your Savior on his way to death? How are you keeping your pledge of loyalty?
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Monday Evening
Immanuel’s Tears
And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
Luke 19:41–44
WHEN THE LORD had reached the top of the Mount of Olives, the royal city with the gleaming gold of the temple lay in all its glory before his eyes. But in the midst of the disciples and rejoicing throngs around him, a deep sadness filled his holy soul at this sight, and his eyes overflowed with tears.
If a child weeps, we feel pity; if a hero weeps, our hearts are unnerved. But when Jesus weeps, Jesus the Son of God and of man, the lion of the tribe of Judah, it brings us to our knees, and we fearfully have to ask, “What is the cause of such tears?” The Lord himself answers us in words of deep emotion. He is not weeping for himself. He is not weeping because of his own approaching suffering. He represses these feelings. They are tears of love and sorrow that he sheds for his unhappy Jerusalem. He knows that there is still a time of grace for Jerusalem, that she may still be saved and raised to her true glory if at the last moment she turns with her whole heart to the Messiah who is just entering her. But he also sees Jerusalem’s hardness of heart. He sees how she rejects her only helper and savior, and that because of this the storm clouds of God’s judgment gather ever more darkly over the beloved city. He sees her at last, broken and ruined by the iron military power of the pagan Romans, sinking in smoke and rubble.
Jesus’ tears also have significance for us. He weeps for us, too, as long as we rush unrepentant along the broad way that leads to destruction. The tears of a mother for her morally corrupt child ought to wake him out of his sleep of sin. The tears of Immanuel ought to fall into our sinful hearts like drops of smelted gold, burning, startling, and shaking us up.
How many nations are still blinded like Jerusalem of old! They build their houses and palaces and set up their governments without fear of God and without prayer, obstinately relying on their own strength. They do not see God’s approaching judgment; they do not feel the quaking of the earth under their feet; they reject all admonitions to repent and turn around. How many people who call themselves Christians, even the old and infirm, do not see their death coming! They do not make use of the time of grace still given them; they do not lay hold of the one who alone can save them and make them blessed. Oh, that the tears of Jesus’ love may still move us all, before it is too late, to consider what gives true peace.
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Tuesday Morning
The Grain of Wheat
Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”
John 12:20–26
WHEN THE LORD HAD ENTERED the forecourt of the temple after his solemn entry into Jerusalem, some Greeks also wanted to see Jesus. Just as after his birth the wise men from the east approached him, so now before his death these Greeks come as representatives of the nations of the world. Moved by the news of the raising of Lazarus, struck by the jubilation of the surging crowd, they expressed their wish to see the Lord – the very deep and mostly unconscious longing of all pagans and indeed of the whole human race.
Jesus himself saw in their coming the beginning of his future glorification, which was to reveal him not only as Israel’s Messiah but also as the head and savior of all nations. At the same time in the parable of the grain of wheat, he taught his hearers that his way to glory could only be through death. As at dawn the light of the coming day blends with the darkness of the night, here the Lord’s sadness over his approaching death was interwoven with the joyful hope of resurrection.
In the parable of the grain of wheat he points to Golgotha and the tomb in Joseph’s garden. When the divine grain of wheat was buried, his disciples surely thought of these words and began to sense something of their meaning. But it was also for us that the Lord went this way, and we should now go with him: that is, we should die with him, crucify our old nature at his cross, and finally sink into the earth, trusting in him. But our dying should also be illuminated by the assurance of a blessed resurrection.
In spring the grain of wheat that was sown awakens to new life, and all the other young blades of wheat shine with it in fresh green. They ripen and bear fruit in the light of the sun. It is the same with the highest form of nature: humankind. We also can only attain to new and more beautiful life through death and the grave. Even though the winter is long, the day of resurrection must come when this human seed, buried with so many tears, will awaken and bloom. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is our guarantee for this. If this heavenly grain of wheat had not fallen into the earth and died, then Christ would have remained alone, the unique God-man, highly exalted, apart from and above all other humans. But now, since he has died and risen from the dead, he bears fruit many thousandfold. All of us who live on earth as his redeemed, the church in whom he lives, gathered from all nations, and the countless hosts of the blessed in the heavenly paradise – all form the one nation, the one body of the Lord, the blessed fruit of his resurrection. And when finally spring comes and Easter morning dawns for those whose bodies rest in the earth, when they are raised in eternal transfiguration to live on the new earth under the new heaven, then the Lord Jesus Christ will be the sun that illuminates them and he will be glorified in all.
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Tuesday Evening
When I Am Lifted Up
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.
John 12:32–33
THE LORD SPOKE THIS WORD about his being lifted up to the Jewish people and to the seeking Greeks shortly after he had entered the temple forecourt. What he meant here by his “lifting up” is explained not only by John’s addition, “This he said to indicate the kind of death he was to die,” but also by what the Lord himself said to Nicodemus, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14).
In contrast to the lifting up desired by the disciples and the populace (that is, being raised to the royal throne of a worldly monarchy) the Lord here envisages being lifted up on the cross, where in his sacrificial death he was to bear the whole curse that the serpent had brought upon the human race. Nevertheless, just as the foot of the cross was rooted in the earth while its head was raised to heaven, he was to die only in order to be raised to the throne of
