Father Stephen De Young: When we get started here in a minute, we’re going to be picking up in Luke chapter 19, verse 28, where we left off last week. I’ll say as usual, the introduction to Luke way back in the long-ago time is still available on the interwebs for anyone who wants to relisten to that since it’s faded into the past. I don’t even think I remember most of it. So I should probably go listen to it again.

But just to sort of get us caught up. I know I’ve said this in the last couple of Bible studies, but now for sure because we’re about to read about Palm Sunday, we’re about to read about the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We are in the endgame of Luke’s Gospel. Pretty much everything we’ve read up to this point has been leading up to this. We’ve seen over the last few weeks that Jesus more and more has been speaking about the time of his death. He’s been speaking about what he’s going to face as he goes into Jerusalem. Remember, the Gospel According to St. Luke is structured around essentially this journey that begins with Jesus’s ministry in Galilee in the north and then travels south on his way to Jerusalem, approaching now the end of his life there.

Just a quick note before we start, because as I just mentioned, way, way back when we first started talking about Matthew, I mentioned that Matthew, Mark and Luke, their gospels are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels. Synoptic being a fancy word, optic refers to vision. “Syn” is “the same” or “together” that Matthew, Mark and Luke sort of follow the same structure. And most folks who study the Bible now believe that’s not coincidental, that St. Mark composed his gospel based on the teachings of St. Peter first and then St. Matthew’s Gospel came second. St. Luke’s Gospel came third.

There’s some debate as to how exactly that all worked out but pretty much everyone agrees now that both St. Matthew and St. Luke sort of used St. Mark’s Gospel as sort of the template. Sort of the undergirding that they built their Gospel around. And they believe that not just because it follows the same pattern of this journey from Galilee to Jerusalem because you could just say “Well, okay, that’s how it happened.” But it’s down to the level of exact phrases, exact sentences, exact wording repeated, repeated sometimes in all three, where if we had tests in this Bible study, three of you to write an essay test about the life of Jesus and you turned in the Gospel According to St. Matthew, the Gospel According to St. Mark, and the Gospel According to St. Luke. I would be accusing somebody of cheating because you don’t find that many identical sentences when three people completely independently write something.

Now, that’s not to say, a lot of the scholarly theories about the Gospels sort of assume that everything is second-hand. They assume there’s no eyewitness testimony involved, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that they’re all just pulling together a bunch of other written documents and sort of smushing them together into Gospels. That is not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that we had two other people in St. Matthew and St. Luke who took St. Mark’s Gospel, reworked it, left parts out, expanded certain parts, added things, based on, in St. Matthew’s case, I believe his own recollections from having been one of Christ’s disciples in the case of, although that would be very controversial among scholars, but I still think that’s true. In St. Luke’s case, he tells us remember at the beginning of the Gospel According to St. Luke, he tells us he went and did research, right? He says, “Many people have set out to write an orderly account of these things.” So he kind of tips his hat that Gospels like St. Mark’s Gospel and St. Matthew’s Gospel already exist. And he says that he went and made an investigation. He says he went and talked to people who were first-hand eyewitnesses and so he took their testimony and what they told him and integrated that with parts of St. Mark’s Gospel, in a few cases, arguably some pieces of St. Matthew’s Gospel and then his own research and his own testimony.

That leaves St. John’s Gospel, the fourth Gospel, as it’s sometimes referred to as sort of the odd man out among the four Gospels. That’s the book that we’re going to be turning to next. And the reason I bring that up here in terms of the structure is preserved in Eusebius’s ecclesiastical history of the Church, which was written in the fourth century. That’s when the first church history book that we know of was written, at the beginning of the fourth century.

And he wrote about what was for him the ancient church in the first century, 300 years before. But there was an author in the first century, a Christian author named Papias, and unfortunately, we do not have any of Papias’s works. They’ve all vanished into history. But in the fourth century they still had copies of Papias’s works. And in his church history, Eusebius uses him as a source and quotes him. He especially quotes from a work by Papias. And again, scholars argue about how this should be translated, whether it should be an explanation of the words of Jesus or a discourse of the words of Jesus, how you translate that word. But in that he talks about the writing of the Gospels, this is in the first century, so this is pretty early. He’s within probably 30 years of when the Gospels were written and probably writing very close to when St. John’s Gospel was written. And what he says about St. Mark’s Gospel is that he’s the earliest source, that tells us that St. Mark received his teaching for his Gospel from St. Peter. But then what he says is that St. Mark then took St. Peter’s testimony, set it out in his Gospel, but not in order to that the events are not in order.

