"And as they drew near, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, 'If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that belong to your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.'" (Luke 19:41,42 ).

"'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.... For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?" ( Luke 23:28,31).

Jesus wept over Jerusalem. The women wept over Him, and He told them to weep for themselves and for their children. Grief at a moment of triumph, grief at a moment of desolation.

There is irony in the Palm Sunday story, for over its rejoicing hangs the shadow of the betrayal, trial and crucifixion. Was the angry crowd that called for His crucifixion the same multitude that hailed Him as King five days earlier? Why did the Lord ride in triumph, knowing the things that would surely come to pass? He did so to announce that He, the Divine truth from the Divine good, would rule all things; to give us a picture which will stand for all time of His majesty. And then the events of Gethsemane and Calvary let us know the nature of that majesty - that indeed His kingdom is not of this world.

Can we picture the scene on Palm Sunday? The multitudes were rejoicing and shouting, and then they saw their King weeping. This was not a brief moment, but a sustained weeping, which caused the writer of the gospel to hear of it. Did their shouting die down as they watched His grief, did they wonder when He pronounced doom upon the city they lived in? "Your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children with you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another because you did not know the time of your visitation." Then, perhaps, as He rode on, the cheering resumed, and the strange words were forgotten.

There is yet another irony; for the people shouted that peace had come. "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" Yet when Jesus wept, He said to the city, "If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes."

This grand panorama speaks of the world inside each human being. It is in our minds, in the spiritual sense of the Word, that Jesus rides in triumph. When we see the wonder of His truth, sense its power over all things, we crown Him. All the events of Palm Sunday tell of those times when we acknowledge that the Lord, the visible God, rules our minds through the Word which is within us. It is a time of great rejoicing. Like the multitudes of Palm Sunday, we feel that this vision will sweep all that is evil away, and the Lord will easily reign within us as our King and our God.

Such happy times do come to us, and we can rejoice in them, and hail our Lord and King with jubilation. "Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest!" Peace comes through conjunction with the Lord whom we have seen (Apocalypse Explained 369:9, 11). Yet the Lord Himself knows that there are battles to come from those who know no peace. This too He warns us of in His Word. In the natural Jerusalem of the Lord's day the rulers had used falsity to destroy the truth, and they brought much grief upon the Christians. In the spiritual Jerusalem in our minds there are false values which would destroy peace. Before we get to heaven there is going to be a battle between our vision of the Lord and our self love which will abuse the truth to make that happen.

So the Lord wept, out there on the mount of Olives, as He looked down upon the city. His weeping was a sign of mercy, for He grieves over the states in us which will hurt us and which are opposed to our peace. (Arcana Coelestia 5480; Apocalypse Explained 365 [9]; cf. 365:11, 340). Yet His grief is an active force, it is mercy, working to eliminate those states. Jesus promised that Jerusalem would be utterly destroyed - not a single stone left standing. It is true that the natural Jerusalem was razed to the ground, but this is not what He meant. He promises us - even as He warns us of the battles to come - that He will triumph, and that our Jerusalem - our excuses for doing evil - will not stand. They will be decimated by His Word. (Cf. Arcana Coelestia 6588 [5]; Apocalypse Explained 365 [9]).

He wept from mercy, and He promised an end to weeping, for "His tender mercies are over all His works."

On Good Friday there was surely cause for weeping. Picture this scene: The women were following the cross, lamenting. Jesus must have been bleeding from the whipping, and scarred by the crown of thorns. He was surrounded by people who enjoyed seeing someone die. Those who called Him their enemy were satisfied that they had won.

His followers were desolate. Never had they imagined that the dream He had fostered would end this way, or the Leader they loved would be treated so terribly. They felt for Him in what they were sure was His suffering. They wept for Him.

Then perhaps the crowds that insulted Him were stilled as He turned to the mourners. Out of His infinite love He spoke. "'Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.'" He did not think of His approaching agony, He grieved for those He loved. He would triumph. It was upon them that suffering would come. What clearer picture can we have of the goal which brought our God to earth than that sentence? He came because evil people and evil feelings bring misery to His children. He came to give them joy after their weeping, to give them consolation and hope, and finally to give them the certainty that there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying.

