After a long absence from the city of Jerusalem, Jesus and His disciples were making their way toward the temple for what was to be the last three days of the Savior's public ministry.
The Savior's own people had rejected Him. "They chose to ignore the fact that He was, in the flesh, the son of David; and when, as their Messiah, He had called Himself the Son of God, they had raised their hands in pious horror, and had taken up stones to stone Him," wrote Frederic W. Farrar in The Life of Christ."Their [the Sanhedrin's] wisdom was utterly at fault, and though they claimed so haughtily to be leaders of the people, yet, even on a topic so ordinary and so important as their Messianic hopes, they were convicted, for the second time in a single day, of being `blind leaders of the blind.' (See Matt. 15:14 and Luke 6:39.)
"And they loved their blindness; they would not acknowledge their ignorance; they did not repent of their faults; the bitter venom of their hatred to Him was not driven forth by His forbearance; the dense midnight of their perversity was not dispelled by His widsom. Their purpose to destroy Him was fixed, obstinate, irreversible; and if one plot failed, they were but driven with more stubborn sullenness into another."
Coming near the city of Jerusalem, Jesus looked over it and wept. "He had dropped silent tears at the grave of Lazarus; here He wept aloud," Farrar wrote. "All the shame of His mockery, all the anguish of His torture, was powerless, five days afterwards, to extort from Him a single groan, or to wet His eyelids with one trickling tear; but here, all the pity that was within Him overmastered His human spirit, and He not only wept, but broke into a passion of lamentation, in which the choked voice seemed to struggle for its utterance. A strange Messianic triumph! A strange interruption of the festal cries! The Deliverer weeps over the city which it is now too late to save; the King prophesies the total ruin of the nation which He came to rule!"
The Savior's lamentation is recorded in Matt. 23:37-39:
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
"Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
"For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."
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