Jesus enters the city with royal state. The fifth period of our Gospel begins with this action. See page 181. The multitude take the tone of the occasion, and, by their welcome, their palm-branches, and their exultation, fill out the scene of this kingly procession. The shout of a King was among them. But the question still was, Would Zion rejoice? Would the children of Israel be joyful in their King 2 Would Jerusalem be glad because He was coming, meek and lowly, and riding upon an ass? Zech. 9: 9.
This was the inquisition now held. And we know the answer. In one language or another all the evangelists give it. "Ye would not," is said to the children of Jerusalem. "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not," is again the word upon Israel. And the whole course of the action here recorded gives the same answer. Jerusalem--that "favoured seat of God on earth, that heaven below the sky"--had defiled itself. The temple is unclean; the elders of the people are unbelieving; hypocrisy and love of the world stain the priests and scribes and rulers; they challenge instead of accepting Jesus; and traps and snares are laid for His feet where the crown should have been prepared for His head.
The action of these chapters, in this way, joins in the universal testimony against Jerusalem; and Jesus has to weep over that "city of peace." It had, of old, been His desire. "This is My rest," He had said of it. And as the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, He seeks no relief from other cities here, but weeps over this faithless one. And, till Jerusalem be restored, the earth, from one end of it to the other, is a Bochim to the spirit of Jesus in His saints. Their joy is divine and heavenly till then; for the earth yields not joy to them, if Jerusalem be disobedient.
It is very blessed to see that the place which the Lord chose for His dwelling on earth was Salem, the city of peace. There, in very early time, His holy witness and minister showed himself. Gen. 14. And so, when He Himself really descended to the earth, He came as "the Prince of peace," seeking Jerusalem; His heralds proclaiming "Peace on earth." Luke 2. But man was not ready for this. Man had previously built a city of confusion (Gen. 11); and builders of Babel could scarcely be prepared for a king of Salem. "The son of peace" was not on earth to answer the salutation of "the Prince of peace" from heaven. Jerusalem, in her day, knew not the things that belonged to her peace. He had, therefore, as we see here, only to weep over her. Her citizens had refused Him, had said He should not reign over them; and He has to return to the "far country" (the supreme seat and source of all power), to get His title to the kingdom sealed afresh.
All this, however, tells us that, when He returns, it must be in a new character. His return will be in "a day of vengeance," seeing that this visitation in "peace" was refused. And, as promising Him this day of vengeance on the citizens, the Lord says to Him, on reaching that "far country," "Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool." The Stone that was first offered as a foundation stone, sure and precious, was disallowed by the builders; and therefore now, ere it can reach its destined place of honour (that is, fill, like a great mountain, the whole earth), it must first smite the image. The kingdom that is to be taken by the returned nobleman is first to have all things that offend taken out of it. The unbelief and rebellion of man have thus shaped the course of the Lord of heaven and earth; and He has now to travel up to His glory and kingdom through "a day of vengeance."*
*This day of vengeance is to be on the Gentiles as well as on Israel; on "all nations" (Isa. 34, 63); for Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles, as well as Herod with the Jews, rejected the Chief Cornerstone. Acts 4: 27.
But (let the earth be for a while never so angry) He will still take the city of peace for His dwelling, and Salem shall still be true to her name: as He says by His prophet Haggai, "And in this place will I give peace;" for that alone is His "strong city" (Isa. 26); its walls will be salvation, and its gates praise. Man's strong city" will then have been made a ruin. Ps. 108 Isa. 26. The day of vengeance will have accomplished that, for the city of confusion and the city of peace cannot stand together. And when He has thus, on the overthrow of man's confusion, established His own peace, the earth will learn to answer the salutation of heaven, and to say, "Peace in heaven," of which the acclamations here give us the pledge and sample. See Luke 2: 14; Luke 19: 38.
