The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost.
The Gospel. Luke 19:41.
When Jesus approached near to Jerusalem, beholding the city, he wept over it, saying: “If thou also didst know, and even now in this thy day, which is to thee for peace! But these things are now hidden from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought; saying unto them, “It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.” And he taught daily in the temple.
Sunday Meditation
Mphides, a philosopher, used to say that cities were theatres of naughtiness. And another, called Stratonicus of Athens, being gone forth of the city Heraclea, looked back upon it with an extraordinary eye, and viewed the gates and walls thereof so earnestly, that one observed him and asked him what it was he beheld so earnestly. He answered: “I am ashamed to be seen to go out of a common stews,” signifying that the city, by reason of the frequency of people of all sorts, and of the occasions of all manner of vice, had not only a common stews of bawdry in it, but was itself a stews of all manner of vices. And so no doubt are other populous cities and towns: theatres or a stews of all manner of vice and iniquity.
And for a disastrous presagement hereof, he that built the first city in the world, which was Cain the son of Adam, was a reprobate, and accursed of God. But of all other cities in the world, none comparable to Jerusalem, which, besides her other abominable sins, committed the most heinous and exorbitant sin of all sins—the crucifying of Christ Jesus, the Saviour of the world—laying violent hands, and that in a most violent and barbarous manner, upon God himself; for so was Christ perfect God as well as perfect man.
This perfect God and perfect man, Christ Jesus, three or four days before his Passion, approaching near unto this city, and beholding it, and withal seeing and foreseeing all the abominations thereof, and that they would most maliciously put him to death, and all the miseries and calamities that were to light upon it for the same (far better than Stratonicus saw the sins of Heraclea), and presented them before his eyes as lively as a little after he did the sins of the whole world in the garden of Gethsemane (which made him sweat blood and water), he wept over the city.
This he did to give us example to have compassion of other men’s sins and calamities, and to comfort and assist them in what we can, at least with our earnest prayers and supplications to God for them, we being members all of one body. And if natural members do as it were condole and help one another, much more mystical members of one and the same body the Catholic Church, as Catholics are of one another, compacted and united together with the sinews of faith and charity, wherewith we may stir up ourselves to compassionate one another, as well as they, yea and command and enforce ourselves thereunto by our free will, far beyond nature; the virtues of faith and charity being divine and theological, descending from heaven, and mounting thither again, above nature; and oftentimes, as in martyrdom, with the destruction of nature, or as in other saints and holy people, with the mortification and subduing thereof.
Wherefore if we do not compassionate the miseries and calamities of others, as Christ did here of Jerusalem, it is a sign we are not true members of one another, and consequently not members of that body the Catholic Church, whereof Christ is the head.
Concerning this charitable compassion towards others, St. Paul, proposing himself for an example, saith thus of himself: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?” (2 Cor. 11:29). And according to this he writeth to the Corinthians thus: “I fear, lest when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and that I shall bewail many which have sinned already, and have not repented of the uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness which they have committed” (2 Cor. 12:21). Thus the good man was afraid that, out of his compassion, he should not be able to be merry and comfortable amongst them, but sorry and afflicted for the miseries of others as his own.
And what the benefit of this compassion is, we may learn out of a vision of the prophet Ezekiel (Ezek. 9:4–6), which was this: Certain men were commanded to pass through the city of Jerusalem with swords in their hands, and to kill man, woman and child, and to spare none, but those that did bewail the sins and abominations of the rest; one man being sent before with an inkhorn, to mark them in the forehead with the letter T, called in Hebrew and Greek Tau, which hath the form of the cross of Christ, and those only to be spared from the general destruction. Those that live among wicked people and lament their sins are marked with a cross in their forehead, and they shall be spared, and find mercy at the hands of God, though they live amongst never so bad people, as Lot was delivered out of Sodom.
