Sermon for the Third to Last Sunday of the Church Year, 2026
As certainly as Jerusalem fell in the year 70, so certainly shall the end of all things come; and on that Day, God will wipe away every tear from His people’s eyes, yours among them.
Yet you know full well that you don’t deserve such good news. You deserve to be punished as those pitiful Jews were, for you are no better.
For consider why they were punished. The wrath of God did not fall on them because of who they were; it fell on them because of what they believed, or rather, would not believe. The incarnate God had stood in their midst and wept over their city, but they would not have Him; they did not know the time of their visitation. And so, as you heard, “the grace of God and men had run out.” And what is still more astonishing is what followed. Those who survived, sold as slaves and scattered across the empire, did not repent. As a nation, they did not repent. Even now, after every sorrow that has befallen them since, a veil lies on their heart, and they will not confess that the Christ was in their midst, calling them to repentance and faith. Judgment, by itself, does not turn a heart. So St. John beheld it in his vision of the end: they blasphemed the name of God… and they did not repent and give Him glory. And that is the same heart with which you were born: a heart that would sooner endure anything than confess its need of a Saviour. You hear this grisly history year after year; you groan and cringe at its details, and then? You return home, heedless: as though its warning were meant for someone else. Yet it is meant for you, for you are by nature children of wrath, just as the others. And the wrath of God, foreshadowed in this history: that is what you deserve.
Yet that is not what you receive. For God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, sent His only-begotten Son ahead of time to give His life a ransom for many: to shed His holy, precious blood, that you, through Him, might be spared and saved.
Readings:
Old Testament: Exodus 32:1-20
Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Holy Gospel: Matthew 24:15-28
Josephus, "Concerning the Destruction of the City of Jerusalem"
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