Previous to this Jesus has made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, marking the end of his long journey to the holy city which has occupied the past ten chapters of Luke’s Gospel. Jesus was joyfully received by the crowds but some Pharisees among them object to the messianic implications of it even telling him to rebuke his disciples but he responded with telling them the stones would cry out if they were silent. Everything has been building up to this moment and many are filled with joy because they do not understand that the Son of Man must suffer and the holy city must be judged for not recognizing who he really is.
41 And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it,
As Jesus draws near to the city and sees it, he wept over it. Although translated as wept, we should not confuse this with the same word as used in John 11:35 (dakryō) when Jesus weeps over Lazarus which is more of a silent, reserved form of crying. The Greek word used in this sentence is klaiō which is used for public mourning used for family members or national acts of mourning of a nation. It is the same word used to describe the widow in Luke 7:13. It is a very loud grief stricken lament, he has never expressed himself this way until now, the moment he sees the city of Jerusalem in the final week of his life.
42 saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.
Jesus begins speaking by addressing the city of Jerusalem as a whole, saying “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!”. Here Jesus is implying, as he has for sometime, that there is oncoming tribulation and that if they knew what would “make for peace” (which would be accepting him as the Messiah and the fulfillment of God’s promises) the city would be peaceful, maybe even implying further that it would have been a perpetual peace. The issue is that this acceptance of him is locked into a particular time-frame of his “visitation” which will be mentioned later and Jerusalem as a whole has not accepted him. The end of the verse “But now they are hid from your eyes” has been interpreted by scholars as an enduring spiritual blindness to God by the Jewish people and this moment marks the handing over of God’s preference to the New Covenant Church. It could also be what Paul references in Romans 11:7-10 and 2 Corinthians 3:14-16, a perpetual blindness to God’s revelation.
43 For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side,
Jesus tells them that in some time in the future their enemies will “cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side” it is reminiscent of Jeremiah 6:6 “For thus says the LORD of hosts: “Hew down her trees; cast up a siege mound against Jerusalem. This is the city which must be punished; there is nothing but oppression within her.” The Greek word for “bank” is charax which literally means “to sharpen to a point” but is used by implication to mean a trench or military mound for circumvallation in a siege.
Many times people will debate ad-nauseam about other statements by Jesus, if they are really prophetic of the siege in 70 A.D. but all those inferences are made because of the extremely clear and terrifyingly accurate ones here. When you compare statements made by Jesus with the Jewish historian Josephus even other Roman sources it is striking. In this verse Jesus is saying that the enemies of Jerusalem will set up barricades around them, surround them and hem them in from all sides.
Josephus writes
“Titus… ordered a trench to be dug, a deep and broad ditch, and to this was added the construction of a wall around the city, which was about four miles in circumference”
Titus’ siege was done exactly the way Jesus described.
44 and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
The language Jesus uses is once again pointing back to the past and predicting the future in store for the holy city. It is referencing Psalm 137:9 “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” it is a lament of the hatred the Judeans felt toward their Babylonian captors but now Jesus is directing the words against the city itself and it corresponds to the suffering Josephus describes in the Jewish War “The famine… reached its height; so that the city was full of dead bodies… the upper rooms of the houses and the very streets were filled with the dead”. This famine led to acts like enslavement and even worse, cannibalism of their own children.
“They will not leave one stone upon another in you” is another prophecy of Jesus, words he will repeat in Luke 21:6 directed specifically at the temple itself which was dismantled brick by brick once Jerusalem was conquered by the Romans, Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus confirm this :
“But the [Roman] soldiers, as they were now breaking into the holy house, had a mind to destroy it, and they set fire to it.” (Jewish War 6.4.5).
“The temple was famous beyond all other works of men as a structure of immense wealth and great magnificence… All the walls were overthrown and the temple completely destroyed.”
(Histories, 5.12)
Jesus follows this horrifying future prediction for the Jews with an explanation. “Because you did not know the time of your visitation”. The Greek word used for visitation is episkopē , it is where we get the term Episcopate from, the office of a Bishop and it literally means investigation or inspection but it has a very large divine connotation to it as it was used to describe the act by which God looks into and searches out the ways of men, in order to adjudge them their lot accordingly. The Jews may have acted differently if they had fully understood everything but this is all a test of faith, to fully understand is to rely on your own knowledge and that was not what was required of them.
Another interesting note on these verses actually comes from the perspective of rationalist scholars and I find it very funny. They read the descriptions used by Jesus to describe the siege of 70 A.D. and use it as their primary evidence to conclude that Luke must have written it after the fact. The issue with this perception is that not a single one of the Christians died during the war and Eusebius records in his Ecclesiastical History that this was because Christians listened to divine revelation and left before the siege occurred.
“The whole body, however, of the church at Jerusalem, having been commanded by a divine revelation, given to men of approved piety there before the war, removed from the city, and dwelt at a certain town beyond the Jordan, called Pella.” (Ecclesiastical History , Book 3, Chapter 5)
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