The lamentation over Jerusalem’s woes,
the subject of to-day’s Gospel, has given its name to this
ninth Sunday after Pentecost, at least among the Latins. We
have already observed that it is easy to find, even in the
liturgy as it now stands, traces of how the early Church was
all attention to the approaching fulfillment of the
prophecies against Jerusalem-that ungrateful city upon which
our Jesus heaped His earliest favours. The last limit put by
mercy upon justice has, at length, been passed. Our Lord,
speaking of the ruin of Sion and its temple, had foretold
that the generation that was listening to His words should
not pass until what He had announced should be fulfilled.
(St. Luke xxi. 32.) The almost forty years accorded to Juda,
that he might avert the divine wrath, have had no other
effect than to harden the people of deicides in their
determination not to accept Christ as the Messiah. As a
torrent, which, having been long pent back, rushes along all
the fiercer when the embankment breaks, vengeance at length
burst on the ancient Israel; it was in the year 70 that was
executed the sentence he himself had passed when, delivering
up his King and God to the Gentiles, (St. Matt. xx. 19.) he
had cried out: ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’
(Ibid. xxvii. 25.)
Even as early as the year 67, Rome,
irritated by the senseless insolence of the Jews, had
deputed Flavius Vespasian, to avenge the insult. The fact of
this new general being scarcely known was, in reality, the
strongest reason for Nero’s approving of his nomination; but
to the hitherto obscure family of this soldier God reserved
the empire, as a reward for the service done to divine
justice by this Flavius and his son Titus. Later on, Titus
will see and acknowledge (Jos., De Bello Jud. , vi.
9.) that it is not Rome but God Himself who conducts the war
and commands the legions. Moses, ages before, had seen the
nation, whose tongue Israel could not understand, rushing
like an eagle upon the chosen people, and punishing them for
their sins. (Deut. xxviii. 49.) But no sooner has the Roman
eagle reached the land where he is to work the vengeance,
than he finds himself visibly checked by a superior power;
and his spirit of rapine is held back, or urged on,
precisely as the prophets of the Lord of hosts had foretold.
The piecing of that eagle, as eager to obey as it was to
fight, almost seemed to be scrutinizing the Scriptures. It
was actually here that he found the order of the day for the
terrible years of the campaign. (St. Luke xxi. 22.)
As an illustration of this, we may
mention what happened in the year 66. The army of Syria,
under the leadership of Cestius Gallus, had encamped under
the walls of Jerusalem. Our Lord intended this to be nothing
more, in His plan, than a warning to His faithful ones,
which He had promised them when foretelling the events that
were to happen. He had said: ‘When ye shall hear of wars,
and seditions, and rumours of war, be not terrified; these
things must first come to pass; but the end is not yet
presently. (St. Matt. xxiv. 6; St. Luke xxi. 9.) But when ye
shall see Jerusalem compassed about with an army, then know
that the desolation thereof is at hand.’ (Ibid. 20)
The Jews had been for years angering Rome by their revolts,
but she bore with it all, if not patiently, contemptuously;
but when, in one of these seditions, Roman blood had been
spilt, then she was provoked and sent her legions. Her army,
however, had first of all to furnish Jesus’ disciples with a
sign; (St. Mark xiii. 4.) He had promised them that this
sign should consist in her ‘compassing Jerusalem,’ then
withdrawing for a time; this would give the Christians an
opportunity of quitting the accursed city. The Roman
proconsul had his troops stationed so near to Jerusalem that
it seemed as though he had but to give the word of command
and the war would be over; instead of that, he gave the
strange order to retreat, and throw up the victory which he
might have if he wished. (Jos,. De Bello Jud. , ii.
19) Cestius Gallus seemed to men to have lost his senses;
but no, he was following, without being aware of it, the
commands of heaven. Jesus had promised an escape to His
loved ones; He fulfilled His promise by this unwitting
instrument.
Vespasian himself had scarcely started
for Judea when he met with one of these divine adjournments
which all the Roman tactics were several times powerless to
resist; the hour marked for them to act had not come, so
they must wait, however reluctantly. The preordained counsel
of the Most High decreed that before all these things (St.
Luke xxi. 12.) which men were to bring about, before the
already broken sceptre of the ancient alliance (Zach. xi.
10.) should have disappeared in the flames enkindled by the
Jews themselves (Isa. I. 11.) — the establishment of the new
Testament was to be solidly set up among the Gentiles, and
be solemnly confirmed by the blood of the apostles, its
witnesses. (St. Matt. xxiv. 9; St. Mark xiii. 10.) It was on
June 29 in the year 67 that Peter and Paul suffered
martyrdom in the city of Rome. Rome was thus made the
mother-Church; and the reign of the Messiah, whom Israel
rejected, was promulgated to the whole world, with an
evidence which only the voluntarily blind could resist.
Though Vespasian had opened the campaign against Judea in
the spring of that year 67, yet he had to wait for the
glorious confession of these two princes of the apostles;
that triumph secured, the impatient legions might rush to
victory as soon as they pleased. For forty-seven long days
they had been kept, by some power, staring at the citadel of
Jotapata, which it was so easy for them to take, and which
would make them masters of Galilee; but June 29 had now had
its apostolic triumph in Rome, and Vespasian was at liberty
to do what he had so long wished to do; on that very June 29
he did it — he took Jotapata.
Forty thousand dead, strewn upon the
steeps of the hill, and heaped up as high as the walls,
showed the Romans what desperate resistance they were to
expect from the Jewish fanaticism. Of all the male defenders
or inhabitants of Jotapata, only two survived; one of these
was Josephus, a chief leader in the Jewish forces, and
historian of these cruel wars. The women and children were
spared. (Jos., De Bello Jud. , iii. 7.) But, some
short time later on, another fortress, Gamala, was attacked;
it overhung a chasm. When one-half of the besieged had been
slain, and it was evident that further resistance was
impossible, the survivors, assembling the women and
children, threw them and themselves down the rock; and five
thousand was their number. When the legions stood looking
around, at the close of the day’s work, they could see but a
desert and death. (Ibid. iv. 1.)