Now, why this becomes interesting is that in St. John’s Gospel, the fourth gospel, events happen in a different order. Events happen in a different order than they do in St. Mark’s Gospel. And then St. Matthew and St. Luke’s gospel following St. Mark’s. Gospel. In St. John’s Gospel, it is not structured around this one long journey beginning in Galilee and then coming to Jerusalem sort of in this one sweep. In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus’s ministry lasts three years, and during that three years, Jesus travels north and south, back and forth at least three times. He comes to Jerusalem for different feasts. It’s structured very differently.

In addition, he structures what we’re about to read in St. Luke’s Gospel very differently. It’s St. John’s Gospel that tells us about the raising of Lazarus, which we’re not going to read about here, and talks about how it was the raising of Lazarus that caused the people to sort of rally around Jesus and sort of sweep him into the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, right? Because they’ve seen this man raised from the dead, and so that to them said, “Okay, this guy has to be the Messiah. This guy was dead for four days. Jesus raised him from the dead. He must be the Messiah.” And then it’s St. John’s Gospel, that gives us the structure, basically, of Holy Week that we’re familiar with.

So that’s important. That’s important because already we know in the fourth century, liturgically, Holy Week was being done the way we do Holy Week. We know that because a woman named Egeria went on a pilgrimage in the middle of the fourth century. She went to the St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, which wasn’t St. Catherine’s yet, but there was a monastery there already, but she went to the monastery at Mount Sinai, then she went to Jerusalem, and she went to Jerusalem during Holy Week. And she writes about what they did on what days, at what churches in the city. So we know that already in the 4th century, our structure of Holy Week was being used. And our structure of Holy Week, again, is based on the Gospel of John.

Even though scholars will tell you that they don’t think the Gospel according to St. John is historical and that Matthew, Mark and Luke are the ones that are really historical. They all say that Jesus’s ministry was three years long, which they’re getting from the Gospel of John.

Why do I say all this as we’re going through? I’d going to repeat it when I start St. John’s Gospel, but why am I saying all this now? Because what this means is that in all probability, as far as we can tell, from Papias’s writings, from church history, from liturgical history, St. John’s Gospel is giving us the order in which the events originally happened. That means that St. Mark, St. Matthew and St. Luke are giving them to us in a different order, which means that St. Luke has shaped his account. He’s put these things in the particular order they’re in, not just because, well, that’s the order they happened, but to make a point.

And so, I’m going through this to emphasize what I said. It’s sort of the beginning to tonight’s introduction. The way St. Luke’s Gospel is structured, Jesus’s whole life and his whole ministry is leading up to this, is leading up to him going into Jerusalem to die. To suffer and to die. That’s the culmination. Jesus is baptized in Galilee. That starts his mission. And his mission is to go down to Jerusalem and die. That’s why he’s been predicting it as we go, to say, “This is not just something bad that’s going to happen to me, this is part of the plan, this is the mission. This is what I came here to do.”

And so, some people have said that the synoptic Gospels in general and St. Luke’s Gospel in particular are passion narratives, story of Christ’s suffering and death and resurrection with really long prologues, right? That the rest of the Gospel is just sort of this prologue to the really important part. That may be slightly exaggerated. That might be slightly exaggerated because I think Christ’s teaching that we’ve seen as we’ve gone through his life as well as in St. Luke’s Gospel. The story of his birth, the story of St. John the Forerunner’s birth and their relationship to each other. I think all of those things are important too. So I don’t think “prologue” really… But if this is a three-act play, we are about to start the third act. And this is the denouement. This is where everything comes together. This is all the hints and clues and plot points that we’ve had for Act 1 and Act 2. This is where they all start coming together, is here in the third act. And that’s how St. Luke is presenting it to us. The example, the fruition of everything Jesus has been saying and teaching is about to happen.