The women of that time did indeed face physical sorrow. It is heartbreaking to learn of the persecutions of the Christians, to think of people killed because they worship their God; of children being taken from them, of good people subject to the mercy of those who know no mercy. Indeed it must have seemed that the Lord was right in saying that it would have been better had they never borne children who would suffer so for their faith. "For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed!'"

But the real reason the Lord came down to earth was that within physical cruelty there is a far greater hurt. There are plenty of people walking this earth who wouldn't think of murdering someone else, but who regularly enjoy taking away something far more precious - his ability to follow his Lord.

That was why the Lord spoke those words, "Weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children." The daughters of Jerusalem represent the gentle love of truth with sincere people all over the world. Their children are the charity and faith which comes from the love of truth. These are the casualties of evil, especially when it infests a church. These are the things that cause internal weeping, a sorrow of the spirit that is the more devastating because it is silent.

"Daughters of Jerusalem," He called them. Our innocent love of the truth grows up together with our justification for being selfish. In fact, it is ruled by self justification, as the daughters of Jerusalem were ruled by a corrupt church. When those women tried to break loose from the Jewish Church they were persecuted. When our innocent love of the truth seeks to lead us to follow the Lord we suffer temptations in our spirits. The hells rise up and tempt us with all the selfish and evil delights we have ever had, and we indeed weep for ourselves.

You see, it is not the truth itself that suffers! "Weep not for Me," Jesus said. The truth is all powerful. It is our love for that truth which is tempted. It is our charity and our faith - the children of that love - which suffer.

"For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts which never nursed.'" Doesn't it seem to us at times that the people who have no truths, who have no ideals, are the ones that are happy? In fact this is a prophecy that those who are outside of the Church and find it afresh will have an easier time than those who bring the falsities of life into the battle.

On Palm Sunday, when Jesus wept, He said that Jerusalem would be destroyed. As I have said, He was actually promising the destruction of evil in us. On Good Friday He gave the same assurance: "Then they will begin 'to say to the mountains, "Fall on us!" and to the hills, "Cover us!"' These apparently harsh words are ones of comfort, for they promise that as the Lord's truth triumphs in us, heaven will draw nearer. When that happens the hells who tempt us will be unable to bear the presence of heaven, and will cover themselves over and hide.

"For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?" The listeners knew what that meant: if when He was among them they rejected His truth, what will they do when the memory of His presence and His miracles have dried up? In the internal sense the green wood is truth that is still alive from a love for it. Even when we see the ideals of the Word, we are going to struggle with temptation. But when that wood dries out, when we can't sense the life and power of truth, the battle becomes very much harder.

In both these images - His weeping on Palm Sunday, His sad warning to the women to weep for themselves and for their children, the Lord is preparing us to fight for what we believe. How does He prepare us? By assuring us, not only of the trials to come, but of the certainty of victory now that He has revealed His might. There is such wonder, such hope for eternal happiness in the true Christian religion. Yet no worthwhile love will ever be ours to keep until it has faced its challenges. There must be a time of weeping: our merciful Lord weeping over our struggles and giving us strength from mercy; our dreams and hopes weeping when we fear they are lost. Through the trial we express our commitment to our dreams, and He delivers us.

Less than twenty four hours before His arrest the Lord spoke again about weeping. At the Last Supper He said, "Most truly I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice." But He did not stop there. "And you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you."

When He was crucified and rose again, they must have thought that now His words were fulfilled. Now they had found the joy which no one could take from them. Perhaps when they suffered at the hands of persecutors and found joy among fellow-Christians they thought the same. And finally, when they had fought their private battles, and from His power overcome the enemy within, they knew what He really meant.

"Jesus wept over the city." "Weep for yourselves and for your children." Our love of the truth will be threatened and with it our hope for true faith and true charity. It was to that end that He came into the world and rode in triumph and drank of the cup of rejection and apparent death - to be able to turn our sorrow into joy. Therefore He could also say, "In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." Amen.

