Word to the Wise
Thursday, November 18, 2021 - Thursday in the 33th Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Macc 2:15-29 and Luke 19:41-44]As Jesus drew near Jerusalem, he saw the city and wpt over it, saying, "If this day you only knew what makes for peace - but now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days are coming upon you when your enemies will raise a palisade against you; they will encircle you and hem you in on all sides. They will smash you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another within you because you did not recognize the time of your visitation." [Luke]
I remember well my first sight of the Holy City of Jerusalem from a bus window in the culmination of a tour of the Holy Land in 1988. We had stopped in Jericho just before, where Jesus had healed a blind man who followed him and where Zaccheus had welcomed him to his home. The journey from Jericho gives meaning to the expression "up to Jerusalem," because the city is built on a mountain ridge!" In Jerusalem, Jesus would encounter blindness and rejection. The evangelist Luke has Jesus weeping over what is to come. The description is standard Roman siege strategy, examples of which may be seen at Masada where Jewish resistance to the Romans was cornered and ended [73-74 AD] several years after the destruction of the temple and the city. [70 A.D.]. The evangelist was writing some 10 to 20 years after these events.
Jesus' disciples had come to believe in him by seeing his power over sickness, demons and death. But they were mixed in their expectations of what a Messiah would do. Jesus came bringing a kingdom of peace and love, but he was met with violence by those to whom his "kingdom" represented a threat to their own, i.e. the Romans and the Jewish authorities who had reached an uneasy accommodation with them.
As we come to an end of the liturgical year, Jesus is ending his earthly journey. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year, we will celebrate the First Sunday of Advent! The story of his journey begins all over again with the visit of Gabriel to Mary. The broader story after Jesus' death and resurrection in Jerusalem follows in the Acts of the Apostles and is still being created by faithful Christians in the church to this present day. AMEN