Interlocutor: [Question]

Fr. Stephen: Well, I think St. Mark was doing something similar. And St. Mark’s Gospel begins with Jesus’s baptism. St. Mark’s Gospel has nothing in it about Jesus’s birth whatsoever, has nothing about him going to the temple in his teenage years. None of that. St. Mark’s Gospel starts with Jesus being baptized, and then it’s just a straight through line. That’s how he arranged it. Jesus is baptized, he goes down to Jerusalem, he’s crucified, he’s buried, they find the tomb empty. That’s it, in Mark’s Gospel. St. Matthew and St. Luke sort of expand on that. Both St. Matthew and St. Luke, for example, have accounts of Jesus’s birth, a little bit different, and they have more full accounts of… it’s not just we find an empty tomb, but at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, St. Luke’s Gospel, we read about Christ’s appearances. We also have to keep in mind now as we enter Act 3 of the Gospel According to St. Luke. Remember, Gospel According to St. Luke, unlike the other Gospels, is part one of a two-part story.

The Acts of the Apostles is volume two. St. Luke writes them as this two-volume work. So while this is the culmination of St. Luke’s Gospel, this isn’t the culmination of what St. Luke writes about. For him, we’re not at the beginning of the end, right? The other Gospels, the triumphal entry, Palm Sunday, is the beginning of the end. It’s the beginning of the end of their Gospel. St. Luke’s Gospel, it’s the end of the beginning, right? Because this is jumping ahead a little bit. What St. Luke is going to do in the Acts of the Apostles is he’s going to show us that what comes next, the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost that we celebrated today, and then the growth of the church and the spreading of the Gospel throughout the Roman Empire, that’s of a piece with Christ’s ministry and what he did.

So, he’s very much going to depict, especially St. Paul, as continuing Jesus’s ministry and carrying it out to the whole world, what Jesus did in Judea and taking it everywhere.

So unless anybody has any other questions or allegations or slurs, okay, we’ll go ahead and get started.

When He had said this,

“This” being what we were just reading about last time, and remember last time we had Zacchaeus, we had the healing of the blind man, we had the rich young ruler, we had a contrast between the rich young ruler and Zacchaeus. And we also had a number of parables. This last parable we had, the Parable of the Minas, was a parable about judgment, God’s judgment. And Jesus was making the point in this final discourse that remember, He was talking about the kingdom and establishing this paradigm. That he was not on his way to Jerusalem to set up the kingdom on this earth now where he’s the king of a new independent Judea, and get rid of the Romans. But that he was going there to suffer and die. But a time was coming when he would return and then everyone would be judged according to their deeds. That’s the paradigm he’s set up in this final discourse. And so this is an important transition, this final discourse is him setting up to his disciples, in particular but to his other followers in general, here’s what’s about to happen and here’s why. And so, what we’re about to read in terms of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem is going to be somewhat ironic.

We’re going to see that they didn’t understand what he said because they’re riding him into town to go throw out the Romans and set up the kingdom.  They’re going to interpret this in that very traditional way despite what Jesus said. So we see that theme again here in St. Luke’s gospel of the disciples not at this point getting it. We’re going to see at the beginning of the Book of Acts there’s this big transition where the disciples go from kind of clueless and frightened and hiding out to receiving the Holy Spirit and this transformation. But that hasn’t happened yet. Right now, they’re still confused.

When He had said this, He went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. And it came to pass, when He drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mountain called Olivet, that He sent two of His disciples, saying, “Go into the village opposite you, where as you enter you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Loose it and bring it here. And if anyone asks you, ‘Why are you loosing it?í thus you shall say to him, ‘Because the Lord has need of it.’”

So he’s finished his final discourse. Now he’s heading into the city, he’s heading into Jerusalem. And he tells while they’re getting close, right? Bethphage and Bethany are literally the “House of Eating” and the “House of the Poor”. I’d rather live in the House of Eating myself. Sounds like an early House of Pancakes, rather than the house of the poor. But these are sort of suburbs of Jerusalem. These are little villages outside the city of Jerusalem itself. So as he’s coming up closer to the city, coming to these villages, he sends these disciples into the village. Since we go to the village, you’ll find a colt. No one’s ever sat on it. Meaning it’s young, right? It hasn’t been ridden yet. It hasn’t been broken yet for riding. Go find the colt, bring it to me. If anyone asks you why you’re committing grand theft colt, say, “The Lord needs it.”

