Taken from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Guéranger  (1841-1875)

Quote:I have great sadness, cries out the Apostle of the Gentiles, as he thought of the malediction 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 flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever! But now, they are gone astray by their own fault; they see nothing; they understand nothing. The royal banquet of the Scriptures, on which their Fathers feasted, 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.

Gentiles! you that have been substituted for those broken branches, and are grafted on the stem of the Covenant! 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—no, this good God 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 thus 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 to bear. 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—it is by faith that you now are what you are. Be not, therefore, high-minded with self-complacency; but remember how that God, who broke off the natural branches from the glorious tree will not spare you, if you cease to be faithful; and while you do well to admire his mercy, you do not wisely if you forget his inexorable justice.

Well, therefore, does our Mother the Church instruct us in today’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” have this great advantage—that we can profit by 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 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 (which will have rejected the Church)—not of the Church herself, who will then ascend to her Lord, perfected, as she will then be, in love and holiness, by the trials endured in those latter days. 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 and 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 those ancestors of the Jewish people—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. 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 were there very few, out of all those thousands, with whom God was pleased. 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 murmurings of the Israelites, who had but the figures and foreshadowings of our privileges?

Quote: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 this King, who came to the daughter of Sion seated on an ass; 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 them.

How loudly had not the Prophets spoken to them, in God’s name! Woe to the provoking and redeemed City! She hath not hearkened to the voice of 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). Crush the City as in a mortar! 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!

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! 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 City and nation. 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 both of 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 conqueror’s chariot. Two bandits, representatives of Jerusalem, in the streets of Rome, her rival! what a divine retaliation for the two thieves, which the Synagogue gave as an escort to its King on the Dolorous Way, and made them his crucified fellows on 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, brother-in-law to Caiphas, and last of the five sons of the high priest Annas, who succeeded each other in the office of high priest. By a visible dispensation of God’s justice, the 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 with this 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 Saducee like his kin, he deplored the war, and would have been glad to have seen peace restored; but he could not shirk the obligation his office obliged him to, of organizing the defense. Ruler most unworthy, yet ruler he was; and therefore, as the Prophet Isaias expresses it, this whole ruin was under his hand—it was all under his management—necessarily, it would, when it came, fall on him and crush him.

It was not long before the fanatics, who had instigated the rebellion, and got 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. Re-enforced by all the enthusiasts of 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 offering sacrifice. They put the office of high priest on a peasant, who happened to be a descendant of Aaron’s family, but was so unfit for the dignity that he did not even know what was meant by a priest.

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 shook at their approach; and on the evening before their arrival, had been heard to moan. Up to the morning, admidst 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 everyone 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 round 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 vigor 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 had 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, were the only ones to escape with their lives.

The justice of God overtook the princes of Juda. Their blood, mingled with the dust—their unburied bodies lying as dung upon the streets—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? 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: Go to! now, ye rich men! weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you! Your riches are putrified; your 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. It was truly the Lord who was avenging his own cause; 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.”

Jerusalem was then but in the beginning of her woes and her civil strifes. The ambitious character of John of Gischala 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 whatsoever they pleased. To pillage and murder were added the frightful excesses of that half idolatrous race which, in the days of the Assyrian Kings, had been substituted for the tribes of Israel; 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.

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, 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 twenty thousand well-armed men, not counting another forty thousand 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, 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 savior Simon the murderer, Simon the brigand! O Jesus, Son of David and Son of God, how art thou not avenged by all this! They wished it to be; they themselves had passed the sentence: Not Him, but Barabbas! The choice 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 to 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.

Meanwhile, the Galileans, driven back from Sion and the lower town by the newcomers, had retreated to the Temple, of which they occupied the first enclosure. The Zealots had grown more than ever discontented with John of Gischala, and made the inner Temple their fortified place of refuge. They were less numerous than the other two 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 the Galilean catapults; nor were they in the least troubled at finding that these huge missiles struck the priests when at the altar, thus mingling the blood of the sacrificers with that of the victims, and stewing the sacred courts with the bodies of dead or dying. Sacrilege and drunkenness—such was the end of those descendants of the austere Pharisees! Here again, Jesus—their crucified victim—was avenged.

