St. Matthew's Sermons

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished.”

Our Lord’s turn toward Jerusalem in the Gospel Lesson signals the fulfillment of a long-awaited promise. To see why, we have to go back to the Old Testament, not as it is in our Bibles, but as it would have been read in the synagogues of ancient Judea. There, we would see the Old Testament scrolls arrayed in their ancient order of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. And there, at the end of the final scroll, the last words in the Scriptures would have been those of a foreign king, Cyrus of Persia, stirred by the Lord to pronounce to his empire the end of the Jewish Captivity: “All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? The LORD his God be with him, and let him go up.”

We know from reading the latter prophets, especially Zechariah and Malachi, that the return from Captivity did not restore the Kingdom to its former glory. Neither did the people who returned from exile actually turn away from their former sins, to the anxious frustration of the priests and rulers of the time. They had returned, but they had not turned from their old ways. The people had come back, but they were still not home.

By the time of Christ, the faithful in Jerusalem and the synagogues each Sabbath would have sat for centuries with those final words of the Scriptures, and with them a persistent question: when would God send the King promised to the prophets to usher in the restoration of Israel? Had they not ‘gone up’ and rebuilt Jerusalem? Why then, after their homecoming, had the place not yet become home again? By pronouncing to the disciples that it was now time to go up, Jesus inaugurated a pilgrimage to restore what had long been missing. The place had been rebuilt, but the Person whose presence made the place what it was meant to be had not yet returned. Now, though, the Lord would return to His chosen temple-home among His ancient chosen people. He would go to make all things new, and would invite His disciples to join Him on His pilgrimage and to participate in His work.

But the character of that pilgrimage becomes immediately clear with Jesus’ very next words: “For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.” Jesus anticipates His rejection in Jerusalem, a rejection that will render perpetually incomplete the old Jerusalem and all it represents. In a terrible irony, those who waited upon the fulfillment of the promise will put to death the One who comes to fulfill the promise. Yet that rejection will also signal the establishment of a new Jerusalem constituted in Christ Himself.

But this is the point at which the disciples’ understanding of what Jesus is saying comes suddenly to a halt. Until Jesus goes up to Jerusalem, they cannot see what it really means to ‘go up’ to Jerusalem. Until the Resurrection, they will not be able to understand what He means in this moment, how it can be that redemption and glory must come through suffering and death. And yet, though they do not see, they still follow Him.

To follow Jesus up to Jerusalem means to partake of His Passion in the confident hope of partaking in His Resurrection. The pilgrimage to the Cross and the empty tomb, those central events of human history, is a formational journey of sacrificial love. As Jesus goes to lay down His life and to rise again, we are likewise called to follow Him as imitators of that self-giving love. Jesus makes this clear earlier in Luke’s Gospel: “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Again, in St. John’s Gospel He says to the disciples: “As I have loved you so you must love one another. By this the world will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” And finally, as He says a little further, “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

In the Epistle, St. Paul elaborates on this connection by basing the entire Christian life on the receiving and the giving of sacrificial love in Christ. Without it, no spiritual gift or authority, no theological insight or mystical understanding, no act of service or activist cause is worth anything. All depends on growth in the love of Christ, and the love of Christ means the embracing of the cross. As St. Paul sings of love: “love suffers long and is kind.” Love presupposes the arduous difficulty of loving at all, of encountering resistance and rejection in love, and yet remaining present in that suffering with a firm kindness. Love abstains from comparison, laying aside notions of better or worse, high or low, worthy or unworthy, and seeks the best and highest good for the other. Love commits to the burden of forgiveness, a work that is as heavy as the cross. It calls us to forgive from our hearts everyone for everything, to release them from what binds them for our sake, to pray for their salvation on the day of judgment. Every step of growth in this kind of love is one step farther along on the pilgrimage with Christ to the Jerusalem He is making. Love calls us to carry a cross with Christ, and then to die on it with everything that is ours that we might rise to pass freely through this world with the hopeful vision of the world to come set before us, the renewal of all things.

This high calling of sacrificial love, however, reveals how we are not yet ready to love like Jesus, and this is why we need Lent. Lent calls us back to the truth that before we can become those who join in Christ’s redemptive work, we need to made again into the people who, with repentance, receive Jesus as He goes up to Jerusalem. We must first acknowledge that we are those who rejected Him, scourged Him, and put Him to death. Only by remembering that we are those by whom and for whom the Lamb of God was slain can we begin to receive the healing and redemption that alone makes possible our participation in His mission. Once we have remembered and received again His love in the midst of our unloveliness, though, we are then called to bear witness in our words and actions to that mission by denying ourselves and being willing to offer all in self-giving love to imitate our Lord. Only then can His lenten journey then become ours. Lent must bring us to the end of ourselves, and only there can we receive the grace of redemptive love, which will transfigure us as bearers of that love to others.

Lent is a suffering bridled by hope, as is our life on the pilgrim trail through this world. On it we are formed in love for God and one another. To keep a good Lent is to grow in Love, because love is the life of God and the character of the Resurrection. Lent calls us to die to all that is not love and to be raised again to all that is love. Like the disciples, only through this dying and rising can we begin to understand, and only then will we see the Lord cheerfully go to suffering in order to keep His promises of redemption to Abraham, his children, and then to all of us who are made to be one family through Christ. When we are perfected in love, then we will see. As St. Paul says: “then we will know, even as we are fully known.” We will see the new Jerusalem and the renewed creation already among us and coming into its fullness. The journey back from exile and into communion, the Lenten journey of the Christian life, will one day be complete; And then, all at once and with the Lord, we will be home at last.
“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.”