In every part of the unhappy Galilee
blood was flowing in torrents, and the flames of burning
villages lighted up the horizon. It was hard to recognize
this as the land where Jesus had spent the years of His
childhood, or as the scene of His first miracles, and of
those teachings of His which were ever borrowing some
exquisite parable or other from the sight of the pretty
hills and fertile vales of that then favoured country. The
arm of God was now pressing with all its weight on this land
of Zabulon and Nephthali, on which first so brightly shone
the light of salvation, (Isa. Ix. 1, 2.) as we sang on
Christmas night. So again this time it was the first to be
visited by God. But these were unhappy times; and the visit
was no longer that of the divine Orient, opening out to the
world the paths of peace. (St. Luke i. 78, 79.) He was hid
behind the tempest, (Ps. xvii. 12.) and darted the fiery
arrows of destruction on the ungrateful country that had
refused to welcome Him in the weakness of human flesh, which
nothing but His mercy had led Him to assume. ‘They cried
out, on the day of my vengeance,’ says this rejected King of
Israel, ‘but there was none to save them; they cried to me
their Lord, but I heard them not: and I will break them as
small as dust, and scatter them before the wind; I will
bring them to nought, like the dirt in the streets.’ (Ps.
xvii. 42, 43.)
Terrible lesson which the Church learned
and has never forgotten, that no blessing, no past holiness,
is of itself a guarantee that the place thus favoured will
not afterwards draw down on itself desecration and
destruction! She saw, and trembled as she saw, these events
of the first age of her history. She beheld violence and
every sort of crime profaning the paths that had been
trodden by the feet of her adorable Master, and the hills
where He had passed whole nights in prayer and praise to His
eternal Father. She one day witnessed even the pure waters
of the Lake of Genesareth fearfully polluted; those waters
that had so oft reflected the features of her divine Spouse,
as when He walked on their glassy surface, or sat in Peter’s
bark superintending those mystery-meaning fishings of His
apostles. The event we here allude to was that of six
thousand Jewish insurgents — hemmed in between God’s wrath
and their Roman pursuers — reddening with their blood this
Sea of Tiberius, where once Jesus had spoken to the storm
and quelled it. (Jos., De Bello Jud. , iii. 9.)
Their livid carcasses were thrown back by the waves on the
shore, where our Lord had uttered woe to the cities that had
witnessed His miracles, and yet were not converted. (St.
Matt. xi. 20, 21.)
And souls, too, on whom God heaps His
choicest favours, inviting them thereby to a closer union
with Himself, have a lesson to learn from all this. Woe to
them if, through indifference or sloth, they neglect to
correspond with their graces! Woe to them if they imitate
the cities on the Lake of Galilee, by greedily accepting the
honour done them but never producing the fruits of holiness
which should follow such signal and frequent gifts of
heaven. The prophet Amos couples these forgetful, careless
souls with the cities which our Lord had treated with such
partiality, and which yet remained apathetic and worldly;
and he tells us what this slighted benefactor will say to
both: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the
earth! Therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities!
Shall two walk together, except they be agreed?’ (Amos iii.
2, 3.)
As to Israel, the highly-favoured above
all people, he would not agree with the Jesus who so loved
him, and was visited with chastisements exactly
corresponding to his crimes. In the spring of the year 68,
an officer under Vespasian scoured the left banks of the
Jordan, driving the terrified Israelites before him. (Jos.,
De Bello Jud. , iv. 7.) They fled in thousands
toward Jericho, where they hoped to find refuge; but the
river had so flooded the country round the city, that
entrance was impossible; the wretched fugitives were
overtaken and slain by the Roman troops. The Ark of the
Covenant had once opened there a miraculous passage to the
tribes of Israel; but even had it been there now, how was it
to protect such unworthy descendants of the patriarchs —
descendants, that is, who broke the Covenant made by God
with the sons of Jacob? A frightful massacre, a merciless
mowing down of human beings, followed; and, at what a place!
The very place where, forty years before, St. John the
Baptist had seen the axe laid to the root of the tree, and
foretold the wrath to come upon this brood of vipers, who
called themselves children of Abraham, and would not do
penance. (St. Matt. iii. 5-12.) A countless multitude
drowned themselves in the Jordan; they found death in the
very stream to which our Saviour had imparted sanctification
by being Himself baptized in it, and imparting to it the
power to give light to the world. But Israel had chosen the
kingdom of the prince of this world in preference to that of
the divine Giver of life. (St. John xix. 15.) The number of
those who perished in that holy stream was so great that the
heap of their dead bodies made it impossible for vessels to
sail in the river; and this fearful obstacle continued until
such times as the current had swept the corpses down to the
Dead Sea, and scattered far into that dismal lake of
malediction that hideous jetsam of the Synagogue. Had not
our Lord said, that Sodom’s guilt was less than theirs? (St.
Luke x. 12.)
Rome and her legions were masters, in the
north, of Galilee and Samaria; in the east and west, of the
banks of Jordan and of the Mediterranean coast; and the
conquest of Idumaea completed the circle of iron and fire
that was to shut Jerusalem in. Roman garrisons held Emmaus,
Jericho, and all the fortified positions round the Jewish
capital. Having, as God’s instruments, chastened so many
other ungrateful cities. Vespasian was preparing to lay
siege to the most guilty of all, when Nero’s fall, and the
events which followed it, drew the attention, both of
himself and of the whole world, from Judea.
The last years of the tyrant had
witnessed frequent ‘earthquakes in divers places,’ (Senec.,
Natur. Quaest ., vi. 1.; Tac. An., xiv. 27, xv.
22.) and ‘plagues’ (Senec., Ibid. , 27; Tac.,
Ibid. , xvi. 13; Suet. In Ner. , 39.) and
‘signs in the heavens’; (Tac., Hist., v. 13; Jos., De Bello
Jud., vi. 5.) but when he died there came ‘risings of nation
against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.’ (St. Luke xxi.