It is easy to apprehend this, and the course of these two chapters presents it all to us very simply. Jerusalem being unprepared for Jesus of Nazareth, accounts for the need of two advents, and for the nobleman's returning in a day of vengeance. But we may remark that, in the midst of all this, denied as He was every thing for the present by the sons of men, still does He act in the consciousness of His lordship of every thing. He claims the ass from the owner of it, because He could say, speaking of Himself, "The Lord hath need of him." And it is very striking that, in the course of His life and ministry, though He was the rejected Galilean all the time, there was no form of the ancient glory that He did not assume. I have before observed how faith at times drew aside the veil, and disclosed His glory. But now I ask, What glory? All glories of Jehovah known and recorded of old--all glories which had taught Israel that their God was the one only Lord of heaven and earth. Thus: He healed leprosy, the well-known peculiar honour of God (2 Kings 5: 7); He put away all sicknesses, as the ancient Jehovah-rophi of Israel (Ex. 15: 26); He fed the multitudes in wildernesses again; He stilled the waves, as though He could again divide Jordan and the Red Sea; and He made the fish to bring Him tribute, as here He claims the ass, treating the earth and its fulness as all His own. The judicial glory of Jehovah He would also fill, when the occasion demanded it, pronouncing woe on the people, or leaving the city for desolation; as, of old, He had again and again judged and chastened His people, both in the wilderness and in Canaan. All the ancient forms of praise and honour known in Jehovah to Israel, He would thus put on; the Redeemer, the Leader, the Healer, the Feeder, and the Judge too, of His people. And, as led forth by the faith of a Gentile, He could show Himself one with Him Who, at the beginning, by His word, had made the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them. Luke 7.
It may well be a happy service to gather up these fragments of His glory in the midst of His humiliation. But I may further observe, that the two parables which we listen to in the course of this action bear us very much through the whole of the divine dispensations. That of the Labourers in the Vineyard gives us the dealings of God with Israel, from the day when they were planted as His people in Canaan, to the time of the mission and rejection of Christ, the Heir of the vineyard. That of the Ten Pounds takes the divine economy up from that moment, and carries us through the present age, until the second coming, or kingdom, of Christ. And in each of them we read of the Lord's going into a far country." Luke 19: 12; Luke 20: 9. The Lord of Israel did this. After He had left His people in their inheritance, in the days of Joshua, He withdrew in some sense, expecting that they would till the land He had given them, for His praise in the earth. But their history and this parable tell us the full disappointment of all such hopes. So Christ, the rejected Heir of the Jewish vineyard, has done this. Upon His rejection, He went into the same "far country" (heaven), leaving behind Him, not an earthly portion to the care of Jewish labourers, but talents, opportunities of serving Him, with His servants, under the promise of His return in the full title of the kingdom, then and there to reward them. And the parable tells us, as well as the history of our present age will tell us, the end of this. A very full view, after this manner, of God's great plans these parables give, coming out here in the most artless and natural way, in the course of this action.
But is not that a tender thought which is suggested here--that the saints are, in this age, left to serve their Master in a place where, after fullest deliberation, He has been refused and cast out? The citizens of it have said they will not have Him; and service, therefore, to be fully of right character, should be rendered in the recollection of this rejection.
And again; if we thus learn the nature of service from this parable generally, from the history of the Unprofitable Servant we learn the spring of service. This man did not know grace. He feared; he judged Christ an austere man; his best calculation was to come off free in the day of reckoning; the bondage of the law filled his heart, and not the liberty of the truth. He was not a Zaccheus, who bore away in his soul, from the joy of communion with Jesus, and the certainty of His love, a readiness to give half his goods to the poor, and a purpose to restore to any he had wronged even more than the law exacted. But this man was no servant. He served himself, and not Christ. And so do all who do not begin with knowing that Christ has first served them, and that theirs is to be the service of grateful love. Grateful love! How happy the thought! Paul served in this spirit. The life that he lived, he lived by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved him, and gave Himself for him. Grateful love, in the sense of forgiveness sealed and made sure to his soul, accounts (under the Spirit, surely) for fruitfulness in Paul; the want of that--ignorance and disesteem of it--in the unprofitable servant, accounts for his barrenness.
