Did Not Know

Luke 19:41-48
Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025

William G. Carter

As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.” Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.” Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.

The Palm Sundays of my childhood were joyful events. It was one of the few Sundays when the choir marched down the aisle. The ushers handed out palms. We sang triumphant music. We dressed in the bright colors of spring. On Palm Sunday, Jesus was our triumphant king. Everything was right with the world.

As I reflect back, the celebration reflected our social location. Our Presbyterian Church was in a county seat. There was a high scale affluence. IBM was the major employer in our town. Everything seemed right with the world, or at least our little corner of it. Many of the Presbyterians didn’t seem to notice we lived on the northern shoulder of Appalachia.

Our celebration was festive and joyful. There was optimism in the air. It had a narcotic event. While our parents sipped coffee after the service, kids like me had imaginary sword fights with the palms they gave us in church.

That’s how we celebrated Palm Sunday when I was a kid. There was no clue anybody was going to die by the end of the week, especially Jesus.

So, it feels like jumping in a vat of ice water to hear how the Gospel of Luke tells the story. Jesus rides a borrowed donkey downhill from the town of Bethany. As he comes around the bend, he sees Jerusalem in all its splendor. Rather than burst into praise, he begins to weep. Rather than echo the enthusiasm of the crowd around him, Jesus shouts to the city, “If only you had recognized today the things that make for peace.” Then he adds, “Because you don’t recognize God’s visit to you, your enemies will crush you to the ground.”

Happy Palm Sunday! If you expected happiness and joy, Luke’s story is a downer.

The pilgrims still march that route. They assemble at the top of the hill and sing hosannas. They wave palm branches. Then they come around the bend, take in the majestic view, and there’s a church a few steps to the right. It’s called Dominus Flevit, which means “The Lord wept.” The building is shaped like a teardrop. It does not get a lot of tourists. It’s not what they want for Palm Sunday.

Let’s reflect on that. Why the uniquely positive spin for the day when Jesus rides into the city that will kill him? Are we going to race through the events of Holy Week and get to the happy ending on Easter? Perhaps. Holy Week services are a bit of downer, too. At least, that’s what some folks have told me. The Last Supper, the betrayal, the arrest, the hammering of nails, the last gasp of breath – it is a lot to process.

At this point in my life, I value what Luke is trying to tell us. That even in the midst of our hosannas and hallelujahs, there’s a lot of unfinished business. When Easter comes, it doesn’t bring instant recognition of God or an understanding of the things that make for peace. My goodness, Jesus was talking about Jerusalem. That city hasn’t had any peace in two thousand years. And if we take a deep breath, we realize he’s talking about us.

When Jesus offers his lament, he speaks in the language of the Jewish prophets. This is one of the ways Luke describes his ministry. Just about the time Pontius Pilate visits Jerusalem from the west, surrounded by a military parade and a display of force, Jesus rides in from the east. The people around him carry no weapons. They are singing Passover psalms. They offer their coats as a makeshift saddle. The contrast could not be more dramatic. Power on one side of the city, humility on the other.

It's just as the prophet Zechariah imagined: “Rejoice, your king comes on a donkey… He will cut off the warhorse from Jerusalem.”[1] Jesus knew what the prophet wrote. Why else did he arrange ahead of the time for the donkey?

And there is lament itself, the weeping. It’s right out of the prophet Jeremiah. From chapter eight, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me; my heart is sick… For the brokenness of my people I am broken. I mourn, and horror has seized me.”[2] Jesus knew the prophet Jeremiah’s writings. Why else would he pause when he saw the city?

Luke wants us to remember Jesus is a truth-teller. Jesus knows there is a lot of hurt in the world. Forcefulness will not fix it. Neither will it be healed if someone tries to smooth it over. So, he weeps, weeps for the city, weeps for all the people within it, weeps for those of us centuries later who haven’t figured out the things that make for peace. They did not know. Neither do we.

In an elegant passage from his Palm Sunday sermon, Frederick Buechner wrote,

I think he weeps for every place on the face of this heartbreaking planet where children have no food to eat and no place to turn to, and the dispossessed turn to lawlessness and chaos, and the homeless sleep wrapped in newspapers to keep out the cold. And I think he weeps too for the rich who have homes all over creation but often can find no home inside themselves and who add to the world’s pain, and to their own pain, less by any evil they do than by the good they don’t do, the good they could do, maybe even dream of doing but somehow never quite get around to doing very well, for the poor and broken of the world. I think he weeps for all those who hunger and thirst after righteousness but don’t know where it is to be found, or are afraid to find it, or don’t even know that it is what they are hungering for maybe more than they hunger for anything else. There at the bend in the road he weeps, in other wors, for all of us an for the self-destroying, world-destroying darkness that is part of all of us, and says to you and me as he said to Jerusalem all those centuries ago, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace,” if only for peace inside our own skins.[3]  

To put it simply, the world is a mess. That’s why the Christ weeps. That’s why anybody weeps. And it’s precisely why this day is grounded in a single Hebrew word: Hosanna! Some think this is a praise word. It certainly sounds like that. But at its heart, it is a prayer word. Hosanna means “save us.” It’s the best word of all for this beginning of Holy Week. Saving is exactly what Jesus does. For those who can recognize it, Jesus saves in at least three ways: by speaking, by acting, by giving.

