Our Lord, The Lord, the hereditary King of the Jews according to the flesh, as well as the God of the Jews according to the Spirit, foresaw the destruction of the work of his own hands, of the spot on earth which was most precious to him. The ruin would be awful, the suffering horrible. The daughters of Jerusalem were to weep, not for him, but for themselves. Blessed would be the barren, and those that never nursed a child. They would call on the mountains to cover them, and on the hills to hide them, and call in vain. Such tribulation would fall on them as never had been since the making of the world. Mothers would eat their own children for famine. Three thousand crosses would stand at one time in the valley below with a living man writhing on each. Eleven hundred thousand souls would perish, or be sold as slaves. It must be. The eternal laws of retribution, according to which God governs the world, must have their way now. It was too late. It must happen now. But it need not have happened: and at that thought our Lord’s infinite heart burst forth in human tenderness, human pity, human love, as he looked on that magnificent city, those gorgeous temples, castles, palaces, that mighty multitude which dreamt so little of the awful doom which they were bringing on themselves.
And now, where is he that wept over Jerusalem? Has he left this world to itself? Does he care no longer for the rise and fall of nations, the struggles and hopes, the successes and the failures of mankind?
Not so, my friends. He has ascended up on high, and sat down at the right hand of God: but he has done so, that he might fill all things. To him all power is given in heaven and earth. He reigneth over the nations. He sitteth on that throne whereof the eternal Father hath said to him, ‘Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool;’ and again, ‘Desire of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the utmost ends of the earth for thy possession.’ He is set upon his throne (as St. John saw him in his Revelation) judging right, and ministering true judgment unto the people. The nations may furiously rage together, and the people may imagine a vain thing. The kings of the earth may stand up, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, ‘Let us break their bonds’—that is their laws,—‘asunder, and cast away their cords’—that is, their Gospel—‘from us.’ They may say, ‘Tush, God doth not see, neither doth God regard it. We are they that ought to speak. Who is Lord over us?’ Nevertheless Christ is King of kings, and Lord of lords; he reigns, and will reign. And kings must be wise, and the judges of the earth must be learned; they must serve the Lord in fear, and rejoice before him with reverence. They must worship the Son, lest he be angry, and so they perish from the right way. All the nations of the world, with their kings and their people, their war, their trade, their politics, and their arts and sciences, are in his hands as clay in the hands of the potter, fulfilling his will and not their own, going his way and not their own. It is he who speaks concerning a nation or a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it. And it is he again who speaks concerning a nation or kingdom, to build and to plant it. For the Lord is king, be the world never so much moved. He sitteth between the cherubim, though the earth be never so unquiet.