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Mat_23:38 f. Ἀφίεται ὑμῖν ὁ οἶκος ὑμ .] your house is abandoned to your own disposal; the time for divine help and protection for your city is now gone by! For the meaning, comp. Joseph. Antt. xx. 8. 5. The present implies the tragic and decisive ultimatum. The ἔρημος , which is to be retained on critical grounds (see critical notes), intimates what is to be the final result of this abandonment, viz. the destruction of Jerusalem ( ἐρήμωσις , Mat_24:45; Luk_21:20); on the proleptic use of the adjective, comp. on Mat_12:13, and Kühner, II. 1, p. 236. According to the context, ὁ οἶκος ὑμῶν can only mean Ἱερουσαλήμ , Mat_23:37 (Bleek), in which their children dwell; not the city and the country at large (de Wette and earlier expositors, in accordance with Psa_69:25), nor the whole body of the Jewish people (Keim), nor the temple (Jerome, Theophylact, Euthymius Zigabenus, Calvin, Olearius, Wolf, Michaelis, Kuinoel, Neander, Baumeister in Klaiber’s Stud. II. p. 67 f.; Hofmann, Schriftbew. II. 2, p. 92; Ewald).
Mat_23:39 proceeds to account for this ἀφίεται ὑμῖν , κ . τ . λ . Were your city any longer to be shielded by the divine protection, I would still linger among you; but I now leave you, and it is certain that henceforth (His presence among them, as He knows, being about to cease with His death, comp. Mat_26:64) you will not see me again until my second coming (not: in the destruction of Jerusalem, Wetstein), when I shall appear in the glory of the Messiah, and when, at my approach, you will have saluted ( εἴπητε , dixeritis) me, whom you have been rejecting, with the Messianic confession εὐλογημένος , κ . τ . λ . (Mat_21:9). This is not to be understood of the conversion of Israel (Romans 11; Revelation 11) in its development down to the second coming (Bengel, Köstlin, Hofmann, Lange, Schegg, Auberlen, Ewald); for Jesus is addressing Jerusalem, and threatening it with the withdrawal of God’s superintending care, and that until the second appearing of Messiah ( ὁ ἐρχόμενος ), and hence He cannot have had in view an intervening μετάνοια and regeneration of the city. No; the abandonment of the city on the part of God, which Jesus here announces, is ultimately to lead to her destruction; and then, at His second appearing, which will follow immediately upon the ruin of the city (Mat_24:29), His obstinate enemies will be constrained to join in the loyal greeting with which the Messiah will be welcomed (Mat_21:9), for the manifestation of His glory will sweep away all doubt and opposition, and force them at last to acknowledge and confess Him to be their Deliverer. A truly tragic feature at the close of this moving address in which Jesus bids farewell to Jerusalem, not with a hope, but with the certainty of ultimate, though sorrowful, victory. Euthymius Zigabenus very justly observes in connection with ἕως ἂν εἴπητε , κ . τ . λ .: καὶ πότε τοῦτο εἴπωσιν ; ἑκόντες μὲν οὐδέποτε · ἄκοντες δὲ κατὰ τὸν καιρὸν τῆς δευτέρας αὐτοῦ παρουσίας , ὅταν ἥξει μετὰ δυνάμεως καὶ δόξης πολλῆς , ὅταν οὐδὲν αὐτοῖς ὄφελος τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως . Comp. Theophylact, Calvin, Gerhard, Calovius. Wieseler, p. 322, despairing of making sense of the passage, has gone the length of maintaining that some ancient reader of Matthew has inserted it from Luke. This view might seem, no doubt, to be favoured by the use, in the present instance, of Ἱερουσαλήμ , Mat_23:37, the form in which the word regularly appears in Luke, and for which, on every other occasion, Matthew has Ἱεροσόλυμα ; but it might very easily happen that, in connection with an utterance by Jesus of so remarkable and special a nature, the form given to the name of the city in the fatal words addressed to her would become so stereotyped in the Greek version of the evangelic tradition, that here, in particular, the Greek translator of Matthew would make a point of not altering the form “ Ἱερουσαλήμ ,” which had come to acquire so fixed a character as part of the utterance before us.
REMARK.
It is fair to assume that Christ’s exclamation over Jerusalem presupposes that the capital had repeatedly been the scene of His ministrations, which coincides with the visits on festival occasions recorded by John. Comp. Act_10:39, and see Holtzmann, p. 440 f.; Weizsäcker, p. 310. Those who deny this (among them being Hilgenfeld, Keim) must assume, with Eusebius in the Theophan. (Nova bibl. patr. iv. 127), that by the children of Jerusalem are meant the Jews in general, inasmuch as the capital formed the centre of the nation; comp. Gal_4:25. Baur himself (p. 127) cannot help seeing the far-fetched character of this latter supposition, and consequently has recourse to the unwarrantable view that we have before us the words of a prophet speaking in the name of God,—words which were first put into the mouth of Jesus in their present form, so that, when they were uttered, ποσάκις would be intended to refer to the whole series of prophets and messengers, who had come in God’s name; just as Origen had already referred them to Moses and the prophets as well, in whom Christ was supposed to have been substantially present; comp. Strauss in Hilgenfeld’s Zeitschr. 1863, p. 90.