It has been allowed to condemned men in all ages to speak to the crowds assembled to witness their death. The dying speech used in this country to be a regular feature of executions. Even in ages of persecution the martyrs were usually allowed, as they ascended the ladder, to address the multitude; and these testimonies, some of which were of singular power and beauty, were treasured by the religious section of the community. It is nothing surprising, therefore, that Jesus should have addressed those who followed Him or should have been permitted to do so. No doubt He was at the last point of exhaustion, but, when He was relieved of the weight of the cross, He was able to rally strength sufficient for this effort. Pausing in the road and turning to the women, whose weeping and wailing were filling His ears, He addressed Himself to them.
His words are, in the first place, a revelation of Himself. They show what was demonstrated again and again during the crucifixion--how completely He could forget His own sufferings in care and anxiety for others. His sufferings had already been extreme; His soul had been filled with injustice and insult; at this very moment His body was quivering with pain and His mind darkened with the approach of still more atrocious agonies. Yet, when He heard behind Him the sobs of the daughters of Jerusalem, there rushed over His soul a wave of compassion in which for the moment His own troubles were submerged.
We see in His words, too, the depth and fervour of His patriotism. When He saw the tears of the women, the spectacle raised in His mind an image of the doom impending over the city whose daughters they were. Jerusalem, as has been already said, had always been extremely unresponsive to Him; she had played to Him an unmotherly part. None the less, however, did He feel for her the love of a loyal son. He had shown this a few days before, when, in the midst of His triumph, He paused on the brow of Olivet, where the city came into view, and burst into a flood of tears, accompanied with such a lyric cry of affection as has never been addressed to any other city on earth. Subsequently, sitting with His disciples over against the temple, He showed how well He foreknew the terrible fate which hung over the capital of His country, and how poignantly He felt it. The city's doom was nigh at hand: less than half a century distant: and it was to be unparalleled in its horror. The secular historian of it, himself a Jew, says in his narrative: "There has never been a race on earth, and there never will be one, whose sufferings can be matched with those of Jerusalem in the days of the siege." It was the foresight of this which made Jesus now say, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children."
His words, still further, reveal His consideration for women and children. The tears of the women displayed an appreciation and sympathy for Him such as the men were incapable of; but well did He deserve them, for His words show that He had a comprehension of women and a sympathy with them such as had never before existed in the world. With the force of the imagination and the heart He realised how, in the approaching siege, the heaviest end of the misery would fall on the female portion of the population, and how the mothers would be wounded through their children. In that country, where children were regarded as the crown and glory of womanhood, the currents of nature would be so completely reversed by the madness of hunger and pain that barrenness would be esteemed fortunate; and in a country where length of days had been considered the supreme blessing of life they would long and cry for sudden and early death.