10, 11) The entire west was in arms; and the east herself
was attracted towards Rome by the immense political
commotion of the year 69. From the heights of Atlas to the
Euxine Sea, and from the Humber to the Nile, provinces and
peoples were striving for the mastery. Galba, Otho,
Vitellius, Vespasian, proclaimed emperors by their
respective armies, sent their rival legions from Britain and
the Rhine, from Illyria and the Danube; they met at Bedriac
for mutual slaughter. In one thing alone they that survived
were unanimous: friends of foes, all must Italy waste. Rome
was taken by the Romans; whilst on the undefended frontiers
appeared Suevians, Sarmatians, and Dacians. The Capitol and
Jupiter’s temple in flames excited the Gauls to declare
their independence, and Velleda to stir up Germany to
revolt. The old world was gradually disappearing beneath the
universal anarchy and war.
Circumstances, then, suddenly seemed
favourable to Jerusalem; they gave her a fresh invitation to
atone for her crimes; but, as we shall see when commenting
on this Sunday’s Gospel, she made no other use of them than
to multiply her sins, and treat herself with greater cruelty
than the Romans would have done.
In the Mass of this Sunday, which is
their ninth of St. Matthew, the Greeks read the episodes of
Jesus; walking on the waters.
‘I have great sadness,’ cried out the
Apostle of the Gentiles, as he thought of the malediction
which was about to fall on the Jews: ‘continual sorrow have
I in my heart; for I wished myself to be an anathema from
Christ for my brethren, who are my kinsmen according to the
flesh; who are Israelites, to whom belongeth the adoption of
children, and the glory, and the covenant, and the giving of
the Law, and the service (the worship of God, prescribed by
Himself), and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of
whom is Christ according to the flash, who is over all
things, God blessed for ever!’ (Rom. ix. 2-5.) But now, they
are gone astray by their own fault; they see nothing; they
understand nothing. (Isa. vi. 9; St. Matt. xiii. 14, 15.)
The royal banquet of the Scriptures, on which their fathers
feasted, (Ibid. , iv. 4.) is now turned by them
into an occasion of error; they have made those Scriptures a
snare for their own destruction; darkness covers their
understanding, and chastisement for all future ages is their
own making. (Ps. lxvii. 23, 24)
Gentiles! You that have been substituted
for those broken branches, and are grafted on the stem of
the Covenant, (Rom. xi. 17.) learn a lesson from their fall.
God, who has shown you so much and so great gratuity of
mercy, and that at the very time He was inflicting upon them
the chastisements they so richly merited, will not allow His
loving designs upon you to be frustrated against your own
will. If you are faithful to the call of His grace, He will
be faithful to you, and preserve you from temptations which
you could not resist; or, He will so watch the combat that
His divine help will make your soul rise superior to the
trial; and this in every temptation you will find, not
defeat, but the merit of a victory, all the more glorious,
as it seemed so much above the power of human strength. And
yet, never forget that the same causes which brought about
the destruction of the Jews would also lead you to ruin.
They fell, because of their unbelief; you, who once had no
faith and yet God showed mercy to you, are now what you are
by faith. Be not, therefore, high-minded with
self-complacency; but remember how God, who broke off the
natural branches from the glorious tree, will not spare you,
if you cease to be faithful; and whilst you do well to
admire His mercy, you do not wisely if you forget His
inexorable justice. (Rom. xi. 20-30.)
Well, therefore, does our mother the
Church instruct us in to-day’s Epistle, as to the lamentable
antecedents of the Jewish deicides; she tells us of that
list of sins and chastisements, which gradually led on to
the final crime and total ruin of the apostate nation. We,
who live in what the Church calls the ‘evening of the
world,’ (Hymn for Adv. Vesp.) have this great advantage,
that we can profit by the what the past ages have
experienced. The holy Spirit had no other end in view, when
He would have the history of the ancient people written: He
would have the future ages there learn lessons of salvation.
By the various episodes of that history, which form so many
groups of prophetic events, He would show us the economy of
God’s providence in His government of the world and of His
Church. Founded as she has been by her divine Spouse in
immutable truth, and maintained by the Holy Ghost in
unfailing and ever-increasing holiness, the Church has
nothing to fear of that which happened to the Synagogue — we
mean, of that total wreck which the liturgy brings forward
for our consideration today. No, the ruin of the Jews is a
prophetic image of the destruction of the world, (St. Matt.
xxiv. 3.) which will have rejected the Church; not of the
Church herself, who will then ascend to her Lord, perfected
in love and holiness by the trials endured in those latter
days. (Apoc. xxii. 17.) But the assurance of salvation,
granted to the bride of the Son of God, does not extend to
her children, taken either individually or collectively —
that is, men or nations. On each one of us it is incumbent
that we meditate on the sad fate which befell Jerusalem; as
also on what happened, ages before, to the ancestors of the
Jewish people, viz., that scarce one of those who were
living when Moses led them out of Egypt lived to enter into
the promised land.
And yet, as the apostle argues, they were
all journeying in the path of life, protected by the
mysterious cloud , beneath which divine Wisdom shaded them
by day, and served them as a pillar of fire by night. (Wisd.
x. 17.) Led on by Moses — who was a type of the future
divine Head of the Christian people — they had all passed
through the sea. All of them thus baptized in that symbolic
cloud and in those saving waters which had engulfed their
foes, just as the water of the Christian font destroys the
sins of them that are washed in it — all of them were fed by
the same spiritual food, and all drank at the same holy
source which issued from the rock, which was Christ. Yet
there were very few, out of all those thousands, with whom
God was pleased. (1 Cor. x. 1-6) But how much more grievous
would the sins of Christians be, who are blessed with the
resplendent and solid realities of the Law of grace, than
were the evil desires, and idolatry, and fornication, and
mumurings of the Israelites , who had but the figures and
foreshadowings of our privileges!