Interlocutor: How did Jesus know, do we have information, or was this a miraculous sign? And also, is this a follower of Jesus?

Fr. Stephen: Who, the colt?

Interlocutor: The owner. Because colts are very valuable…

Fr. Stephen: Well, we can assume the owner of the colt was not, because if the owner of the colt was, he would have said something more like, “Go to this village and talk to Shlomo, he’ll loan you his colt.” Whereas he’s telling them to just go. “You’ll find a cult there, take it. If someone asks you why you’re taking it, say the Lord has need of it.” That’s sort of assuming that someone’s going to question you.

Interlocutor: How do we explain what’s going on? Was this a stranger? Was this a miraculous event?

Fr. Stephen: This is a miraculous event, but part of it is again, what’s Jesus about to do? He’s about to be arrested and suffer and die. So from one perspective, if you’re living at the time, you don’t know that he’s going to rise from the dead, because no one gets that, even though he’s said it several times. You don’t know he’s going to rise from the dead. You see this big movement that says that Jesus is the Messiah. He comes into town, the Romans grab him up like they’ve done a bunch of would-be Messiahs in the past. They crucify him, they kill him. Well, that’s done, right?

That looks like, “Oh, well, there’s another messianic movement that went wrong. His mission was a failure. He Died as a criminal. Mission was a failure.” So we’ve said before that the reason Jesus kept predicting his death to them, kept telling them, this is what’s going to happen when we go there wasn’t just that he was being a Gloomy Gus. He wasn’t just being Eeyore, “we’re going to go to Jerusalem, I’m probably going to get crucified.” That wasn’t it. Jesus was saying that, predicting it, so that when it happened, they know that that was part of the plan, that he knew about it. It wasn’t a surprise.

This is the same thing. What’s about to happen, Jesus already has planned out down to the level of knowing where the colt is, that he’s going to ride into town, that it’s over at this village tied to a post, right? He knows exactly where that colt is, that he’s going to ride into town. It’s all part of the plan.

Interlocutor: And he picks a colt because it’s a beast that’s never been ridden?

Fr. Stephen: Well, because there’s a prophecy. There’s a prophecy about the Messiah coming on a donkey’s colt.

That’s why, it’s to tell them, look, everything is going according to plan, down to the minute detail, right? And that’s a minute detail because he could have just walked, right? He could have borrowed somebody else’s donkey. There’s any number of ways he could have gone into town. But no, “I want this specific colt and I know where it is, even though I can’t physically see it,” right? So this is all going according to Jesus’s plan.

So those who were sent went their way and found it just as He had said to them. But as they were loosing the colt, the owners of it said to them, “Why are you loosing the colt?”

As one might, if I saw somebody taking the lock off my bike, I might go out and ask them, “Why are you taking my bike?”

And they said, “The Lord has need of him.”

Notice how they refer to Jesus. Now, St. Luke is playing with us a little here, right? Because at the time they said it, do you think the disciples understood that Jesus was the Lord, as in the God of the Old Testament? No. They’re pretty clueless at this point. So, from their perspective, what they’re saying is they’re basically saying “Well, Jesus is sort of like a prophet, he’s a Messiah, right?” So he said, “Tell him God needs it. And then they’ll give it to you.” That’s how the disciples would have understood. But in actuality, what are they saying? Because notice it’s not “God needs it”, it’s “the Lord needs it”, because we know now Jesus actually is the Lord.

Then they brought him to Jesus. And they threw their own clothes on the colt, and they set Jesus on him. And as He went, many spread their clothes on the road.

Remember when I said about St. John’s Gospel? St. John’s Gospel, we sort of see this precipitating event, we see the raising of Lazarus and you can say, “Oh, wow, yeah, I mean, if I saw that, they sort of said, sweep him into Jerusalem.” Here it seems sort of just spontaneous. So it might be a little confusing that people are just taking the clothes off their backs and throwing it down on the ground and welcoming this person as the Messiah. So we sort going to get a gap filled in there and we’ll talk about this more when we get to the Gospel according to St John, but I’ve become persuaded and more and more people who study the Bible are becoming persuaded that St John had the other three Gospels. And so we have these places where St John’s Gospel sort of fills in little gaps that that was deliberate. St John’s Gospel was written last by a fair amount, by about 20 years, or about 20 years after St Luke’s Gospel.

