Friends, in today’s Gospel passage, Jesus laments over Jerusalem because it failed to acknowledge him. He says, “They will smash you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another within you because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” This is a thunderclap, a shock, a highly subversive thing to say. It would be something like a president-elect coming upon the White House in the midst of a crowd of his supporters and saying, “All of this will be destroyed.”

But this is precisely what Jesus does here. I know I’ve said it to you before, but I will say it again, because it belongs to the heart of the Gospel and it is repeated by Jesus over and over again: nothing in this world lasts. Nothing in this world should, therefore, be the object of our deepest longings or of our most powerful commitments.

The temple represented all of the glitter and glamor of this world, the best it can offer; and the people standing there, entranced by it, stand for all of us down through the ages who stand staring up at the goods of this world. So we must free ourselves from worldly attachments and live for God alone.