“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’ As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it…” – Luke 19:29-41

If you had brought the crowd to silence, Lord,
and made the air to still so stones could speak,
would they have cried aloud their praise?
Or would they have, instead, shed tears of grief?

Red, flowing tears, as hot with loss
as ever streaked a human face,
as hot as those you tasted on the cross,
as scarlet as the blood you shed.

They flow, these tears of Earth, today
from vents beneath the salty sea,
from fissures high upon the mounts
and far downslope in forest glades.

You wept to recognize that people will
not do the things that make for peace.
The stones in chorus weep to see
our violence laid hard on you.

And when the scarlet tears encounter salt,
the heat of sympathy explodes in sand,
black sand, gray cinder, groaning now
to bear the land extending into sea.

Weep stones. Weep people, weep. Weep all
Creation. In the confluence
of scarlet tears and human tears
we build new land on sable sand.

A poem/prayer based on Luke 19:28-40 (plus verses 41-44), the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel Reading for Year C, Sixth Sunday in Lent, the Liturgy of the Palms. 

Photo by Eric Anderson