Luke 23:28-30

Weep not for me, &c.— "Though my death affects you, and seems to call for all your tears, yet it is rather a reason for joy than sorrow, as it will be a means of reconciling the world to God: rather reserve your tears for a real calamity which threatens you, and your children, which will terminate in the destruction of this city and nation, and which will be most terrible, and call for the bitterest lamentations: for in those days of vengeance, you will vehemently wish that you had not given birth to a generation, whose wickedness has rendered them objects of the divine wrath, to a degree that never was experienced in the world before. The thoughts of those calamities afflict my soul, far more than the feeling ofmy own sufferings." These words sufficiently imply that the days of distress and misery were coming, and would fall on them and their children: but at that time there was not any appearance of such an immediate ruin. The wisest politician could not have inferred it from the present state of affairs; nothing less than the divine prescience could have certainly seen and foretold it. The expression in Luke 23:30 is proverbial, as appears from Hosea 10:8. Isaiah 2:19 and is generally made use of to imply the pressure of some intolerable calamity.