Hear The Weeping
The Rev. Dr. Stephen R. Montgomery
Senior Pastor, Idlewild Presbyterian Church
Memphis, TN

(This sermon is also available in audio)

The Lenten journey now, just like this Lenten Preaching Series, is almost complete. Everything has been said, hasn't it? We've heard sermons every day for five weeks now. And those sermons have been preached by a kaleidoscope of preachers. We heard Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, AME's , Catholics, Jews and Presbyterians. We've heard male and female, white and black, professor and preacher, local and national, young and not-so-young. We've heard prophetic sermons, pastoral sermons, doctrinal sermons and narrative sermons. We've laughed, cried and slept a little, maybe. There doesn't seem to be a lot more that can be said. We are primed and ready to enter the city.

Maybe we should do the Presbyterian thing and entertain a motion to conclude right now and adjourn to the Waffle Shop. (Let the record show that the motion dies for lack of a second.)

But we're just about ready. The children have their palms. Word has reached the city that we're coming and the crowds are starting to gather by the side of the road to get a good look. Jesus is getting on his donkey that has never been ridden. (I once tried to get on a donkey that had never been ridden, and after that it was still a donkey that had never been ridden.) We're ready for a showdown, a final victory. We are going to oust the tyrants who have oppressed and humiliated the people. The disciples had been planning this for some time. Things are going so well. Here we go….

But wait….Jesus halts things. What's this? He sees all the excitement, he's on the hill overlooking the city. Crowds are yelling "Hosanna!" There are parties in the streets. And he stops. Those who are closest to him see tears in his eyes. Why would he be weeping at a time like this? It's only those who are closest to him that can hear his words: "If you, even you, had only recognized the things that make for peace. But now, they are hidden from your eyes." He is weeping.

I wish that Jesus would be more explicit here. I wish that Peter would have stopped him and said "Jesus, tell us what you mean. What are the things that make for peace?" And then today we could tell each other, "These are the things that Jesus says make for peace….Number one…number two….number three."

But Jesus left it at that. He chose to keep it a mystery…or maybe he didn't tell us because it was so obvious.

I've pretty much devoted my life to trying to understand the things that make for peace, and I have to admit that I'm not much closer to that understanding than I was 23 years ago when I entered the ministry. But I got a nudge not too long ago from a Bible commentary of all places. The writer had translated this from the Greek, and he translated it to say, "You do not know the things that make for peace," and then it had an equals mark, "salvation."

He was saying that for Luke, peace equals salvation. The things that make for peace are the things that make for salvation. Now that's interesting, because the people in Jerusalem were lining up as was the custom to welcome returning military heroes. They had done this for generations. What they did not see, hidden from their eyes, was that Jesus was not talking military language but salvation language. They had understood Jesus' words, but they had not understood Jesus' meaning. They understood peace in narrow, political, military terms; while Jesus understood peace as being as wide as salvation itself.

It's easy to see how the disciples could be confused. This was, after all, the era of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. There was but one superpower in the world, but unfortunately, it was a superpower militarily and not a superpower morally. Caesar had done all that he could to do keep the peace. He'd gone into Carthage because of its threat to the peace and burned it down, then planted fields. Peace. Caesar would keep a tight grip on the people, and so people dared not criticize him for fear of disturbing the peace or being branded unpatriotic. "We need to keep the peace," they'd say. But Jesus knew that there was no peace, and he wept over the deception.

Today, with all that is going on in our lives, the life of our nation, the life of the world, we need to pause, halt the parade, and hear that weeping, for somehow those tears just might be the key to our peace, our salvation. It won't be easy, but nothing short of looking at the world in a whole different way; nothing short of a whole different way of thinking--different purpose, different goals--will save us. Nothing short of conversion will do.

I'm not talking about the kind of conversion that many Christians are drooling over right now. We've got all sorts of mission groups ready, waiting at the border of Iraq right now, to come in and share the love of Jesus to that country. And the leaders of these groups are the very ones who have called Islam a "wicked" religion, who have called Mohammed a pedophile. They're going to have a field day converting those souls.

No, this is not just conversion in the religious sense of the word. Remember, Jesus was weeping over his disciples, "you, even you, do not know the things that make for peace." I'm talking about a whole newness. "If a person is in Christ" we read in scripture, "that person is a new being altogether." Nothing less than that kind of conversion will save us. And here's the good news: It can be done!

There is a riddle that I first heard when I was in college that helps make the point. It goes like this: A man and his son were in a terrible automobile accident. The father was killed instantly. The son, seriously wounded, was rushed to the emergency room where it was determined that immediate surgery was required to save his life. The surgeon was summoned and quickly arrived. Only, the surgeon took one look at the boy and declared in horror, "I cannot operate on this boy. He is my son."