So then it’s not different because it was written in a vacuum. It’s written because St John had access to the other three, and so didn’t feel the need to repeat what had already been said three times, but wanted to fill in gaps and add more from his own personal testimony.

Then, as He was now drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives,

So now he’s getting really close to town. He’s ridden through the villages and everything. Now he’s coming up on the city.

the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, saying:

“‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the LORD!’

Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

And some of the Pharisees called to Him from the crowd, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples.”

So they start singing this. Do you notice anything about what they were singing? Particularly the second verse where you might have heard something similar before?

Interlocutor: The birth of Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Luke 2. St. Luke’s Gospel Chapter 2. That’s very similar to what the angels sing. “Glory to God in the highest, on earth, peace, good will toward men.” So see, he’s making the point that what began back there is now coming to fruition, beginning at Jesus’s birth. His whole life is leading up to this.

And so, the Pharisees hear this. The Pharisees are sharp enough to realize they’re calling this guy the Messiah. Because they’re calling him the king who comes to the name of the Lord. The Messiah is the anointed king, descended from David.

Why are they trying to shush him? It’s not just because they don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah. They don’t I mean, we know they don’t as the Pharisees, but why do you think they’re trying to keep them quiet as they’re coming into the city? What’s going on? We’re coming up on Passover. There’s a lot of people in the city. Remember a few years before this at Passover, there was trouble. Pilate executed about 150 people from Jerusalem. Okay, so it’s not just that they don’t believe it’s true. They don’t believe it’s true, and if the Romans hear this, they’re going to send to the troops, we’re going to have a massacre. They start calling this guy the King who’s riding into town.

Remember, it’s not just with the Romans. I mean, there’s the obvious level of obviously, Caesar rules the Roman Empire, and anybody else who claims to rule, even a tiny piece of it, therefore is Caesar’s enemy, and Caesar is going to squash him like a bug. So there’s that obvious element. But also in Roman culture, “king” was a dirty word. That’s the one title Caesar never took. His main title was “Imperator”, which is what we translate as “emperor”. But what Imperator actually means is “conqueror”. He’s the one who conquered the world, but he took the title Savior of the world. He took the title Lord. That’s not coincidental that these titles end up getting given to Jesus instead of Caesar later on.

He never took the title “King”, because in the early history of Rome, when it was a republic before the empire, Rome became a republic in the 6th century BC. And before that, it had been ruled over by kings, and those kings were referred to by all the Roman historians as the tyrants. “Tyrannus”. That’s the Latin word. That’s where we get the word tyrant in English. Who are these sort of cruel dictatorial? And so there was basically a revolution where the last one of them was killed off and the Roman Republic was established. And that was a huge part of Roman pride, was their republican board of government. They were ruled by the Senate.

You may have seen the abbreviation on Roman ruins and that kind of thing, SPQR, right? Yeah. That is the authority by which Rome was governed. And it’s an abbreviation of the Senate and the people of the state of Rome. There was the Senate and the people. You notice who’s not there. There’s no king. And so even when well, that’s what got Julius Caesar killed, was that he basically came into Rome to set himself up as the first emperor. They all accused him of trying to make himself a king. So he got stabbed in the back 23 times by the senators, because they were not about to go back to the dark old days of having a king. So when Octavian became Caesar Augustus and actually became the first Emperor, he was no dummy. He did not try and call himself a king. He made very clear he was not a king. That’s where the Imperator title comes. That’s where these other titles come from. He’s this honored citizen, the most honored citizen of the Empire, and the Senate still existed even though the Emperor was really governing the day to day goings-on of the Empire.

So, someone saying he’s a king is not only claiming authority that they believe belongs to Caesar, but it’s a slap of the face. The whole idea of a king is a slap in the face to the whole Roman way of life, the whole Roman view of the political system. So the Romans react very violently, and I mean that literally. Not just they get angry, they react violently through crucifixions to claims of kingship. So when the people are all here greeting Jesus as their king, maybe if the Pharisees thought it was true, maybe if the Pharisees thought he was the Messiah and he was about to go kick the Romans’ behind out of Jerusalem. Maybe they would have gone along with it. But since they don’t believe it’s true, “You guys need to shut up. Shut up. You got to get us all killed. We don’t need any trouble right now.”