Sequel of the holy Gospel
according to Luke
Chapter XIX [19:41-47]
And when he drew near, seeing the
city, he wept over it, saying: If thou also hadst known,
and that in this thy day, the things that are to thy
peace: but now they are hidden from thy eyes. For the
days shall come upon thee: and thy enemies shall cast a
trench about thee and compass thee round and straiten
thee on every side, And beat thee flat to the ground,
and thy children who are in thee. And they shall not
leave in thee a stone upon a stone: because thou hast
not known the time of thy visitation. And entering into
the temple, he began to cast out them that sold therein
and them that bought. Saying to them: It is written: My
house is the house of prayer. But you have made it a den
of thieves. And he was teaching daily in the temple.
The passage just read to us from the holy
Gospel takes us back to the day of our Lord’s triumphant
entry into Jerusalem. This triumph, which God the Father
willed should be offered to His Son before the commencement
of His Passion, was not, as we well know, anything of a
recognition of the Messiah made by the Synagogue. Neither
the meek, gentle manners of the King, who came to the
daughter of Sion seated on an ass, (Zach. ix. 9.) nor His
merciful severity upon the profaners of the temple, nor His
farewell teachings in His Father’s house, could open the
eyes of men who were determined to keep them shut against
the light of salvation and peace. Not even the tears of the
Son of Man, then, could stay God’s vengeance: there is a
time for justice, and the Jews were resolved it should come
to themselves.
How loudly had the prophets spoken to
them in God’s name! Woe to the provoking and redeemed city!
She hath not hearkened to the voice her God. Her princes are
in the midst of her as roaring lions; her judges are evening
wolves; her prophets are senseless, men without faith; her
priests have defiled the sanctuary; they have acted unjustly
against the law (they have violated it). (Soph. iii. 1-4, i.
9.) Crush the city as in a mortar! (Ibid. , 11.) Go
through the city and strike! let not your eye spare, nor be
ye moved to pity! Utterly destroy old and young, maidens,
children and women — yea, destroy all that are not marked
upon their foreheads with Thau! And begin ye at my
sanctuary; slay the priests, and the ancients; defile the
house (my temple), and fill its courts with the bodies of
the slain!’ (Ezech, ix, 4-7)
Alas! precedence in chastisement was
richly due to those princes of the people who had had
precedence in crime; it was due to those priests and
ancients who had decreed the death of the Just One, and
driven the multitude to cry out: ‘Crucify Him!’ (St. Matt.
xxvii. 20.) Jealous of the miracles of the Man-God, they
said in their perfidious hypocrisy: ‘If we let Him alone’
(doing all these miracles), ‘all men will believe in Him,
and the Romans will come and take away our nation.’ (St.
John xi. 47-53) God has turned their impious diplomacy
against them. But, as far as they themselves are concerned,
they will have their way; not one of them will see the
Romans; for, before the arrival of the legions, John of
Gischala, and Simon the son of Gioras, will have annihilated
this deicidal aristocracy, hated of both heaven and earth.
When, after the war is over, Titus shall enter into Rome,
these two brigand chiefs, and prime movers of the war, shall
adorn his triumph; they shall be the substitutes of the
nobles of Juda before the conquerors chariot. Two bandits,
representatives of Jerusalem, in the streets of Rome, her
rival! What a divine retaliation for the two thieves, whom
the Synagogue gave as an escort to its King on the Dolorous
Way, and made them His crucified fellows in Calvary! — But,
let us resume the sequel of events, and give them as briefly
as the subject permits.
After the rupture with Rome, and the
retreat of Cestius Gallus, the government of Jerusalem had
been entrusted to the high-priest Ananus, (Jos., De
Bello Jud. , ii. 20 et seq.) brother-in-law to Caiphus,
and the last of the five sons of Annas, who succeeded each
other in the office of high-priest. By a visible
dispensation of God’s justice, this family, the guiltiest of
all in the crime of the crucifixion, found itself at the
head of the nation when the fatal hour came: it was
impossible then to mistake the meaning of God’s vengeance
upon His people. Independently of the enormous crime, whose
responsibility rested on his race, Ananus had a personal sin
to atone for — the death of St. James the Less, who had been
martyred, by his orders, in the year 62. Rationalist or
Sadducee like his kin, he deplored the war, and would have
been glad to see peace restored; (Jos., De Bello Jud.
, iv. 5.) but he could not shirk the obligation his office
imposed on him of organizing the defence. Ruler most
unworthy, yet ruler he was; and therefore, as the Prophet
Isaias expresses it, this whole ruin was under his hand,
(Isa. iii. 6.) under his management; it would, necessarily,
when it came, fall on him and crush him.
It was not long before the fanatics, who
had instigated the rebellion and taken the name of Zealots,
became dissatisfied with the way in which Ananus was
managing affairs: so they revolted against him, and put to
death the most illustrious men of the city. Reinforced by
all the enthusiasts of the other towns, and by the
highway-robbers who were daily flocking to Jerusalem, they
made themselves masters of the temple. Out of hatred for the
ancient priestly families, they changed the order of
sacrifice. They put the office of high-priest on a peasant,
who happened to be a descendant of Aaron’s family, but was
so unfitted for the dignity that he did not even know what
was meant by a priest. (Jos., De Bello Jud., iv. 3.)
About this same time the wreck of the
Galilean bands, headed by John of Gischala, occasioned the
first defeats, and excited the people to exasperation; they
made common cause with the rebels, and increased their fury
against all whom they suspected of an inclination to treat
with Rome. The Zealots were hard pressed by the troops of
Ananus, and had already been forced back into the inner
temple; on the advice of John of Gischala; they called the
wild Idumean herdsmen to come to their aid. These fierce
auxiliaries came on Jerusalem in the thick of a storm that
was raging during the night; they found the watchmen asleep,
and put them to death. The very earth, says Josephus, had
shaken at their approach; and, on the evening before their
arrival, had been heard to moan. (Jos., De Bello Jud., iv.
