We need to hear the social dynamics of the Gospels. Here they are astonishing. Jesus is surrounded by personal adulation. Normal people milk the crowds, enjoy the popularity, become slightly smug or think of the next step; at all events they are content. Jesus is very different. He was surrounded by adulation, but was thinking ahead to the possible coming tragedy of Jerusalem, the greatest national tragedy of the Jewish people. The issue crops up a number of times during the last week. It is, of course, inescapably political. You could almost say, Jesus was obsessed about it, and so, we, with him, need to stop on the way into Jerusalem and see what is going on.

Social Science and Prophecy
First, we need to have a look at contemporary social science and prophecy and understand what prophecy is. Social scientists believe in prediction. The Holy Grail is the prediction of events which will happen in a year, or six months, or even tomorrow on the Stock Market. Actually, as every Social Scientist knows, predictions do not work out. Life is too complicated and people can, to some extent, choose. To see ahead even to an event like the collapse of Western finance in 2008 was beyond almost all economists. Jesus, of course, is producing a prediction “success”. He was predicting the Roman destruction of Jerusalem some forty years later, although the timing is not given, an amazing bit of prescience. For this reason, some scholars say it must be a later interpolation and not real prediction. But that will not do. The multiple references to this catastrophe embedded in the history of this last week make it impossible to extract, any more than we can remove Dunkirk from the Second World War. More than this, it fits with Jesus approach to public affairs throughout the Gospels. So, there is no doubt to me that it happened as recorded.

But we are ignoring the difference between prediction and prophecy. Prophesy is really much deeper than prediction. It gets rid of the false omniscience and puts human responsibility back in the picture. It says, “This is what will happen if you continue the way you are going without reference to God and God’s wisdom.” It takes in the life direction of the nation. It is warning of the way that is coming if the people do not see the Zechariah 9 meaning of peace.

The False Nationalist Hope.
Jesus comes to the Mount of Olives and sees the city of Jerusalem beneath him. He weeps and says, “If you only knew today what is needed for peace! But now you cannot see it! The time will come when your enemies will surround you with barricades, blockade you, and close in on you from every side. They will completely destroy you and the people within your walls; not a single stone will they leave in its place, because you did not recognize the time when God came to save you!” (Luke 19:41-44) It tells it like it will be four decades hence, because….Of course, the depth of recognition needed is completely beyond them. They cannot see the long-term. They cannot see that the Jewish nationalism, present among the Zealots and re-inforced by the Temple Party will devastate the nation. The people, mostly, do not see. There is no magic Jesus can do here to make things better. There has to be a change of political mind and understanding.

This is an attempt to make these people who are praising him and perhaps seeing him as the national deliverer, see that they are deeply wrong. But it is also a deeper truth about nationalism, constructing enemies and ending wars before they happen. We British might understand the lesson. We British controlled India through the sword and gun. There were massacres, and famines. Churchill and others wanted the jewel in the British Empire, but Gandhi, taught by Tolstoy, taught by Jesus, understood non-violence and refusing to make the colonial power an enemy, and British control ended without a similar conflagration. It is possible Britain and India will never be at war. Power relationships can deconstruct and change Jesus’ way, but still many politicians do not see the Gospel of peace, but up the ante, do enemies, arms, threats, defence and attack. Still we do not see, and we may feel some of the weeping distress of Jesus overlooking Jerusalem.

No Nationalist god.
He was also telling all people, and us, about God. The gods of the time were national, nationalist. Yesterday, I nipped into the Cambridge Classical Archeology Museum and took in the great Zeus bronze javelin thrower statue, as I call it. The Trident is aimed away from the body line and down to pin some creature to the ground. Many gods were gods of war, and national gods, like Athena in the Parthenon, dominated world culture then and still do. Often, they built in political and religious worship to a matrix, but Jesus refuses this. He refuses the Temple as a national icon, refuses to hate enemies, will completely confuse Pilate by not being an enemy, and here predicts a national calamity, never a route to popularity. Here, as consistently throughout Jesus life and teaching God is not on our side, or against us, for God is the Father of all peoples and deconstructs all nationalisms and religious formulations of nationalism, whether they be Nazi, Islamic, pseudo Christian, Zionist, American or whatever. So deep stuff is happening here.

All Lives matter.
Jesus does not let the issue drop, and as Luke reports, on the way to the cross, when women are weeping at this beaten, bleeding, to be crucified man with thorns pushed into his head, he turns to them, and says, “Women of Jerusalem! Don’t cry for me, but for yourselves and your children. For the days are coming when people will say, ‘How lucky are the women who never had children, who never bore babies, who never nursed them! That will be the time when people will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ And to the hills. Hide us!’ for if such things as these happen when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28-31) To have such a focus on the way to Golgotha is amazing. It confronts the women with what will happen. Is looks at the process by which evil is generated, even suggesting that worse things than this will happen, and it warns. Perhaps a million died in Jerusalem as they flocked to the capital in AD 70 for the miraculous deliverance which did not happen, though big figures are not too accurate at this time. It was slaughter and destruction. The Temple Treasury was looted of vast amounts of gold. Bodies piled up and the Romans sacked the city, fires and blood. But hundreds, perhaps thousands, Christians and others, put Jesus’ warnings together and did not die or succumb to this false psychosis. Even here, Jesus was saving lives.

So, Jesus’ way of peace – loving enemies, the warning that those who take the sword perish by the sword, the sorting quarrels, the absence of control and coercion, the spreading of peace house to house, not accumulating wealth, threatening – was not understood and is still not understood. Jesus’ grief at the slaughter of war sits alongside our arming to destroy the world many times over and spawning wars and refugees across the globe. When will we ever learn? When will we learn?