A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then“‘they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!”’ For if people do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Maybe it was the epic film, Ben-Hur that causes us to think that along the path to his crucifixion, Jesus never spoke a word. It's not true, and the passage above gives a fairly long discourse by Jesus on his way to his death. It is hard to imagine this even occurring. We hear so much about other events along the path, such as Simon of Cyrene being forced to carry the cross for Jesus, or Veronica wiping his face. These events are depicted in the "Stations of the Cross" in the Catholic Church, and this event is the eighth stop along the 14 stations.
That Jesus had strength enough to say so much is amazing. After a sleepless night of being dragged from one end of town to the other several times, given repeated beatings, and being lashed forty times with whips that tore the flesh off his back, this almost sounds like a conversation the women of Jerusalem. One would imagine that by this point, Jesus would only be able to speak the shortest, most important thoughts in his mind. So to take this much effort to get all this out, Jesus must have felt it to be of tantamount importance.
"Don't cry for me; Cry for yourselves, and your children. Things are going to get worse for you and your offspring, to the point that you are going to wish you and they were never born. What you see here is what people will do when I am with you. Imagine how bad it will get after I am gone."
And bad it did and continues to be. Shortly thereafter, Jerusalem fell, and the followers of Christ were tortured and put to death in droves. And even to this day, there are daily reports of how children are stolen, forced into slavery, and treated in the most savage ways, some even by those claiming to be messengers of a supreme god. And lest you think this only happens of foreign soil, take a look at the sex-trafficking trade here in America. Some do not even get the opportunity to be born. Young children everywhere are being destroyed by evil people.
If you have any heart at all, it brings tears to your eyes. It makes you sick to think of the evil being done in today's world, especially to the innocents.
Well, after that uplifting set-up, where am I going with this? Simply to say that while Easter is a time to celebrate the gift of Life, it is meaningless if we try to forget how horrible mankind can be. We tend to be complacent. To certain acts against children we turn a blind eye, and make excuses that sound solid in polite society ("after all, everyone should have the right to choose"), and forget that every bit of life that break forth is not forgotten by God.
Defend children, for they do not have the voice you and I do, as adults. If it was important enough for Christ to say it in his last words, it should be important to all of us.
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