To get the riddle we had to adjust to a way of thinking different from the way most of us had been accustomed to thinking most of our lives. It took forever to figure it out back then, but I asked this riddle to several people this week, and most of them got it right away. The surgeon, of course, was the boy's mother. Over time we have adjusted our way of thinking about the roles of women in our society. We still have a ways to go. There are still denominations that don't believe that God is an equal opportunity employer, but we have changed our way of thinking!

But Jesus calls us to do more. He never suggested that conversion was anything less than a total and radical change in the way one thinks about things--about everything, including peace.

The people of Jesus' day were longing for something new, hence the excitement, but they had become so numb to the way things were, that they couldn't see it when it was right before their eyes. Jeremiah, years before Jesus, sensed what was happening: "The people say, 'Peace, peace, but there is no peace.' The people were not ashamed," he said. "They did not know how to blush." They had become numb to the way things were.

Walter Brueggemann tells of the time he was in the sixth grade and a two-engine plane crashed in a cornfield near his house. He ran with his young friends to watch as the ambulance crew, with rubber gloves, lifted bloody pieces of the passengers from the crater the wreckage had carved in the cornfield. He tells of watching as they stuffed what they could find of those people into plastic bags. But the memory that lingers most in his mind was that of watching a "woman standing next to him holding a baby, eating an apple." He remembers, he says, wondering "How can she do that, now, here?" Only later did he understand, it was because "she had no shame. She had no sense of incongruity, no sense of disproportion." She was numb.

We have in our time, all but lost our capacity to be appalled and indignant and ashamed about things that really matter--about things that make for peace. I remember reading somewhere of a UNICEF study that calculated what it would cost to provide adequate food, clothing, and basic medical care and education for every child on the face of the earth. It amounted to what the world spends on armaments in two weeks…and there is no blushing over the inconsistency.

I wonder if there was much embarrassment on the part of the crowds who followed Jesus during the events of that last week of his life…the one that is almost here that we call Holy. Or did the people simply become numb and say, "This is the way things are, always have been, and always will be." I suspect the latter. It's my guess the only embarrassment they felt as Jesus halted the parade to survey the city was that the parade might get off schedule.

People were numb that day, as they were in Jeremiah's day, as they are in our day. Apparently only Luke paid any attention to this pathos filled moment--the tears of Jesus--but those tears just might be the key to our conversion, the key to our peace, the key to our salvation.

Walter Wangerin, Lutheran priest and author, tells the story of a period in his son Matthew's life when the youngster really loved to read comic books. The Wangerins were not opposed to comic books per se, but wanted Matthew to read only "quality" comic books. One day his parents were mystified to find in his room stacks upon stacks of contraband comic books. Upon closer inspection they realized that they belonged to the public library-not checked out, but stolen. With the anguish of any parents in that situation, they determined that Matthew should do the right thing. They gave him a talking to about honesty, made him gather up the comic books and take them back to the library and confess what he had done. They hoped and prayed that was the end of the problem.

But sometime later they found unexplained quantities of comic books in Matthew's room again. This time they had been shoplifted from a convenience store near the place the family vacationed, miles away. Since distance made it unrealistic to return them, they insisted that Matthew build a fire and burn every one of them. Again they told Matthew how disappointed they were at his dishonesty, and hoped he had learned his lesson, but, before too long, they found stolen comic books in his room again.

Really desperate this time, and angry, his father took Matthew to his study where he proceeded to give Matthew another lecture and, on top of that, the spanking of his life. Then, leaving Matthew in the study to "think things over," Walter Wangerin went out of the room and closed the door behind him. Then this father, who loved his son, leaned against the wall in the hallway and wept. "He wept because of what his son had done. He wept because of what he had done. He wept because he did not know what would happen to his boy in the future if he could not convince him to honor the values he knew to be right."

Years later, after Matthew had become a reasonably respectable adult, he and his mother were reminiscing about his childhood. One of them remembered the story of the stolen comic books. "Well, you know," Matthew told his mother, "after that time Dad spanked me I never stole again." She asked, "Was that because he spanked you?" Matthew replied, "No, it was because after he left the room, I heard him crying, and I could never take anything again."

And so this Lenten journey draws to a close. We approach the city. We hear the crowds. They're jubilant. Victory is approaching. They are shouting and dancing in the streets, "We're number 1! The parade is about to start."

But….what's that we hear? Listen! It is weeping. The weeping of someone who is not numb to the pain and hurt. What's that we see? If you look closely, you can see tears. The tears of one who is embarrassed at the deception of those who do not know the things that make for peace.

Pay attention to those tears, dear friends, for they just might be the key to our conversion, our peace, our very salvation! Thanks be to God!

Copyright ©2003 The Rev. Dr. Stephen R. Montgomery

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