4.) Up to the morning, amidst violent wind and rain and
lightning, howling themselves as if to add to the din of the
tempest, amidst the shouts of the wounded and the screams of
women, they pitilessly murdered every one they met. When at
length daylight appeared, it revealed the horrors of the
previous night; eight thousand five hundred dead bodies were
lying on the ground, and the blood was running in streams
all around the temple. The corpse of Ananus, after being
insulted, stripped, trodden on, was given as food to the
dogs. The following days, twelve thousand men, in the vigour
of health, and picked out of the most distinguished
families, were also put to death by the Idumeans, either by
torture or by other means. As soon as they left, the Zealots
became masters of the city, and were guilty of cruelties
even greater than those exercised by the Idumeans. All those
whose independent character, or influence, or noble birth,
excited suspicions were at once massacred, nor were their
friends or relatives allowed to bury or mourn over them. The
lower classes, the poor, and the unknown, alone escaped with
their lives.
The justice of God overtook the princes
of Juda. (Isa. iii. 14.) Their blood mingled with the dust,
their unburied bodies lying as dung upon the streets, (Soph.
i. 8, 17.) would all this remind Sion of those prophecies
which had foretold these days of tribulation and anguish,
these days of bitterness for the mighty and the strong? (Ibid.
, 14-16; Ezech. xxiv. 3-5.) The Christians of Jerusalem, who
were then sheltering beyond the Jordan, would remember, if
no one else did, the inspired words which their bishop, St.
James, had written eight years before to the twelve tribes
who were dispersed throughout the world: (St. James i. 1.)
‘Go to now, ye rich men! Weep and howl for your miseries
that shall come upon you! Your riches are putrefied; you
treasure is a store of wrath. Ye have feasted; but your
feasts have but nourished you for the day of slaughter. Ye
have condemned, and put to death the just one, and he
resisteth you not…. But the coming of the Lord draweth
near.’ (Ibid. v. 1-8.) It was truly the Lord, who was
avenging His own cause; (Jer. v. 5, 9.) and Vespasian was
well aware of it, when he thus answered those who urged him
to take advantage of all these troubles, and attack the
city: ‘God is a better general than I: let us leave Him to
deliver up the Jews to the Romans without any trouble on our
side, and give us victory without our incurring any risk.’
(Jos., De Bello Jud. , iv. 6.)
Jerusalem was then but in the beginning
of her woes and of her civil strifes. The ambitious
character of John of Grischala did not allow him to be long
at peace with the Zealots. He separated himself from them;
and to the Galileans, who supported his cause, he gave
permission to do whatever they pleased. To pillage and
murder were added the frightful excesses of the
half-idolatrous race which, in the days of the Assyrian
kings, had been substituted for the tribes of Israel; (4
Kings xv. 29, xvii. 6, 18, 23-41.) it had borrowed from
Judaism little better than a mass of superstition, which it
mingled with the customs and vices of its predecessors. Then
was the daughter of Sion compelled to witness and endure the
abominations, wherewith the prophets of the Most High had
threatened her. Humbled and indignant, the unhappy city
would fain have shaken off the yoke. (Jos., De Bello
Jud. , iv. 7, 9.)
In those days a celebrated brigand was
laying Idumea waste; towns and villages were destroyed,
houses were pulled down or burnt; and, according to the
prophecy of Abdias, (Abdias 5, 6) he was ransacking Edom
through and through, right to the very core. His name was
Simon, son of Gioras. What with slaves, criminals, outlaws,
and malcontents of every party, he had got together upwards
of 20,000 well-armed men, not counting other 40,000 who
followed him. This was the strange Messiah on whom Jerusalem
cast her eyes for help in her trouble! A deputation, headed
by a high-priest, waited on this son of Gioras, begging him
to accept the sovereignty. He deigned to consent to their
wishes! Proud and haughty, says Josephus, (Ubi supra.) he
graciously allowed Sion to offer him her suppliant homage.
He was led into the city of David, amidst the enthusiastic
acclamations of the people, who hailed as their protector
and saviour Simon the murderer, Simon the brigand! O Jesus,
Son of David and Son of God, how art Thou avenged by all
this! They wished it to be; they themselves had passed the
sentence: ‘Not Him, but Barabbas!; (St. John xviii. 40.) The
choices of the children was in keeping with the preference
entertained by their fathers. Bar Gioras — worthy descendant
of Barabbas — once he was master of the city, treated alike
both them that had invited him and them that he had been
invited to reduce order — that is, he treated them all as
enemies. Day and night was the massacre kept up by his
savage horde, until every man of worth or credit in
Jerusalem was made away with. (Jos., De Bello Jud.
, vii. 8.)
Meanwhile, the Galileans, driven back
from Sion and the lower town by the new-comers, had
retreated to the temple, of which they occupied the first
enclosure. The Zealots had grown more than ever discontented
with John of Grischala, and made the inner temple their
fortified place of refuge. They were less numerous than the
two other parties, but their position was far preferable,
for it was on the very summit of the holy mount. Then, too,
they had provisions in abundance, seeing that all the
first-fruits and offerings made to the temple were under
their absolute control. They passed their time in feasting
and drunken revellings. Little cared they for the stones
hurled by Galilean catapults; nor were they in the least
troubled at finding that these huge missiles struck the
priests at the altar, thus mingling the blood of the
sacrificers with that of the victims, and strewing the
sacred courts with the bodies of dead or dying. Sacrilege
and drunkenness — such was the end of those descendants of
the austere pharisees! (Jos., Ibid., v. 1.) Here again
Jesus, their crucified victim, was avenged.
