By Herb Montgomery
"Jesus
turned and said to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for
yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say,
‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts
that never nursed!’ Then “‘they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to
the hills, “Cover us!”’ For if people do these things when the tree is green,
what will happen when it is dry?”
(Luke 23.28–31)
We’ve
reached the eighth and final prophecy of the last eight prophecies of Christ in
Luke’s version of the Jesus story. We will be returning to the fifth prophecy
in Luke 27 for the ninth and final part of this series, but this week we are
looking at Jesus’ words to the women weeping for him on his bloody march to
Golgotha.
Jesus was
just moments away from being crucified. Luke tells us that “a large number of people followed him, including women who
mourned and wailed for him.” (Luke 23.27) It is difficult to discern
whether these women were sincerely weeping for Jesus and Jerusalem’s rejection
of him or because of the dashing of their hopes that this Jesus would be their Messiah.
Days earlier this same crowd had ushered Jesus into Jerusalem. There is much
that is missed in the details of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem by today’s Christians
who still trust in militaristic saviors in our current global climate. Here Jesus
is borrowing imagery used by Rome itself. It must be remembered that Caesar
himself was referred to as the “son of God.” He was called “the savior of the
world.” It was through the victories of Rome (i.e., Caesar) that the political
propaganda of Jesus’ day proclaimed that “peace on earth” would come. It was
called the Pax Romana, the “peace of
Rome.” When Caesar would approach a city within the Roman Empire, emissaries
from the city would go out to meet the dignitary and escort him on his way into
their city. They would welcome Caesar and the “peace” that Roman occupation
brought to their lives.
At a
bare minimum, the fact that Jesus used the image of taking honor thought to be
due only to the “Lord” Caesar would have been interpreted as a threat to Rome
and could have been met with swift retribution. This is why “some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus,
‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’” (Luke 19.39) They did not wish to bring on
themselves the same retribution Caesar had recently exercised against the
Galilean insurrectionists. (See Part 3.) As Jesus approached Jerusalem, the
crowd was crying out,
“Blessed is the KING who comes in the name of the
Lord!” and “PEACE in heaven and glory in the highest!” But what must be noticed first
and foremost is how Jesus was turning this imagery on its head. Where Caesar
would have been riding a warhorse in his triumphal entry, Jesus came riding on
the foal of a colt, a young donkey. Jesus was doing two things here—providing
his own nonviolent, enemy-embracing imagery in contrast to Rome’s violent
warhorse imagery and pointing those present that day to the words of the
prophet Zechariah:
“Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your KING
comes to you, righteous and having salvation, lowly and riding on a DONKEY, on a colt, the foal of a
donkey. I will TAKE
AWAY the CHARIOTS from Ephraim and
the WARHORSES from Jerusalem, and
the BATTLE BOW will be broken. He
will proclaim PEACE to the nations. His
rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.” (Zechariah
9.9, emphasis added)
Jesus was trapping his audience once again in a catch-22. To admit that Jesus was their “King,” as
Jesus’ fulfillment of Zechariah’s words would indicate, would be to also accept
this contrast between the imagery of violence used by Caesar riding a warhorse
and the nonviolent Jesus riding a donkey. He was announcing a nonviolent,
enemy-embracing “peace” revolution of love and enemy-forgiveness in which the “warhorse,”
“war-chariot” and “battle bow” would all be laid down by Jerusalem so that the
world could be healed of its violence rather than simply liberating Jerusalem
from the Romans and allowing it to become
another unstoppable, violent, world-dominating, empire. That was the catch. To
embrace Jesus as King was to embrace the path of nonviolence.
When Jerusalem came into view, Jesus stopped and wept. “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you PEACE—but now it is hidden from your
eyes. The days will come on you when your enemies will build an embankment
against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you
to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one
stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”
(Luke 19.42–44, emphasis added.)
