. Jesus weeps for these people who rejected Him because He loves them so very much. From His innermost being, He earnestly wants them to receive what He had come to give them. And that is how earnestly He reaches out to you and to me today. For you with your burdened conscience, for me as I examine my own heart and worry that the Lord’s grace cannot be meant for me, for all of us who fear the grave—the tears of Christ are indeed precious, and for this simple reason. They proclaim in the clearest and most unmistakable way that, with all His divine-human heart, our incarnate Lord wants for us to have the pardon and the life eternal that He offers us. II The second part of our text takes place in the temple there in Jerusalem. For the second time in His earthly ministry, Jesus drives out of the temple-courtyard the merchants and money-changers. “It is written,” He says to them, “‘My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.’” Again, the people had distorted what was intended as the Lord’s gift of grace to them. Instead of coming to the Lord in true repentance and offering their sacrifices in faith—as pointing to the one great sacrifice for sin which the promised Messiah would offer—too many had become mechanical and thoughtless in their visits to the temple. Too many thought that just their act of sacrificing was sufficient—that their own performance of even such empty worship was enough to please the God of Israel. And their offerings made them feel safe and secure, just like thieves and robbers who feel safe in their secret hideaway. Again, the Law that Jesus preaches to them is harsh and severe. He drives out the merchants and money-changers who were making this empty worship possible, and He thus makes clear that those who think they can earn something from the Lord have no place in His house. But once again, there is also precious Gospel for you and me in our Savior’s words. “My house is a house of prayer,” Jesus says. His house—His temple, our Church—is not meant to be a place where you and I come to do something for God. It is a “house of prayer”—a place where we come to ask for and to receive what He wants to give to us. We who are fallen come here to lay our sins before Him in Confession and to receive His Word of Absolution. We who are dying come to hear of His resurrection and to receive life from Him. We who are weak and weary come here to be refreshed with the word of His love. And, in His “house of prayer,” we who belong to His flock by faith come to present to our Good Shepherd all our requests—for His blessings, for His care, for His help as we seek to do His work. We come here to receive from our merciful and loving Savior-God what He wants to give us. That is His will for us, and that is what Christian worship is really all about. III Both parts of our text took place on the first Palm Sunday—that day when the Prophet from Nazareth rode into Jerusalem as the great King of whom the prophet Zechariah had written—meek and lowly and riding on donkey. On that day as He approached the city, He could see—there at the foot of the Mount of Olives—the Garden called Gethsemane where, as Jesus knew, He would experience such terrible anguish in His soul as the sin of this world would begin to weigh so heavily on His very conscience. Beyond the gates of the city were the places of judgment where He would be placed on trial—first by the Sanhedrin and then before Pontius Pilate—and where He would be mocked and beaten and scourged. Just outside the walls of the city was the hill Golgotha—the “Place of the Skull,” the place of public execution where, as Jesus knew all-too-well, He would be crucified to death. Yet the tears that He sheds are not caused by His foreknowledge of what He would endure. Instead, He weeps for the people whom He so dearly wants to save. He rides into the city to invite them to His Father’s House of Prayer so that they might find there the grace and pardon and life that He had come to win for them and for us. The great cost of those gifts—the enormous price of our salvation—our Savior would willingly pay. We keep in our minds what Christ Jesus Himself has made clear to us—that Moses and the Psalms and the Prophets testify of Him, of what He has done for us, and of what He offers us. We keep in mind what the evangelists and St. Paul and Luther and Philip Melanchthon have taught us—that all of Holy Writ is intended to present the two doctrines of Law and Gospel. And then our reading of Scripture at home and our hearing of that same Scripture in our worship-services can be blessed with understanding and with increased faith in our incarnate Lord.

May the Holy Spirit grant us that understanding and faith for Jesus’ sake. Amen.