Whilst the abominations of desolation,
foretold by Daniel, was thus standing in the holy place,
(St. Matt. xxiv. 15.) John of Grischala saw that the Zealots
were too stupefied by the feastings to cause him any further
alarm. He fell on the city, like a bird of prey, there to
find the necessary provisions; and out of hatred for Simon,
he destroyed by fire all he could not carry away. Simon,
instead of quenching the fire, extended it in every part
where John was likely to pass, hoping, by this means, to
deprive the Galileans of all further victualling. Immense
stores of corn and other provisions had been amassed by the
Jewish leaders, as a necessary resource in case of a future
siege; but all were now destroyed by these two men, who were
greater enemies to their country than were the Romans
themselves. Thus was spent the year 69 — a year of respite,
which Rome, torn as she was by factions of her own, was
compelled to allow, and which might have been of such
incalculable benefit to the Jews. (Jos., ubi supra.
)
With the exception of the armed troops,
there were no other inhabitants in Jerusalem but women and
old men. The passover of 70 was drawing near, and
it produced a sort of truce among the several parties. The
city began to be again crowded, and with a population far
exceeding the ordinary number. The Romans had pillaged the
Jewish provinces; Sion had been even more cruelly treated,
and by her own children: and yet, in this year of 70, there
assembled within this city of final vengeance as though it
were the whole nation, and that from every quarter of the
globe. (Ibid. , vi. 9.) It had been the same at the
time of our Jesus’ crucifixion; it seemed as though the
whole Jewish people insisted on witnessing the consummation
of the deicide. The apostles afterwards besought them to
confess their having been accomplices in the crime of
Calvary, but the preaching was fruitless; the terrific
lessons of recent events was unable to open their eyes. As
it was in the days of the Pasch so salutary to mankind, but
so fatal to Juda; and as it was a subsequent Pentecost, so
now there were Jews congregated ‘out of every nation under
heaven,’ (Acts ii. 5.) not, indeed, to hear an apostle
preaching to them to do penance, (Ibid. , 38) but
to undergo that which Moses had foretold, and St. Peter had
recalled to their memory — the extermination of all such as
should refuse to hearken to the Messiah of the Lord. (Ibid.
iii. 22, 23)
As the Man-God had said, the terrible day
came suddenly, and as a snare, upon this immense assemblage
of people. (St. Luke xxi. 34, 35.) The empire was in the
hands of Vespasian; the prosperous fortune of Rome was
re-established on the whole of the frontiers; and Titus had
just reached Caesarea, with orders to put an end to the
eastern question. He sent word to the legions then in Judea
to effect, from the respective points they occupied a joint
concentration towards the capital. When the tenth legion
marched from Jericho and was seen encamped on Mount Olivet —
that is, on the very place where Jesus wept as He looked on
Jerusalem, and foretold the siege which was to be its ruin —
the unexpected arrival of the Romans alarmed the pilgrims,
and made them busy themselves with preparations for a
battle, rather than for the solemnization of the Pasch. The
several parties agreed to forget, at least for a day, their
own animosities, and unite all their forces together; they
made two desperate sallies, for the purpose of dislodging
the enemy on the Mount; but each time they were repelled.
(Jos., De Bello Jud. , v. 2.)
The Pasch which is about to be
celebrated, is, as ever, and now more than ever, the
passover of the Lord; but the Lord is no longer leading
the sons of Jacob to their deliverance by it. Juda has made
himself the enemy of the Lamb, whose blood should be the
sign of the redeemed of the Pasch. Whilst the blood of this
divine Lamb is enriching the whole earth, whilst the light
of the vanquisher of death is illumining the whole world,
Juda is there, obstinately keeping to his figures and
shadows. More stiff-necked than the Egyptian, and more
guilty than Pharaoh, he would, if he could, hold the true
Israel in the trammels of his own slavish law, just as he
once vainly tried to make the true Son of God an everlasting
prisoner in the tomb. As to Jesus, He has, years ago, set
Himself free; and now more terrible than He was in Mesraim,
He is passing over , as the avenger both of Himself
and of His Church. The Pasch — the feast of feasts, whose
memory is every Sunday brought back to us — is now about to
receive its final completion. On the Tuesday of our Easter,
we were saying: ‘How terrible will be the passage of the
Lord over Jerusalem, when the sword of the Roman legions
shall destroy a whole people! (See our first vol. of
‘Paschal Time.’ P. 226.)
‘Woe to thee, O Ariel! Ariel, the city
which David took — the city where God had His temple and His
altar — thy years are passed; thy solemnities are at an end!
(Isa. xxix. 1.) Take away from me the tumult of thy songs!
Psalms, in thy mouth, have lost all their meaning. I will
not hear the canticles of thy harp. (Amos v. 23.) The song
of lamentation is heard in Israel, for his house is fallen.
(Ibid. , 1.) In every street there shall
be wailing; and in all places, they shall say: Woe! Woe!’ (Ibid.
, 16.)
This prophetic cry of Woe — this
most gloomy foreboding that all the threats uttered in
Scripture against Jerusalem are on the point of being
fulfilled — was forced upon the inhabitants’ ears. Ever
since the feast of Tabernacles of the year 62, an unknown
peasant — the husbandman, as the prophet Amos called him, a
man skillful in lamentation (Ibid.) — had been ceaselessly
paving the streets of the wretched city, crying out day and
night: ‘A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a
voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the
holy house, a voice against the bridegroom and the brides, a
voice against all this people!’ Tried, questioned, scourged,
even till his flesh was torn to pieces and his bones laid
bare — nothing could prevent him from continuing his most
unwelcome work. On the festival days above all, this
precursor of the vengeance of the Son of Man redoubled the
energy of his plaintive enthusiasm, which gave a superhuman
emphasis to his cry of Woe. To every word of kindness or
reproach, to every act of charity or cruelty, he gave
neither thanks nor plaints, but went on with the same words:
‘Woe! Woe! to Jerusalem!’ And thus he continued for seven
years and five months, without his voice being altered by
weakness or hoarseness. During the early days of the siege
he was seen by the Romans running to and fro along the
walls, shouting: ‘Woe to the city! Woe to the people! Woe to
the holy house!’ At length he added: Woe! woe to me!’
Immediately a stone, thrown from one of the engines, smote
him, and he died on the spot. (Jos., De Bello Jud.
