Luke 13:31-35 · Jesus’ Sorrow for Jerusalem
Eyes Set on Jerusalem
Luke 13:31-35
Sermon
by King Duncan
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Have you ever noticed that airlines have crazy rules? And the way they set airfares sometimes defies comprehension.

One man tells about wanting to go on vacation. He couldn’t decide whether to go to Salt Lake City or Denver. He wanted to visit Denver, but money was tight so he decided to let the amount of the fare make his decision for him. He called one airline and asked what the fare was to Denver.

“Airfare to Denver is $300 per person,” said the reservation agent.

Then he asked, “What about Salt Lake City?”

“Oh,” said the agent, “we have a really great rate right now to Salt Lake City . . . only $99, but there is a stopover.”

“Where?” asked the man.

“In Denver,” the agent answered.

What a crazy system! I hope he was able to stay in Denver once he got there . . . but who knows? Usually it pays in life to know your destination before you set out on your journey.

Business people know that. There is a famous study involving graduates of Yale University of the class of 1953. It was about goal setting. Setting goals is important. Do you know where you are headed in life? Do you know how you are going to get there? Have you counted the cost of what it will take to get you there?

The graduates involved in these studies at Yale were asked if they had a clear, specific set of goals for their future. Then they were asked if these goals were written down with a plan for achieving them? It turned out that only 3 percent of those interviewed had ever written down their goals.

You probably know where I am headed with this. Twenty years later, in 1973, the researchers went back and interviewed the surviving members of the 1953 graduating class. They discovered that the 3 percent with written specific goals had achieved more in financial terms than the entire other 97 percent put together. They were also happier and more satisfied with their lives. It pays to know where you are going.

Jesus knew where he was going. He probably never had a set of written goals, but there was no hesitation about where he would end up. In today’s lesson Jesus eyes’ are set on Jerusalem--the Holy City. This was his destiny and thus his destination. This was God’s will for his life.

He knew what it would mean to go to Jerusalem. He tells us in this passage: “surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!” Jesus knew that going to Jerusalem would be fatal for him and yet he did not turn back. He was committed. He was courageous. Most importantly, he cared too much to turn back.

For whom did he care? I’m glad you asked.

He cared, first of all, for the people of Jerusalem. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

Later on the day we know as Palm Sunday, Luke tells us, as Jesus approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “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 upon 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 19:41-44).

Forty years later that prophecy was fulfilled. The Roman army stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. Jesus loved the people of Jerusalem. But he could not help them if they rejected the message he came to bring them. On that day long ago, all he could do was weep for the city.

Bishop Hazen Werner once told about a doctor who years ago placed a call to a specialist in a town 50 or 60 miles away. The doctor told the specialist to tell him about a young boy who was critically ill. The boy had contracted an infection that was causing him to hemorrhage internally.

“I don’t know how to deal with this infection,” said the first doctor, “but you do. This is your area of specialty. Can you come at once?”

The specialist said, “I’m on my way.” The specialist jumped in his car and headed toward the hospital where the young boy lay. Reaching the outskirts of his own town, he stopped at a traffic light. Suddenly his car door was yanked open and a man wearing a grey cap, a brown leather jacket and holding a very intimidating revolver shouted at him, “Get out of the car!”

The doctor said, “But I can’t get out. You see, I’m trying . . .”

The man with the revolver cut him off in mid-sentence. “I don’t care what you are trying to do. Get out of that car or I will kill you!” The doctor got out of the car and the man with the grey cap and the brown leather jacket jumped into the car and drove off.

The doctor tried desperately to find a telephone since this was before the cell phone was invented. After trying four or five homes where nobody was home, he finally found someone who would allow him to call a taxi. The taxi took him to the bus station. He boarded a bus and finally got to his intended destination--but he was two hours later than he had planned. The other doctor met him at the door and said, “I’m glad you came, but you’re too late. The boy died nearly 20 minutes ago. Maybe if you had not been delayed, you could have saved him.” Then he added, “I would like for you to come with me to meet the boy’s mother and father, though. His father is nearly hysterical with grief. Maybe you can say something to comfort him.”

As they entered the family waiting room the doctor saw the father--wearing a grey cap and a brown leather jacket. It was the man who stole his car. In his hurry to get to the hospital, the father had shut out of the car the one man who could save his son. (1)

The people of Israel made that same mistake. They rejected the one man who could save them. And thus, Jesus wept.

Please do not regard Jesus’ tears as a sign of weakness. Can you imagine the courage it took for him to go to Jerusalem, knowing in advance that he would die there?

Thirty-three years old . . . still a young man with amazing promise . . . a possible world of adventure lay before him . . . he could have literally had it all . . . with no pain . . . but he turned his back on pleasures that could have been his in order to bear witness in Jerusalem to his Father’s love.

Weak people offer up bluster, threats and words of intimidation. The truly strong man looks death in the face and gives his or her life for a cause bigger than himself.

The lyrics of some of our hymns are so misleading: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild . . .” One thing Jesus was not was meek and mild.

Bryan Chapell in a resource for pastors tells a story which he heard two missionaries tell. Paul and Carolyn London are missionaries in Sudan, one of the most dangerous places on earth.

Paul says that in that part of Africa the strongest man in a tribe is the chief. “You might think this is because the chief must wear a very large headdress and heavy ceremonial robes,” Paul says, “but there are other reasons . . .”