But He answered and said to them, “I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.”

Well, what does that mean? Is it literal? Do you think he’s going to make yelling rocks? No, the point is the point is, Jesus counters that, right? Their argument is, their thought process is, this isn’t true. So them claiming it is going to get us all into a lot of trouble. And so, Jesus counters that with this is true. And since it is true, just shutting them up won’t make it not true.

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.”

So Jesus gets to the point where he can look out and see the city of Jerusalem, and he weeps. He says, “If you had known. Even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace.” What have the prophets been coming and telling them? We’ll go to Jeremiah in particular, you remember Jeremiah, there were all those false prophets, but the false prophets were saying good stuff. It’s sort of like when you call the psychic hotline, right? When you call the psychic hotline, first of all, they try to keep you on the phone as long as possible because they’re charging you by the minute. Secondly, what do they tell you, when you call the psychic hotline? “There’s love in your future. You’re going to get a big raise and a promotion. Now is the time to go buy that new house. Now is the time to go buy that new car.” They always tell you good stuff. You never call the psychic hotline and they say, “Tomorrow you’re going to die”, because no-one would call that psychic hotline. They never say, “Tomorrow you’re going to be in a horrible car accident.” They never say, “You better get all your money out of the stock market because it’s going to crash.” They never tell you anything like that, right?

So, the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day were playing the same game, right? They’re going to the king and saying, “No, everything’s great, Babylonians, they’re just going to wander off. Don’t worry about them. City is going to do fine. You’re going to reign forever. Everything is good, everything is great. God told us that, so you can believe it.” Whereas Jeremiah, who is the actual prophet of God, is coming to them and saying, “No, this city is going to get wiped out. The temple is going to be destroyed, the city is going to be destroyed by the Babylonians. You’re all going to go into exile.” Well, nobody wants to hear that, right? So what do they get? “Shut up, Jeremiah. Stop prophesying.” At one point, they literally say to them, “Prophesy to us so that we could kill you.” That’s how it’s literally worded, “We’re in the mood to murder you. So go ahead and prophesy again. Go ahead, do it.”

But what was the famous thing that Jeremiah said to the false prophets? He said to them, “You go around crying out, peace, peace.” Because that’s what they were prophesying, right? Oh, there’s going to be peace, there’s going to be peace. What did Jeremiah say? He said, “But there is no peace. There is no peace.” Why was there no peace? Was it because of the Babylonians? That’s what the false prophets were saying. The false prophets were saying, well, the reason there’s no peace is because of the Babylonians. But don’t worry, our God is more powerful than their God, right? And so we could beat the Babylonians. That in and of itself is not a false line of argument, right? God basically said that in the Torah. He said, “If you follow me, you will defeat all your enemies no matter how powerful they are. “

Remember the first part of that. “If you follow me, you will defeat all your enemies no matter how powerful they are.” And so, what Jeremiah was trying to explain to them is that the reason there was no peace, the reason the city was going to be destroyed, had nothing to do with God not being powerful enough to deliver them. It had to do with their own sinfulness that was bringing destruction upon them. That’s what Jesus is talking about here, when he looks at the city of Jerusalem once again, it’s about to be destroyed once again, and says to them, “If only you knew the things that make for your peace.”

What’s going to bring you peace is not collaborating with the Romans. It’s not you propping up some king to overthrow the Romans. That’s not going to give you peace. That’s what’s going to bring about the destruction of the city. What would bring them peace is what? Repentance. What would bring the peace would be embracing Christ. But Jesus knows they’re not going to do that. They don’t even understand how it is to get the peace that they claim they want, because he says it’s hidden from their eyes. And then he prophesies exactly what’s going to happen to the city. And this time it isn’t just AD 70. He’s not just talking about the temple here, you notice, he’s talking about the whole city. This happened around 128 at the end of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in some detail.

And by the way, there are people who will point out we’ve already seen Jesus in St. Luke’s Gospel prophesying about the destruction of the temple in AD 70. They’ll say, “Well, St. Luke’s Gospel was probably written after AD 70.” There’s nobody who thinks St. Luke’s Gospel was written after 128. So, it wasn’t written after this happened when the whole city was destroyed and not one stone was left upon another. And especially this bit about the embankment, because this is exactly how the Romans finally laid siege to the city.