(References: Luke 19:29-44, 23:24-38)

231. "Profanation of what is holy" means profanation by people who know the truths that their faith discloses and the good effects of caring taught by the Word, and who in one way or another acknowledge them. It does not mean people who have no knowledge of such things or who simply reject them out of irreverence. What follows, then, is about the former people, not the latter.

There are many kinds of profanation, some less serious and some more, but they boil down to the following seven kinds.

The first kind of profanation is committed by people who make light of the Word or use it lightly, or who do the same with the divine gifts of the church. Some people do this because of habitual immorality, pulling words and phrases out of the Word and including them in conversations of questionable quality, sometimes indecent ones. This necessarily involves some disrespect for the Word, when in fact the Word is divine and holy throughout and in every detail. At the heart of everything it says, there is something divine lying hidden; and it is through this that it is in touch with heaven. This kind of profanation is more or less serious, though, depending on the recognition of the Word's holiness and on the indecency of the conversation into which the supposed humorists inject it.

[2] A second kind of profanation is committed by people who understand and acknowledge divine truths but who violate them in their lives. This is less serious, though, if they simply understand the truths and more serious if they actually acknowledge them. All our discernment does is teach, much the way a preacher does. It does not automatically unite the teaching with our volition. Acknowledgment, on the other hand, does unite itself. There can be no acknowledgment unless our volition agrees. Still, this union may vary, and the severity of the profanation depends on the closeness of the union when our lives violate the truths that we acknowledge. For example, if we acknowledge that vengefulness and hatred, adultery and promiscuity, fraud and deceit, slander and lying, are sins against God and still commit them, we are guilty of this more serious kind of profanation. The Lord says, "The slave who knows the Lord's will and does not do it will be beaten severely" (Luke 12:48 [Luke 12:47]). Elsewhere, "If you were blind you would not have sin, but now you say that you can see, so your sin remains" (John 9:41).

Acknowledging things that are apparently true, though, is different from acknowledging things that are really true. If we acknowledge things that are really true and violate them with our lives, then in the spiritual world we seem to have no light or warmth in our voice and speech, as though we were completely listless.

[3] A third kind of profanation is committed by people who use the literal meaning of the Word to justify their evil loves and false principles. This is because the justification of falsity is the denial of truth and the justification of evil is the rejection of goodness; and at heart the Word is pure divine truth and divine goodness. In its outermost meaning, its literal meaning, this does not come out as real truth except where it tells about the Lord and the actual path of salvation. Rather, it comes out in those outer garments of truth that we may call "appearances of truth." As a result, this level of meaning can be persuaded to support all kinds of heresy; and if we justify our evil loves we do violence to things that are divinely good, while if we justify our false principles we do violence to things that are divinely true. This latter violence is called "the falsification of what is true," while the former is called "the adulteration of what is good." Both are meant by "blood" in the Word.

There is something spiritual and holy in the details of the literal meaning of the Word--the spirit of truth that emanates from the Lord. This holy content is damaged when the Word is falsified and adulterated. Clearly, this amounts to profanation.

[4] A fourth kind of profanation is committed by people who utter devout and holy words and whose voice and body language seem to express loving feelings, but who at heart neither believe nor love what they are pretending. Most of these are hypocrites and Pharisees. Everything true and good is taken from them after death, and they are dismissed into outer darkness. People of this sort who have also become fixed in their rejection of Divinity, the Word, and the holy gifts of the church sit in silence in the darkness, incapable of speech. They want to utter devout and holy words the way they did in this world, but they cannot, because in the spiritual world speech must be in accord with thought. Hypocrites, though, want to say what they do not really think. This gives rise to a resistance in the mouth, and the result is that they can only be silent.

However, there are less and more serious forms of hypocrisy depending on how resolute the opposition to God is, and on the outward arguments in favor of God.

[5] A fifth kind of profanation is committed by people who claim divine qualities for themselves. These are the people meant by Lucifer in Isaiah 14 "Lucifer" there means Babylon, as we can tell from verses 4 and 22 of the same chapter, which also tell of their fate. These are the same people who are described as a harlot sitting on a scarlet beast in Revelation 17:3.