, vi. 5.)
Jerusalem has drunk of the cup of
madness, and nothing seems to impress her; she is drunk with
the cup of God’s wrath; yea, she has drained it to the last
dregs. (Isa. xxix. 9-14, li. 17.) What a terrific day, this
last celebration of the Jewish Pasch! The historian Josephus
tells is what it was — sacrilegious, bloody, and noisy with
the shouts, which even the enemy could hear, of the strife
of the dissentient factions, for all had revived. Taking
advantage of the gates being opened to the pilgrims, some
Galileans, disguised, made their way into the inner temple;
where, throwing aside their cloaks, and displaying their
weapons, they attacked the crowd that stood round the altar.
They beat and murdered; then, trampling on the dying and the
dead, they drove the people outside the courts. Meanwhile,
the Zealots, who were taken unawares, rushed, in dismay,
into the subterranean caverns of the temple. (Jos., De
Bello Jud. , v. 3.) What a Pasch! What a feast! worthy,
indeed, of God’s hatred and rejection. (Amos v. 21.) Unhappy
feasters, that had come from the ends of the world to this
solemnity! how is it that they forgot to apply the words of
the prophet? ‘Woe to them that desire the day of the Lord!
To what end is it for you? This day of the Lord is darkness
and not light. You shall be as a man fleeing from the face
of a lion, and a bear should meet him; or, as one that
entereth into the house, and, when he leaneth with his hand
upon the wall, a sepent should bite him.’ (Ibid. ,
18, 19.) Terrible prophecy! How strangely it is
verified: — the Romans are yonder in their camps; Simon is
in the city; John of Gischala is in the temple, its sole
master!
As in the days of Jeremias, so now : the
sword and famine — it is hard to say, which was the busier
to make this multitude prey; (Jer. xiv. 18.) for, owing to
the previous depredations, famine had made itself felt from
the beginning of the siege. Each day added to its intensity,
and urged on the savage instincts of the armed ruffians to
attack all who were not of their party. It was not hatred
only that now filled Sion with murder; to rob, or to get
something to keep themselves from starvation, these were
additional motives to make such men grudge each other’s
existence. Under plea that they were conspirators, Simon and
John had the rich summoned to their respective tribunals;
and then, adding insult to injustice, these two wretches,
who, in the intervals between fighting against the Romans,
were carrying on their own deadly feud — these two judges,
having first seized the property of their victims, sent them
to the second bar, (Jos., De Bello Jud., v. 10.) under
pretense that they wished to show each other a mutual kindly
feeling; giving the one who had nothing to steal, the option
of condemning to death. Scarcely forty years before in these
very streets, through which the Jewish aristocracy was being
ignominiously dragged from Simon to John, and from John to
Simon, there was another Victim of the nation, was made the
pledge of a mock reconciliation, and, with a fool’s uniform
put on Him, was sent back from Herod to Pilate, there to
await judgment! (St. Luke xxiii. 7-12.)
Whilst these tyrants were thus living on
the public distress, there were hundreds of starved
creatures, whom hunger drove to go forth by night into the
fields, and there try to find some wild herbs. If they fell
into the hands of the Romans, these, unwilling to be
burdened with such prisoners, had them crucified within
sight of the walls. Five hundred and upwards were thus
captured each day; and, oh! what a fearful detail, but how
loud in its significance! — all this was done, with Calvary
opposite! and, as Josephus tells us, there was not room
enough to plant the crosses, nor wood enough for making
them. (Jos., De Bello Jud. , v. 11.)
Titus had flattered himself that the
taking of Jerusalem would be an affair of a few days. He, of
course, disregarded the prophecies which declared that the
deicide city was to be ‘compassed round with a trench’; and
preferred to use negotiations and a series of assaults,
rather than be detained by the tedious operation of a
blockade. But he was, of course, mistaken; his messengers
received, in answer to their parlays of peace, nothing but
insults and arrows; and, as to assaults, all the bravery of
his legions was powerless against the fortresses where the
factions were protected. Two months thus passed away in
useless attempts; all that the Romans had possession of was
the lower town, which the Jewish contesting parties had
already reduced to ruins; but Sion and Moriah still held up
their heads in defiance against the determined invaders.
There was nothing, them, to do, but make up their minds to
defer Rome and her pleasures to some later season, (TAC.,
Hist., v. 11.) and encircle Jerusalem with that terrible
trench, which the Gospel had said must be cast about her.
The literal following out of the plan traced by God got the
better of Titus’ impatience. He set his legions to the work;
they must change their manual labour, and instead of bows
and arrows, they must handle pickaxe and spade. To have seen
them at work, one would have said they were thinking of
Jesus’ words, for they were fulfilling them as though they
were the most devoted of His servants; Josephus would have
it, that they were animated by a divine influence. (Jos.,
De Bello Jud. , v. 12.) In the brief space of three
days, they completed an earth-wall measuring a little over
five miles round, a work which would ordinarily, have
occupied several months. God had thus spoken by the prophet
Isaias: ‘I will make a trench about Ariel; and it shall be
in sorrow and mourning; and it shall be to me as Ariel. I
will make a circle round about thee (O Jerusalem), and will
cast up a rampart against thee, and raise up bulwarks to
besiege thee.’ (Isa. xxix. 2,3.) Truly, Jerusalem was thus
made as an Ariel to Jehovah — that is, on immense
altar of countless victims.
The famine, by this time, was intensely
increased; for every exit into the fields was now closed
against the unfortunate creatures, who, till then, had been
able to eke out their miserable existence by picking up, at
the risk of their lives, a few seeds or roots. (Lam. V. 9,
10.) A bushel of wheat was sold for a talent (about 240
pounds sterling). Those who could afford it gave their
costliest treasures for a morsel of bread; (Lam. i. 11.)
but, as to those who had nothing to give, they must drag the
sewers in hope of finding food. The vilest rubbish was
devoured with avidity. Filth, too foul to have a name was
hidden as though it were a treasure, for which husband
quarreled with his wife, and mothers grudged it their
children. (Deut. xxviii. 56, 57; Jos., De Bello Jud., v.
