Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1320
“And there followed Him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented Him. But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us. For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” Luke 23:27-31.
CAN you picture the scene? Jesus is given up by Pilate to the Jews that they may do their will with Him and, led by a small band of soldiers, He is conducted into the public street, bearing His Cross upon His shoulders. Perhaps they judged Him to be weary with His night of watching and worn with His suffering from the scourge, and they feared lest He might die upon the road and, therefore, with a cruel mercy, they laid hold upon one in the crowd who had too loudly expressed His sympathy, impressed him into military service and compelled him to assist in carrying the instrument of execution. You see the haughty scribes and the ribald throng—but the center of the spectacle, and the cause of it all was our Lord Himself—Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.
We cannot paint Him. All who have ever attempted to do so have, to a large extent, been unsuccessful, for there was upon His face a mingled majesty and meekness, loveliness and lowliness, sanctity and sorrow which it would not be possible to express upon canvas or to represent in words. About His Person there were abundant marks of cruelty. He had been scourged. Everyone could see it. His own garments, which they had put upon Him, could not conceal the marks of the Roman lash. The traces of the crown of thorns were on His brow and the rough treatment of the soldiers had left its tokens, too, so that His visage was more marred than that of any man. And His form more than the sons of men.
And now He is being led away to be put to the shameful death of the Cross. There were some glad eyes there, delighted that, at last, their victim was in their power and that the eloquent tongue which had exposed their hypocrisy would now be silenced in death. There, too, were the unfeeling Romans, to whom human life was a trifle. And all around, gathered in dense masses, the brutal mob, bribed to shout against their best Friend. But all then present were not in this savage mood. There were some—and to the honor of the sex it is recorded that they were women—who entered their protest by their cries and lamentations.
Not silently in their sorrow did they weep, but they began to lament aloud and bewail audibly, as though they were attending the funeral of some dear friend, or expected the death of one of their kindred. The voice of a woman’s weeping has great power with most of us, but it would not stir the stony hearts of Roman legionaries. The wail of women was no more to them than the moaning of the winds among the forest trees! Yet it must have struck many of the less stern and stolid mold and filled their souls with some measure of kindred feeling. Chiefly, however, did it strike One, the most tender hearted among them all, One whose ear was delicately sensitive to every sound of sorrow.
And though He had not answered Herod and had given Pilate but a few words of reply. And though amidst all the mockeries and scourging He had been as dumb as a sheep before her shearers, yet He paused and, looking round upon the weeping company, piteously, yet sublimely broke the silence by saying to them, “Weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.” As for the words, themselves, they are especially noteworthy, because they constitute the last connected discourse of the Savior before He died. All that He said afterwards was fragmentary and mainly of the nature of prayer. A sentence to John and to His mother, and to the dying thief. Just a word or two looking downward, but for the most part He uttered broken sentences which flew upwards on the wings of strong desire.
This was His last address, a farewell sermonette delivered amid surroundings most sad and solemn, restraining tears and yet, at the same time, causing them to flow. We reckon the words to be all the more weighty and full of solemnity because of the occasion, but even apart from this, the truths delivered were, in themselves, of the utmost importance and solemnity. This last discourse of our Lord before His death was terribly prophetic to a world rejecting Him—portentous of a thousand woes to a people whom He loved—woes which even He could not avert because they had rejected His interposition and refused the mercy which He came to bring. “Daughters of Jerusalem,” said He, “weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.”