(2) The day of visitation is limited. — Jerusalem's day was narrowed up into the short space of three years and a half. After that, God still pleaded with individuals ; but the national cause, as a cause, was gone. Jerusalem's doom was sealed when Christ pronounced those words.
Here was His last word to the chosen people, the last proba- tion, the last opportunity. We may reverently say that there was no more after that to be done. Each prophet contributed something which others could not ; each had filled a place in the long series of visitations which no other could fill. Already, long ago, Jerusalem had been once destroyed, after a great neglect of opportunity. The Book of Jeremiah is one long and pathetic commentary on the blindness and obstinacy of kings, priests, prophets, and people which preceded the Chaldsean invasion, and which rendered it inevitable. And still that ruin, vast and, for
the time, utter as it was, had been followed by a reconstruction
that long and bitter exile by a return. But history will not go on for ever repeating events which contradict the possibility of change and renewal. One greater visitation awaited Jerusalem ; one more utter ruin — and each was to be the last.
^ After the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus no cause of justice, no ministry of truth, no service of one's fellow-men, need despair. Though the People, Eeligion and the State together triumph over them, beyond the brief day of such a triumph the days — to use a prophetic promise which had often rung through Jerusalem — the days are coming. The centuries, patient ministers of God, are waiting as surely for them as they waited for Christ beyond His Cross. Thus, then, did the City and the
» H. P. Liddon.
ST. LUKE — 26
402 THE IMPENITENT CITY
Man confront each other : that great Fortress, with her rival and separately entrenched forces, for the moment confederate against Him ; that Single Figure, sure of His sufficiency for all their needs, and, though His flesh might shrink from it, conscious that the death which they conspired for Him was His Father's will in the redemption of mankind. As for the embattled City herself, lifted above her ravines and apparently impregnable, she sat prepared only for the awful siege and destruction which He foresaw ; while all her spiritual promises, thronging from centuries of hope and prophecy, ran out from her shining into the West ; a sunset to herself, but the dawn of a new day to the world beyond.^
II.
The Eejection of the Light.
1. The Jews were blind to their opportunity. They knew not the day of their visitation. There is the ignorance we cannot help, which is part of our circumstances in this life, which is imposed on us by Providence. And such ignorance as this, so far as it extends, effaces responsibility. God will never hold a man accountable for knowledge which He knows to be out of his reach. But there is also ignorance, and a great deal of it in many lives, for which we are ourselves responsible, and which would not have embarrassed us now, if we had made the best of our opportunities in past times. And just as a man who, being drunk, is held to be responsible for the outrage which he commits without knowing what he was doing, because he is undoubtedly re- sponsible for getting into this condition of brutal insensibility at all, so God holds us all to be accountable for an ignorance which He knows not to be due to our nature. Now, this was the case with the men of Jerusalem at that day. ^Had they studied their prophets earnestly and sincerely, had they refused to surrender themselves to political dreams which flattered their self-love, and which coloured all their thoughts and hopes, they would have seen in Jesus of Nazareth the Divine Visitor whose coming Israel had for long ages been expecting.
■[[ There is a way of blindness by hardening the heart. Let us not conceal this truth from ourselves. God blinds the eye, but it
* G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, ii. 578.
ST. LUKE XIX. 41, 42 403
is in the appointed course of His providential dealings. If a man will not see, the law is he shall not see ; if he will not do what is right when he knows the right, then right shall become to him wrong, and wrong shall seem to be right. We read that God hardened Pharaoh's heart, that He blinded Israel. It is im- possible to look at these cases of blindness without perceiving in them something of Divine action. Even at the moment when the Eomans were at their gates, Jerusalem still dreamed of security ; and when the battering-ram was at the tower of Antonia, the priests were celebrating, in fancied safety, their daily sacrifices. From the moment when our Master spake, there was deep stillness over her until her destruction; like the strange and unnatural stillness before the thunder-storm, when every breath seems hushed, and every leaf may be almost heard moving in the motionless air ; and all this calm and stillness is but the prelude to the moment when the east and west are lighted up with the red flashes, and the whole creation seems to reel. Such was the blindness of that nation which would not know the day of her visitation.^