A Targum of Luke 19:41-44

As Jesus came near and saw the nation, he wept over it, saying:

If only you knew—even now—the things that make for peace.
But you did not want peace. You wanted power. And now the things that make for peace are hidden from your eyes.

You did not weep for the children drinking poisoned water in your own cities.

You did not weep for the sick who died in waiting rooms, turned away for the crime of poverty.

You did not weep for the immigrants who perished in your deserts and your detention centers, for those you deported into danger, for those you called "animals" and "invaders" while they fled the very wars you funded.

You did not weep for those you executed on your gurneys in the name of justice, or for those your officers killed in the streets in the name of order.

You did not weep for the ones you bombed in Iraq. In Syria. In Somalia. In Yemen. In Libya.

You did not weep when your drones killed wedding parties and called the dead "combatants."

You did not weep when you cut the aid that kept strangers alive on the other side of the world, because their survival was no longer politically useful to you.

You did not weep when you seized a nation's president from his own land at gunpoint.

You did not weep when you shattered a country that was days from a peace deal—when the breakthrough had already come and you chose the bomb anyway.

You did not weep for the schoolgirls buried under rubble this morning.

You did not weep, because you believed your Christ was a Christ of borders, and your God a God of empire.

So hear this: the days will come upon you when your own walls will not protect you—when the wealth you have hoarded will rot in your hands, when the alliances you have broken cannot be rebuilt, when the hatred you have sown across the earth returns to your own shores, and no army will be large enough to make you safe.

They will not leave one stone upon another.

Because you did not recognize the time of your visitation—when the Lord came to you disguised as the immigrant, the uninsured, the prisoner, the bombed, the abandoned—and you looked away.