10-12.) The factions had, thus far, laughed at the people’s
starvation; but they soon began themselves to feel the
gnawings of famine, and then they furiously attacked those
who were reported as having something to eat. If a man were
sinking, he was said to be feigning the weakness of death,
in order to prevent search being made for his victuals; if
he had just strength enough to walk a few steps, it was
taken as an indication that he had some hidden eatables
about him. All were savagely tortured to make them own the
imputed crime of having something yet to live on. Like
famished dogs — it is the expression used both by the
historian and the Psalmist (Ibid. vi. 3; Ps. lviii. 7, 15,
16.) — they ran wildly through the city, knocking down the
doors of the suspected, ferreting in every nook and hole,
and returning two or three times within the hour. A savoury
smell was one day perceived coming from a house which had
been thus frequently visited; this was more than enough for
a further search. In they rushed; a woman was there; they
threatened her with death, unless she at once declared where
was her feast. ‘It is my son,’ she replied; ‘there are the
remnants!’ The woman was Mary, daughter of Eleazer; once
rich, and of a noble family, she, maddened by hunger, had
murdered her infant child, and had fed on his flesh. (Jos.,
De Bello Jud. , vi. 3; Deut. xxviii. 53-56.)
All these horrors failed to subdue the
ferocious obstinacy of John of Gischala and Simon, son of
Gioras. In spite, however, of their precautions, and their
cruelties towards those who were suspected of meditating an
escape, there were, every day, scores who, by throwing
themselves down the walls, were able to reach the Roman
camp. Deeply moved at the sight of so much misery, Titus
received them kindly, and gave them their liberty. But, adds
Josephus, ‘God had condemned the whole of this people, and
turned the very means of safety into occasion of
destruction.’ (Jos., De Bello Jud. , v. 13.) Many
of these poor fugitives were so exhausted on reaching the
camp that they died on taking the food which had been too
long denied them. A still greater number fell victims to the
Arabs and Syrians, who followed the Roman army; for, a
report having been circulated that some of the Jews had
swallowed their gold before leaving Jerusalem, in order the
more effectually to hide it, these wild auxiliaries,
strangers to the discipline of the legions and born enemies
of the Jewish people, ensnared the unfortunate fugitives and
cut them into pieces, hoping to find what would satisfy
their monstrous avarice. During one single night there were
two thousand found lying thus embowelled. (Ibid. )
How all this forces us to think of the death of Judas, (Acts
i. 18.) and of the punishment of his deicidal betrayal! And
had not all this people imitated that traitorous apostle?
He, the Iscariot, had delivered up the Son of Man to the
chief priests and leaders of the Jews; the Jews delivered
Him up to the Gentiles; and the Prophet Zacharias makes them
all share in the responsibility of that infamous barter,
wherewith began the sacred Passion of our sweet Jesus.
(Zach. xi., 12, 13.)
In the city, the ravages of the famine
were beyond all imagination. Josephus, speaking of them,
uses, without being aware of it, the very expression of our
Redeemer: ‘In no time did any other city ever suffer such
miseries.’ (Jos., De Bello Jud. , v. 10; St. Matt.
xxiv. 21.) In the space of a few months there were counted
six hundred thousand dead, and to these burial of one sort
or other was given; as to the rest, they could not be
numbered, for the survivors had not the strength needed for
burying them, and they were left to rot in the houses or
streets.
Meanwhile, on July 12, a greater trial
than all this befell Jerusalem and the whole Jewish people:
for want of victims, the continual sacrifice was taken away,
as in the days of Antiochus, (Dan. viii. 11-13.) but this
time it was for ever. It was the end, the openly declared
end, of Mosaism and its worship, to be henceforth replaced,
and without dispute, by the Sacrifice of the law of love;
the end, with but the brief interval of a siege and a war,
which had then no other object to achieve, and therefore, no
further reason for its continuance. An immense grief — a
grief that admitted no consolation — seized the hearts of
the Jewish people, who, up the very last, had lived on the
empty hope fostered by the false prophets. (Jos., De
Bello Jud. , vi. 5.)
The foolhardy obstinacy of Simon and John
rejected, even then, the proposals of Titus, that he would
spare both city and temple. Hostilities were therefore
resumed, implacably and pitilessly resumed. But the Jewish
soldiers had not energy enough to keep pace with the
fanaticism of their leaders; worn out by famine, they had
not the unflinching resistance needed for repelling the
sustained assaults of the Romans. Already the tower of
Antonia, which commanded the temple, was in the power of the
enemy, and each day he was seen closing in nearer to the
sacred edifice. Its defenders resolved on one last effort;
roused by the greatness of their misfortune, they rushed
through the vale of Cedron, and made a desperate charge on
the post of Mount Olivet. It looked though, for these final
engagements, the instinct of God’s vengeance, which weighed
upon them, was leading them to this place of prophecy, where
the Son of Man had wept over Jerusalem, and where, as we
already said, the first battle was fought. Repelled, and in
despair, they returned to the city, which they were never
again to leave; then, with their own hands, setting fire to
the outer porticoes of the temple, they gave the first
enclousure over to the Romans.
Titus was desirous, above all things, to
save the temple; but, as Josephus observes, ‘God had, for
certain, long ago doomed it to the fire;… and the flames
were kindled by the Jews themselves, when that fatal day
came.’ (Jos., De Bello Jud. , vi. 4.) It was August
4, in the year 70, a Sabbath-day, and the anniversary of the
first destruction of the holy place under Nabuchodonosor.
The guards of the temple, exasperated by suffering,
stupefied by hunger, attacked the soldiers who, by Titus’
orders, were quenching the fire that had been some days
burning at the outer portion of the building. They were soon
beaten back into the temple, and, this time, they were not
the only ones to enter. While they were falling by hundreds
beneath the sword of the
