Posted by The eye doctor instructed her patient to read a chart on the wall. He looked at it and read, “A, B, F, N, L and G.” The doctor turned the light back on and wrote in her notebook. “How’d I do, Doc?” the patient wondered. She replied, “Let’s put it this way — they’re numbers.” “But Doc,” he argued, “this is the way I see it!”
Seeing and recognizing are obviously quite different things. The people of Jerusalem saw Jesus but failed to recognize God in their midst. What a tragic case of missed opportunity! Salvation, in a manner of speaking, was under their very noses, the signs were everywhere, and they still didn’t get a clue. Their forefathers and prophets longed to see him, but when he finally appeared, they failed to appreciate him. John 1:11 tells us: “He came to His own (people) but His own did not receive Him.” Who would not weep for such blindness and numbness of heart?
Jesus had more reasons to cry over Jerusalem because seeing her unbelief, the Lord recognized the terrifying destruction she was heading. While weeping over Jerusalem showed His humanity, His exact knowledge of the future proved His divinity. His dire prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem came true in 70 AD. The description of this fateful event by the Jewish historian Josephus was replete with massacre, mutilations, and cannibalism. Why would this happen? Jesus says: “Because you did not recognize the opportunity of your visitation.”
The Gospel writer, in telling this account, must have intended this as a warning to us also. For worse than our blindness is our indifference and neglect of opportunities for our salvation. In what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “dictatorship of relativism” the secular/material person insists on his way of seeing things, and in doing so fails to recognize the dream of God for the world.
Now, we are Jerusalem, and the Lord weeps for us. What do we do next?
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