We covered this passage in Part 6, but suffice it to say here that
this is the same crowd in our prophecy this week, not shouting in joy, but
weeping in lamentation. Crucifixion meant defeat. These people did not want to
embrace their enemies, to forgive the Romans, or to learn from this prophet of
nonviolence how to even love the Romans. No, they wanted a Messiah that would
defeat the Romans and liberate Israel. (It should be noted that Rome would, by
the fourth century, be defeated by the nonviolent revolution Jesus began, yet
this was not the kind of defeat those in Jesus’ day desired.) For a Jewish
Messiah to end up on a Roman cross meant that Rome had won. (Little did they
realize that in reality Rome’s defeat was just beginning.) Jerusalem had
rejected Jesus and his nonviolence in favor of a more militaristic hope of defeating
Rome. Thus, Jesus proclaimed to those weeping:
“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not
weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come
when you will say, ‘blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore
and the breasts that never nursed!’ then “‘they will say to the mountains,
“fall on us!” And to the hills, “cover us!”’ (Luke 23.28–30)
Jerusalem,
rather than learning to love its Roman enemies, would continue on the path of an
eye for an eye, retribution, retaliation, and violence against Rome. And what
would be the result? That path would end in its annihilation by Rome. Jesus
here was quoting the prophet Hosea, who centuries before had spoken those same
words referring to the way Israel would be destroyed by Assyria. “The high places of wickedness will be destroyed—it is the
sin of Israel. Thorns and thistles will grow up and cover their altars. Then they
will say to the mountains, ‘Cover us!’ and to the hills, ‘Fall on us!’ . .
. I will come against the wayward people
to punish them; and nations shall be gathered against them when they are
punished for their double iniquity.” (Hosea 10.8, 10) Jesus applied Hosea’s
words to how Jerusalem would be destroyed by Rome.
“As the legions
charged in [the Temple], neither persuasion nor threat could check their
impetuosity: passion alone was in command . . . Most of the victims were
peaceful citizens, weak and unarmed, butchered wherever they were caught. Round
the Altar the heap of corpses grew higher and higher, while down the Sanctuary
steps poured a river of blood and the bodies of those killed at the top
slithered to the bottom . . . Next [the Romans] came to the last surviving
colonnade of the outer court. On this women and children and a mixed crowd of
citizens had found a refuge—6000 in all. Before Caesar could reach a decision
about them or instruct his officers, the soldiers, carried away by their fury,
fired the colonnade from below; as a result some flung themselves out of the
flames to their death, others perished in the blaze: of that vast number there
escaped not one.” Josephus, The Jewish War,
Williamson and Smallwood, p. 359 (6.5.1; 271–76)
This is where the path of violence, of an eye for an eye, of
retributive justice, and of retribution ends. Those who live by the sword die
by the sword. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind!
Lastly,
we come to Jesus’ final sentence to these weepers:
“For if people do these things
when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23.31)
Jesus was bringing to their minds the warning given by Ezekiel in
the days when Babylonian captivity loomed on the horizon:
“Hear the word of the
LORD. This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am about to set fire to you, and
it will consume all your trees, both green and dry. The blazing flame will not
be quenched, and every face from south to north will be scorched by it.
Everyone will see that I the LORD have kindled it; it will not be quenched.” (Ezekiel 20.47)
Jesus clearly was the green tree, bearing the fruit of nonviolent,
enemy-embracing love. This was the fruit
the Father desired. This was the “will of the Father” that Jesus had referred
to so many times. What Jesus is saying here
is: “If Rome will do this to me—a prophet of nonviolence, leading a subversive,
peaceful revolution—if Rome sees nonviolence noncooperation as a threat, how much more will they do this to
Jerusalem when it—a dead tree—chooses the path of violence and insurrection
under the headship of a militaristic messiah!” Jesus is proclaiming, “Do not
weep for me. No, no! Weep for yourselves because the violent path you have
chosen will end in horrifying events that are neither imaginable nor
conceivable.”
What does this mean for us today?