While the abomination of desolation, foretold by Daniel, was standing in the Holy Place, John of Gischala saw that the Zealots were too stupefied by their 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 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 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.

With the exception of 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 70, there assembled, within this city of final vengeance, as though it were the whole nation, and that from every quarter of the globe. It had been the same at the time of our Jesus’ crucifixion—the whole Jewish people seemed as though it insisted on witnessing the consummation of the deicide; when over, the Apostles besought them to confess their having been accomplices in the crime of Calvary, but the preaching was fruitless; then there had been the terrific lesson of recent events—and that too was unable to open their eyes. As it was in the days of that Pasch, so salutary to mankind but so fatal to Juda; and, as it was at the subsequent Pentecost, so now, there were Jews congregated out of every nation under heaven, not indeed to hear an Apostle preaching to them to do penance, 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.

As the Man-God had said, the terrible day came suddenly, and as a snare, upon this immense assemblage of people. The empire was in the hands of Vespasian; the prosperous fortune of Rome was reestablished on the whole of the frontiers; and Titus had just reached Cæsarea 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 from the Mount; but each time they were repelled.

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. While the blood of this divine Lamb is enriching the whole earth—while 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 Mesraïm, he is passing over, as the avenger both of himself and 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!”

Woe to thee, O Ariel! Ariel, the city which David took—the City where God had his Temple and Altar—Thy years are passed; thy solemnities are at an end! 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. The song of lamentation is heard in Israel, for house is fallen. In every street there shall be wailing; and in all places, they shall say: Woe! Woe!

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—has been ceaselessly pacing 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 bridegrooms 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 ditty and 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.

Jerusalem has drunk 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 dregs. What a terrific day, this last celebration of the Jewish Pasch! The historian Josephus tells us what it is—sacrilegious, bloody, and noisy with the shouts, which even the enemy could hear, of the strife of the dissentient factions, for all are revived. Taking advantage of the gates being opened to the pilgrims, some Galileans, disguised, get into the inner Temple where, throwing aside their cloaks and displaying their weapons, they attack the crowd that stands around the altar. They beat and murder; then, trampling on the dying and the dead, they drive the people outside the courts. Meanwhile, the Zealots who were taken unawares, rushed, in dismay, into the subterranean caverns of the Temple. What a Pasch! What a Feast! worthy, indeed, of God’s hatred and rejection. Unhappy feasters, that have come from the ends of the world to this solemnity! how is it that they forget 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 who, fleeing from the face of a lion, and a bear should meet him; or, as one that entering into the houses and, when he leaneth with his hand upon the wall, a serpent should bite him. Terrible prophecy! how strangely is it not 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 is the busier to make this multitude its prey; for, owing to the previous depredations, famine had made itself felt from the beginning of the siege. Each day adds to its intensity, and urges on the savage instincts of the armed ruffians to attack all who are not of their party. It is not hatred only that now fills Sion with murder; to rob, or to get something to keep one from starvation, these are 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, are carrying on their own deadly feud—these two judges, having first seized the property of their victims, send them to the second bar, under pretense that they wished to show each other a mutual kindly feeling; giving the one who has nothing to steal, the option of condemning to death. It is scarcely forty years ago that in these very streets—through which the Jewish aristocracy is being ignominiously dragged from Simon to John, and from John to Simon—there was another Victim who, amidst the approving ridicule of the leaders 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!

While 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.

