Sermon for The Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 2026

Weeping. Rejection. The Cross. All that sounds more fitting for Holy Week, rather than for some ordinary summer Sunday. And so you might wonder, then, why you’re hearing an account like this now, rather than then, or even, perhaps, nearer the end of the Church year. Well, there’s a reason for it: some portions of the Church year are bound to actual historical time, and this is one of them. The destruction of Jerusalem’s temple, and of Jerusalem itself, in A.D. 70, which Jesus foretells here, took place in early August of that year, just as He said it would. Indeed, tomorrow, the tenth of August, marks the day itself 1 when the temple, that “most admirable of all works… both in its marvelous construction and its size, and also known for the vast wealth bestowed upon it, as well as for the glorious reputation that it had for its holiness, was burned to ashes that hour.” 2 The temple was leveled, exactly as Jesus had said: “not one stone shall be left upon another.” And Jerusalem itself was later “destroyed and leveled to its foundations on the eighth day of September.” 3 Why did that have to happen? The Incarnate God says so, right here: because “they did not know the time of their visitation.”

This is the nature, the character, of God: He earnestly wants His people to come to Him. Yet there will come a day when the grace of God runs out, and those who refused Him will be condemned. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 is only a foretaste of the final judgment, a little piece of it, ahead of time, in history.

1. “The desolation of the temple occurred on the tenth day of the month of August.” “The Destruction of Jerusalem: Drawn from the account of Josephus.” Walther’s Hymnal. Matthew Carver, trans. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2012. p. 384.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 385.

Readings:

• Old Testament: Jeremiah 7:1-11

• Epistle: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

• Holy Gospel: Luke 19:41-48
  

Sermon:

https://youtu.be/HeiOvj0HYno