The greatest victories of the church were won in its nonviolent
days before Constantine. This is how bloody and violent Rome was brought to its
knees by pacifistic Jesus-followers. There were no Christian armies, and every
true Christian soldier was a martyr. It was martyrs who conquered Rome. Today
Christians and non-Christians alike have to rediscover the sources of
Christianity. It began, not as a religion, but as a pacifist movement of people
placing their hopes in a nonviolent Messiah or Lord, an enemy-forgiving, loving,
and embracing revolution and a final resurrection whereby the world would be
restored, renewed, and healed. We must come to realize that we have, to a great
extent, abandoned the early Christian ideal of peace and nonviolent action.
It is a curious thing that in the twentieth century the one great
political figure who made a conscious and systematic use of Jesus’ principles for
nonviolent political action was not a Christian but a Hindu. What is more
curious is the fact that so many Christians today continue to think of Gandhi
as some kind of eccentric whose nonviolence remains impractical, a sensational
fad, or at best naïve. What may lie underneath all of this is the reality that
we may have to admit that a Hindu, being oppressed by Colonial Christianity
wedded to Empire, understood the meaning and intent of the nonviolent Jesus’
teaching more deeply than many post-Constantinian Christians.
Today we, much like Jerusalem in Jesus’ day, still hold to the
idea that evil must be met with evil. Today we are faced with the same options
Jerusalem had—nonviolence or nonexistence—both in our personal lives as well as
in our global lives. According to experts, we live, every day, each moment,
only five minutes away from total genocide of the entire human race either
through global nuclear war or new developments in ecological science that could
inflict irrevocable harm. All along those who claim to follow the Jesus of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are “straining gnats” while by their silent approval
they are “swallowing camels.”
The question is appropriately asked: “How are we today to live at the end of the
world?” I’m suggesting we do so by beginning a new one, rooted in the
nonviolent teachings of the enemy-embracing, enemy-forgiving, enemy-loving
Jesus. Nonviolence, as Jesus taught it, is a steadfast love, in resistance, of those
behind technologically advanced violence, behind the massive oppression that
causes the masses to continually go hungry, and a global debt crisis that keeps
the poor of this planet in slavery to larger and stronger empires. It is to
love, in resistance, the conduits of violence in our local communities, our
private and public relationships, and even within our families no matter what
they do. It is the force of this kind of unrelenting love that can overcome
anything.
To live the prayer of desiring Christ’s “Kingdom” to “come . . .
on earth as it is in heaven” is to believe in a Kingdom whose coming will cause
“swords to be beaten into plowshares.” Or in language that would be more
appropriate to our culture today, it is a Kingdom where technologically advanced
forms of mass violence will be abolished and the world’s masses will be freed
from hunger and the poor freed from oppression.
We will discuss the two prevailing views of how Christ’s Kingdom
will come in the final part of this series (Part 9) when we return to Jesus’
words in Luke 17, and I will actually offer a third option. But to believe in
Christ’s Kingdom is to believe that a new world will eventually come into existence (one way or another) and to be
working toward that end in our daily lives today, not just putting on display
what such a world will look like! The Kingdom has come! The Kingdom is at hand!
The Kingdom starts now! The Kingdom of
God is within your power! All of these words, spoken originally by Jesus, are
to be our proclamation to the world. His parting words in Luke were the promise
of repentance [metanioa] for the forgiveness of sins” being
“preached in his name to all nations,
beginning at Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:47, emphasis added)
We live in that final time that offers humanity the same choice as
the final eight prophecies of Jesus about Jerusalem in the book of Luke—the
Kingdom or global holocaust. Where do we start?
Put this down right now, go into the bathroom, and look in the mirror.
It starts right there. As the old adage goes, “As you are, so is the world.” It
starts with one person at a time, beginning with today, not with Jerusalem but with
each one of us. It starts with me. It
starts with you. In our own lives, in our own spheres of influence, wherever
this finds us today, will we be followers of the nonviolent, enemy-embracing,
enemy-forgiving, enemy-loving Christ? If
nonviolence does not begin here, it goes nowhere. The revolution starts now!
Look deeply into that mirror, and by the power of God’s Spirit, let a new world
begin today!
Till the only world that remains is a world where love
reigns.
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