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 parleys 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—these still held up their heads in defiance against the determined invaders. There was nothing, then, to do but make up their minds to defer Rome and her pleasures to some later season, 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 labor, 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. In the brief space of three days, they completed an earth-wall measuring a little over five miles around—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. Truly, Jerusalem was thus made as an Ariel to Jehovah, that is, one 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, until then, had been able to eke out their miserable existence by picking up, at the risk of their lives, a few seeds or roots. A bushel of wheat was sold for a talent (about a year’s wages). Those who could afford it, gave their costliest treasures for a morsel of bread; but as to those who had nothing to give, they must drag the sewers, in the 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 quarrelled with his wife, and mothers grudged it their children. 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—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 savory 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 threaten her with death unless she at once declares where is her feast: “It is my son,” she replied; “there are the remnants!” This woman was Mary, daughter of Eleazar; once rich and of a noble family, she, maddened by hunger, had murdered her infant child, and had fed on his flesh.

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.” 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. How all this forces us to think of the death of Judas, 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 Zecharias makes them all share in the responsibility of that famous barter, wherewith began the sacred Passion of our sweet Jesus.

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.” In the space of a few months there were counted six hundred thousand dead; and to these, burial of one sort or another 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 the 12th of July, a greater trial than all this befell Jerusalem and the whole Jewish people: for want of victims, and continual sacrifice was taken away, as in the days of Antiochus; but this time, it was forever. 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 compensation—seized the hearts of the Jewish people who, up to the very last, had lived on the empty hope fostered by the false prophets.

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 as 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 have already said, the first battle was fought. Repelled and in despair, they returned back to the City, which they were never again to leave; then, with their own hands, setting fire to the outer porticos of the Temple, they gave the first enclosure over to the Romans.

Titus, however, was desirous above all things to save the Temple; “but,” as Josephus observes, “God had, for certain, long ago doomed it to the fire … although the flames took their rise from the Jews themselves, and were occasioned by them, when that fatal day was come.” It was the 4th of August, 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 sufferings, 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 Romans, now unexpectedly made masters of the inner enclosure—one of the soldiers, forgetting the orders given by Titus, but, as Josephus puts it, urged on by a divine power, seizes a firebrand, and hurls it through a window, into one of the rooms adjoining the sanctuary. The flame bursts forth and spreads; the efforts of Titus to stay it are useless. Simon’s soldiers on Mount Sion see it rising up towards the sky. At this fearful spectacle, the famished and wounded, turning towards the falling Temple, forget all their sufferings. From these thousands of dying Jews, all of them possessed with the one same grief, there arises a loud scream of despair, which blending with the shouts of the pagan soldiers, is heard even on the mountains of Perea, beyond the Jordan and the Dead Sea. Mount Moriah, on fire, seems as though its very foundations were burning, and blood is flowing enough to quench the flames. The number of the slain is so great that the ground could not be seen, and the soldiers, as they marched, had to trample on the dead. The Priests who have mounted on the roof of their Temple—women and children crouching by thousands in its galleries—all perish in the flames with the treasures of the sanctuary.

John of Gischala, gathering together his few remaining followers, had escaped between the enemy’s battalions, and had joined Simon in the high portion of the city. The contest continued for a few weeks longer, but it was the effort of a last agony. On the first of September, Sion was taken, plundered and burnt like Moriah and the lower town. The prediction of today’s Gospel was fulfilled. Jerusalem—beaten flat to the ground, and the children that were in her—is but a mass of smoking ruins. Eleven hundred thousand men had perished during the siege. Of the ninety-seven thousand that had been taken prisoners during the whole war, seven hundred were picked out as fit to grace the conqueror’s triumph; the remainder (that is those who were over seventeen years of age) were sent to the mines, or reserved for the amphitheater; the others supplied the slave-markets of the empire for some length of time.

NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – ON THE DEATH OF THE SINNER ~ St Alphonsus
SERMON XXXVIII.

“Thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee.” LUKE xix. 43.

SERMON XXXVIII. NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST. – ON THE DEATH OF THE SINNER
by St. Alphonsus Liguori



“Thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee.” LUKE xix. 43.