Entering Jerusalem, Jesus weeps over its fate. He clearly foresees the city's sad destiny: in A.D. 70, after the anti-Roman revolt raised by the Zealots and the war that followed, Jerusalem will be razed to the ground by the Roman army sent to suppress the revolt. In the Middle Ages, and partly also in modern times, an opinion was widespread and popular among Christians that this catastrophe became a punishment for the Jewish people's rejection of the Messiah sent to them. Yet Jesus Himself looks at the situation differently. For Him this is above all a tragedy, a national catastrophe. He does not look at it as just retribution. For Him it is rather a rejected and therefore missed opportunity.

In the lives both of individuals and of whole peoples, there are crossroads at which the direction of further spiritual movement is determined and set for years ahead, if we are speaking about a person, or for centuries ahead, if we are speaking about a people. There is nothing predetermined here, no program written in advance, no fate or doom. On the contrary, such a crossroads is always a moment of highest freedom. A moment of that choice when the person himself or the people themselves choose and determine what later may look to them like doom or fate. The day of the Savior's entry into Jerusalem became such a moment for the Jewish people.

Of course, one can say that the enthusiasm with which the crowd met Him in the streets of Jerusalem was not worth much: the enthusiasm of crowds never lasts long. But the people did have the possibility of a choice, a serious choice determining further history for centuries ahead, and Jesus understands this perfectly. He also understands something else: like all such choices, this one essentially comes down to whether to follow God or one's own opinions, traditions, and habits. And the second option is always catastrophic. The only question is how soon this catastrophe will come. That it will come is beyond doubt: missed opportunities always exact a price, and the greater the opportunity, the more terrible the catastrophe will be if that opportunity is missed.

That is why Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. He understands as no one else does what has been given and what has been missed. And He also understands what the consequences will be.

This is already the second episode described by Mark in which the Lord heals by using saliva. Perhaps this is another prophetic action, in which Jesus symbolically portrays what is really happening on the invisible plane of being.

The point is not even that these symbols reflect what is happening better than anything else, but that they themselves are a reflection of the heavenly reality brought by the Son of God, who became the Son of Man. Thus the very words "Father" and "Son" are taken from human vocabulary for family relationships. But who knows whether these family relationships were not created to reflect the heavenly unity of the Father and the Son? Human saliva has always been considered a carrier of a person's qualities. The saliva of the unclean is unclean (Lev. 15:8); the saliva of the sick is contagious. In exactly the same way, the saliva of the One who sees gives sight, and the saliva of the One who hears and speaks gives hearing and speech (Mark 7:33).

Each of the evangelists, according to the logic and features of his own narrative, gives us an account of the cleansing of the Temple. The point is that for the Jews who saw the Lord Jesus driving the sellers out of the Temple, this was a symbol that He truly is the Savior of the world, the Christ. The prophet Haggai says of this Second Temple that its glory will be greater than the glory of Solomon's Temple, because the Deliverer will come into it. And now Christ drives out of the Temple the bustle unworthy of the holy place, and then, as the evangelist Luke writes, He teaches every day in the Temple. Day after day, again and again, Christ proclaims the Father's love and calls people to repentance.

It is important for us to notice how the evangelist Luke speaks about His listeners. The Synodal translation here offers the words: "...all the people listened to Him attentively"; in the Greek original, however, the evangelist uses a very vivid word: "...all the people hung on Him as they listened". This is the kind of unflagging attention, when we literally hang in clusters on Christ, catching His every word, that prevented the chief priests and scribes from immediately carrying out their treacherous plans. They wanted to destroy Him, but could not, the evangelist says, because all the people were literally hanging on Him. The world's hostility toward Christ, the opposition of the powers of evil to His saving action, proved powerless when people listened to His word in this way.

What draws attention is the similarity of this image to the words of Christ recorded by the apostle John in chapter 15 of his Gospel: "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me". It is characteristic that here the evangelist Luke uses not his usual word "ochlos," crowd, but "laos," people, the word by which laypeople in the Church later came to be called.