There are many mentions of Babylon and Chaldea in the Word. "Babylon" means the profanation of what is good and "Chaldea" the profanation of what is true. In each case, it applies to people who claim divine qualities for themselves.

[6] A sixth kind of profanation is committed by people who accept the Word but still deny the divine nature of the Lord. These are the people known as Socinians and Arians in the world. Both kinds of person ultimately find themselves praying to the Father, not to the Lord. They pray constantly to the Father for admission to heaven (some also praying for the sake of the Son), but their prayers are in vain. Eventually, they lose all hope of salvation and are sent down into hell with people who deny God. These are the people meant by those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit, who are not forgiven in this world or the next (Matthew 12:32).

The reason is that God is one in both person and essence, comprising a Trinity; and this God is the Lord. Since the Lord is heaven as well, and since this means that the people who are in heaven are in the Lord, people who deny the Lord's divine nature cannot be granted admission to heaven and be in the Lord. I have already explained [28, 60-67] that the Lord is heaven and that therefore people who are in heaven are in the Lord.

[7] A seventh kind of profanation is committed by people who at first accept divine truths and live by them but later backslide from them and deny them. The reason this is the worst kind of profanation is that these people are mixing what is holy with what is profane to the point that they cannot be separated, and yet they need to be separated for people to be either in heaven or in hell. Since this is impossible for such individuals, their whole human volition and discernment is torn away from them and they become no longer human, as already noted [226, 227].

Almost the same thing happens to people who at heart acknowledge the divine contents of the Word and the church but submerge them completely in their own sense of self-importance. This is the love of being in control of everything that has been mentioned several times before [38, 112, 146, 215]. When they become spirits after death, they are absolutely unwilling to be led by the Lord, only by themselves; and when the reins of their love are loosened, they try to control not only heaven but even the Lord. Since they cannot do this, they deny the Lord and become demons.

It is important to realize that for all of us, our life's love, our predominant love, stays the same after death and cannot be taken away.

[8] This kind of profanation is meant by the lukewarm church described in the Book of Revelation: "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. If only you were cold or hot! Since you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth" (Revelation 3:14, 15 [Revelation 3:15-16]). This is how the Lord describes this kind of profanation in Matthew: "When an unclean spirit leaves someone, it wanders in dry places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, 'I will go back to the home I left.' Then it does go back and finds it empty, swept clean and furnished for itself. It goes off and allies itself with seven other spirits worse than itself, and they come in and live there; and the latter times of that individual are worse than the earlier ones" (Matthew 12:43, 45 [Matthew 12:43-44, 45]). The departure of the unclean spirit describes our turning; and the return of the unclean spirit with seven worse spirits to the house made ready for them describes our turning back to our former evils once our true and good qualities have been banished. The profanation of what is holy is described by the profanation that makes our later times worse than our former ones.

The following passage from John means much the same: "Jesus said to the man who had been healed at the Pool of Bethesda, 'Do not sin any more, or something worse will happen to you'" (John 5:14).

[9] The following passage tells of the Lord's provision that we do not inwardly acknowledge truths and then backslide and become profane: "He has closed their eyes and blinded their hearts so that they do not see with their eyes or understand with their hearts and turn themselves, and I heal them" (John 12:4 [John 12:40]). "So that they do not turn themselves and I heal them" means so that they do not acknowledge truths and then backslide and so become profane. This is also why the Lord spoke in parables, as he himself explained--see Matthew 13:13. The Jewish prohibition against eating fat and blood (Leviticus 3:17; Leviticus 7:23, 25 [Leviticus 7:23, 26]) meant that they should not profane holy things. The fat meant what is divinely good and the blood what is divinely true. Once we have turned to what is good and true, we should remain turned to the end of our life, as the Lord tells us in Matthew: "Jesus said, 'Whoever will have remained faithful to the end will be saved'" (Matthew 10:22; likewise Mark 13:13).