“Water is very scarce where these people live, so they have to dig deep wells. These are not wells as we know them--with brick walls, a pulley, and a bucket at the end of a rope. The African people sink a narrow well shaft as much as 100 feet into the ground. Even though the well is deep, the ground water of that dry land seeps very slowly into it and there is never a drop to waste. If the water were too easy to reach, the people might not use it sparingly, or an enemy might steal the next day’s supply at night. So, the tribesmen cut alternating slits into the wall of the well all the way down to the water. By alternating his weight from one leg to the other, a man can use these slits as steps to walk down the shaft to the water. Only the largest, strongest men can make the arduous climb down the well and back up again with a full water skin for the whole tribe.

“One day a man carrying water out of the shaft fell and broke his leg. He lay at the bottom of the well. No one dared to help because no one had the strength to make the climb carrying another man. The chief was summoned. When he saw the plight of the injured man, he doffed his massive headdress and discarded his ceremonial robe. Then the chief climbed down into the well, took the weight of the injured man on himself, and brought the man to safety. The chief did what no one else could do.” (2)

The chief had to be strong. The welfare of the tribe depended on him.

Jesus wept that day as he looked over Jerusalem not because he was weak but because he was magnificently strong. He cared for the people of Jerusalem. He would gladly have carried them out of the well if they would let him. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he cried. “You who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

I wonder if Jesus doesn’t weep over our land as he did his own land long ago. For certainly we are just as far from serving God in our daily lives as were they. Jesus set his eyes toward Jerusalem because he cared for Jerusalem.

But it wasn’t just because he cared for Jerusalem. Jesus cares for every man, woman, young person and child on this earth no matter where they may live or even who they may worship.

One of the mistakes that many of the religious people of Jesus’ time made was that they thought God loved them alone. They believed that there was something special about their tribe that made God love them more than other people. Of course there are people in every tribe who believe that about their own people. That is why human history is most often told in the great wars we have fought.

The Jewish people looked at themselves as God’s own people. And to a point, they were right. But it was not because God loved them any more than He loved anyone else. It was because God had given them a special task. They were to show forth God’s divine purpose for His world. They were to be a light to the nations of the world. But they wanted the spotlight, not to be a searchlight seeking to save the lost.

Jesus set his eyes toward Jerusalem because he loved his own people, but also because he loves every person on this planet. And that, of course, means he cares for you and me.

Speaker Ron Hutchcraft tells about a news story that gained worldwide attention a few years ago. It was about an earthquake that rocked the mountain kingdom of Nepal. “Thousands of people lost their lives,” reports Ron Hutchcraft. Many more found their world, their homes, actually their very lives wiped away.

“There were some who survived the quake,” he continues, “but they faced the prospect of dying in the aftermath.” For example, there were climbers on Mt. Everest, trapped on the mountain by massive avalanches. Eighteen of them died when part of Everest collapsed on their base camp. “There were 140 surviving climbers, but when they tried to go down through the escape route, it was impossibly blocked by fallen rocks. And as time passed, their food was running out; their water was running out.”

But then, when it looked like they would all perish, there was a wondrous sound in the sky. Helicopters. One after another these helicopters somehow landed on that mountain, saving those climbers, taking out two at a time.

And there was a 27-year-old man named Rishi who was trapped beneath a collapsed hotel, lying amidst the stench of dead bodies for 82 hours under mountains of concrete. He was running out of hope. Then, after ten hours of digging through concrete, the rescuers broke through. Rishi is alive . . . the climbers are alive. Why? Because the rescuers came.

“One six-letter word,” says Hutchcraft, “that was the difference between life and death for the men on the mountain and the man in the rubble. That six-letter word was “Rescue.”

‘Hope in Nepal,” says Ron Hutchcraft, “depended on--as it is in so many disasters--a rescuer from above. And that,” says Ron Hutchcraft “is where [this news story] intersects my life and yours. Because hope for [us also] depended on a rescuer from above. At the spiritual crossroads of [our lives we were] trapped in a place where we would have died. Except our Rescuer came. Jesus. The One called ‘Savior’ by millions of people around the world. That’s Savior as in Rescuer.

“In fact, the Bible says . . . in Galatians 1:3, ‘Jesus gave His life for our sins . . . in order to rescue us.’ Not to start a religion. Not to be an example or a teacher. But to rescue us. So, it isn’t about a religion, called Christianity, it’s about a rescuer named Jesus. He came to rescue us at the cost of His life.” (3)

He set his eyes toward Jerusalem. He knew the fate that awaited him, but he did not hesitate. Why? Because he was committed. Because he was courageous. But more than that, because he cared. He cared for Jerusalem. Even more importantly, he cared for the world that His Father created out of love. And that means it was because he cared for you and me. Gregory of Nazianzus, in 381 A.D. asked, “Who is Jesus?” And he answered with these words:

  • He began His ministry by being hungry, yet He is the Bread of Life.
  • Jesus ended His earthly ministry by being thirsty, yet He is the Living Water.
  • Jesus was weary, yet He is our rest.
  • Jesus paid tribute, yet He is the King.
  • Jesus was accused of having a demon, yet He cast out demons.
  • Jesus wept, yet He wipes away our tears.
  • Jesus was sold for thirty pieces of silver, yet He redeemed the world.
  • Jesus was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, yet He is the Good Shepherd.
  • Jesus died, yet by His death He destroyed the power of death.

 Have you made this Jesus the Master of your life?


1. Contributed. Source unknown.

2. Bryan Chapell, Using Illustrations to Preach with Power (Revised Edition).

3. Ron Hutchcraft, “A Word With You,” http://www.hutchcraft.com/. Cited by MONDAY FODDER, http://family-safe-mail.com/.

ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., Dynamic Preaching First Quarter 2019 Sermons, by King Duncan