Jesus saves by speaking, by speaking truth. He reveals the hurt and names it. There is no saving if we don’t know what he is saving. The hurt is often buried, denied, and covered up. I think again of the prophet Jeremiah, speaking to Jerusalem centuries before Jesus, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace.”[4] Sounds like Jesus.

The prophet of God says, “Here is what is going on.” It is description. It is diagnosis. And it usually gets the prophet into trouble. Yet it’s the right thing to say, because it is the truth, and the truth matters, and nothing is healed if the truth is not told. Jesus has been telling the truth. Even now, a cross is being prepared just outside of the city.

Not only does Jesus speak, he acts. His donkey ride concludes at the door of the Jerusalem Temple. He storms inside and chases out all the merchants. Luke holds both scenes together, as if to say, “All in a day’s work.” The coming of the prophet leads to the acting of the prophet. And the cleansing of the Temple was not a purging of the gift shop, as popularly described. Rather, Jesus quotes the prophet Jeremiah. “Has this house of God become a den of robbers?” asks the prophet. A den of robbers.

Well, whom did they rob? They robbed those in need, like the widows and the orphans who had no other means of income. And they robbed the resident aliens from other countries. And they worshiped gods of their own invention and lied about what they were doing. That’s how the prophet Jeremiah described it.

The historians now tell us the Sadducees, the keepers of the Temple, had cut a deal with the Roman army. The Sadducees kept a thumb on the status quo, effectively keeping the needy in need. In return, the Romans would allow them to keep their wealth and play church in their Temple. Jesus arrives, makes a tussle, effectively announcing the whole system’s coming down.[5] That had happened by the time Luke wrote down the story.

Jesus speaks, Jesus acts. And the end of the week, Jesus gives. He was always giving. Giving food to the crowds, giving wisdom to the simple, giving healing to the sick, and finally giving his life. He willingly took on the injustice, the brokenness, and the sin that conspired to silence him. The miracle, the saving miracle, is that he gave it all away. Even on the cross he says, “Father, forgive them (give it away for them), for they don’t know what they are doing.” Or to put it in the words of Palm Sunday, “They do not recognize the time of their visitation. They do not know the things that make for peace.”

Jesus saves by giving: giving himself. He does not “save himself,” as he was devilishly tempted.[6] He doesn’t give in or give up. He gives away. That’s the true meaning of forgiveness. We “give away” the hurt, give away the damage. We release it, we let it go. It’s the only way there can be a new beginning. Can’t you see? Don’t you know? This is what makes for peace.

Soon after he was born, another prophet, the prophet Simeon approached his parents in the Temple. The same Temple. Luke says, “He was looking for the consolation of Israel.” Let’s say he was looking for the things that make for peace. Peeking in the little blue blanket, he said to Mary and Joseph, “This child is destined for the fall and rising of many.”

The fall is the tragedy, of course. The days would come when the enemies of Jerusalem would build the ramparts, surround the city, hem it in, and crash it to the ground. And the days would come when those same enemies would be surrounds, hemmed in, and crash to the ground. Every empire rises and falls. Sometimes it collapses under its own excess.

But there is the rising, too. The raising of many, just as Jesus has been raised. If we are granted the vision to know the things that make for peace, blessed are all who do them. Blessed are those who lift others up. Blessed are those who lift up the work that Jesus left for us to do. Blessed are those who speak the truth and expose the selfish. Blessed are those who cancel the power of sin by forgiving it.

Palm Sunday pushes the story forward. By the end of the week, Jesus is the first one to rise. His raising was God’s vindication of everything Jesus said, did, and gave. Today, we celebrate that he keeps coming back into our town. Maybe this time we will know him when we see him. Maybe this time we will get it right. Maybe this time he will have to keep forgiving us until we understand peace, his peace, God’s peace. Let’s see how that goes.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Zechariah 9:9-10.

[2] Jeremiah 8:18, 21.

[3] Frederick Buechner, “The Gates of Dawn,” The Longing for Home (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) 163-164.

[4] Jeremiah 6:14.

[5] Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus Final Days in Jerusalem (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) 39-52.

[6] Luke 23:37, 39.