The Bar Kokhba rebellion, Simon Bar Kokhba, means “son of a star”, was successful at first. They managed to take over Jerusalem and make it independent, briefly, they even minted some coins with Bar Kokhba’s face on them, and it has the year one stamped on them. That’s how convinced they were that he was the Messiah, that this was the beginning of the new. They never got past year one, but this is how sure they were. They were minting money. They were minting coins. The Romans surrounded the city, laid siege to do it, just the way Jesus is talking about now. How did they get through the walls? They built an embankment, meaning like a big earthwork ramp going up the side of the wall so that the troops could march up, go over the wall and down into the city.

Jesus doesn’t go into the detail here of what happened in 128, that a lot of that embankment was made up of dead bodies of people who the Romans killed in those surrounding villages. They went and massacred everyone in the surrounding villages, used their bodies in the earthworks to help build the ramp, because that’s how they operated. They went into the city, and when it says not one stone is left on another, what they did is they leveled the city. The temple had already been destroyed in AD 70. They leveled the entire city and they plowed earth over it. So they flattened out the top of the hill again and then they built a new city on top of it. Called Aelia Capitolina, the capital of the east.

And after they built that new city in 128, they expelled all of the surviving Jews from it. No one of Jewish ancestry was allowed into the city except for one day a year, which was the day that they destroyed the temple in 70 AD, they let the Jews come and take a pilgrimage to the place where the temple used to be so they could go and weep there publicly, over the fact that the Romans had destroyed their temple.

That’s what happened in 128. That’s what Jesus is talking about here. And he’s saying the reason that’s going to happen is what? They did not know the time of their visitation. We talked about that word “visitation” in the Old Testament. That’s the time when God was going to return to his people. When God returns, it’s not grandpa comes by for tea and biscuits, right? It’s God comes to visit his people and there’s judgment. They were expecting that day to be the day the Messiah came and the judgment was going to come on the Romans, because they’re the problem, they’re why we don’t have peace. What Jesus is saying is they’re not why you don’t have peace. Why you don’t have peace, why the Romans are here is that your hearts are full of sinfulness. God has come to visit you in the person of Jesus and you’re so far from God that you’re about to murder him. That’s how far your heart is from God that he’s come to visit you and you despise him and want to kill him.

And because of that, because you’re going to reject Jesus as the Christ and you’re going to pick pretenders in the 60s, and then in the 120s, this whole city is going to be destroyed. And there was no city of Jerusalem until the fifth century when they changed the name of Alia Capitolina back into Jerusalem. So when you read the canons of the acts of the first couple of ecumenical councils, one, two, three, they referred to the Bishop of Aelia, which is what used to be Jerusalem. They don’t refer to the patriarch of Jerusalem. They’ve heard of the bishop of Aelia.

And the number of Christians left there after the Romans destroyed it was so few that it was not a patriarchate. Not only was it not a patriarchate, the Bishop of Jerusalem wasn’t even the metropolitan of the province. It was only the fifth century when they changed the name back to Jerusalem that they made him a patriarch and made it the seat of the area that was sort of honorary because of the importance of Jerusalem historically. But when the Romans destroyed the city, they built a temple of Zeus on top of where the Jewish temple had been. And they built a temple to Venus on Golgotha, where Christ had died and risen from the dead. Which is terrible, but that’s how St Helena, Constantine’s mother, was able to find those sites later in the fourth century as a Christian because those pagan temples were still there. And so she had the pagan temples bulldozed and excavated beneath them. And that’s how they found the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is now. The site where the Temple Mount is now, because they knew they were under these Roman pagan temples.

Interlocutor: So you’re saying that the Gospels were written before 70 AD?

Fr. Stephen: No, no. I’m saying St. Luke’s Gospel was written before 128. In 70 AD they destroyed the temple, they did not destroy the city.

Jesus here is predicting the destruction of the entire city. There were other places where he predicted the destruction of just the temple in 70 AD, but this is the destruction of the whole city. He’s looking at the whole city and predicting the destruction of the whole city, which hadn’t happened yet at the time that St Luke’s Gospel was written.