As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” (Luke 19: 41-44)
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. (Matt. 23:37)
Much of the conversation about judgment and justice in recent weeks has focused on the question whether God “gets what He wants.” We know that God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” (1 Tim. 2:4). God’s desire for us, His pursuit of us despite our rebellion, is a pervasive theme in scripture. It’s something we need to recall again and again and again. It is why, I think, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem in the story of the Triumphal Entry.
A pastor at my former Church would preach on this passage on Palm Sunday, but he referred to it as the Tragic Entry. I think he was right. Jesus foresees destruction for God’s beloved city — a destruction accomplished by the Roman Emperor Titus not too long after Jesus’ death and resurrection. And Jesus weeps because the “abode of peace” (Jeru-Salem) failed to recognize the Prince of Peace.
Did God “want” the Romans to destroy Jerusalem? Not according to Jesus. He wanted to surround the city with protection. But they “were not willing,” and eventually they were destroyed.
An easy lesson we could draw from this episode is that God allows us the freedom to choose what we want. Do we want God’s protection or do we choose a path that leads to destruction?
This might be a bit too easy. Left to our own choices, would any of us choose God? That possibility is something that the Apostle Paul, reflecting on the Jewish scriptures, seemed to consider impossible:
There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God. (Rom. 3:11)
So does God get what He wants, or does He let us choose for ourselves even if it is not what He wants? The right answer seems to be “Yes” on both counts. The Biblical witness emphasizes both God’s sovereignty and human free will. It offers no systematic harmonization of this tension.
I suspect the scriptures allow this tension to lie open in part because the question of what God “wants” or of what any human person or human culture “wants” is irreducibly complex. Most of us are unable even to penetrate the deepest recesses of our own desires. Very often, we don’t know what we “want,” or we deceive ourselves about what we want to think we “want.”
We know that God “wants all people to be saved,” but we also know that this is not all God wants. He wants people to be free. He wants justice. He wants to expose and strip away evil until the good alone remains. He wants the fellowship of His perichoretic love, unimposed and uncoerced, to be “all in all.” God will get what He wants, but what He wants contains more than one element. The entirety of it can’t be isolated to one passage from scripture — perhaps it can’t ultimately be isolated at all.