I. It is interesting and instructive to notice in this passage how the Lord regards men both in their corporate and their individual capacities. He made us, and He knows what is in man. He knows that each immortal stands on His own feet, and must meet with God alone, as far as regards all the rest of humanity. But He knows and recognises also, that we are made with social instincts and faculties, that we cannot exercise the functions of our nature without society; and that we are all affected deeply by our intercourse with others, both as regards our time and our eternity. In one aspect, each man stands or falls for himself alone; in another aspect, we grasp each other, and, like the victims of a shipwreck, either help to sink or help to save one another. It is in the latter aspect that our Lord regarded the inhabitants of Jerusalem as He looked on them across the glen from the neighbouring mountain's brow. They were brethren in iniquity. Hand was joining in hand in preparation for the highest crime ever done in the universe. They were leagued in a dark covenant to crucify the Son of God. Looking down on Jerusalem, and making great lamentation over it, the ground of His grief was, not that they had sinned and so brought on themselves condemnation in that there was nothing peculiar to Jerusalem; what makes Him weep is, that they will not accept redemption at His hands.
II. "In this thy day" Jerusalem had a day. Every community and every person has a day a day of mercy. If in that day the lost shall turn they shall get life in the Lord. But if they allow their day to pass, there remaineth only darkness "a fearful looking for of judgment." "The things which belong unto thy peace." The things which God had fixed in the eternal covenant, and revealed in the fulness of time, were things that Jerusalem did not know. Like the wayside, hard, trodden ground, they did not open their hearts to take in the seed of the Word. The lesson that we learn from the text is this: that Jesus, the Author and Possessor and Giver of eternal redemption to the lost, rejoices when they accept His gift, and weeps over them when they neglect it.
W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul,p. 326.
References: Luke 19:41. J. Greenhough, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 291; Parker, Christian Commonwealth,vol. vii., p. 611; Church of England Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 369; C. Kingsley, Discipline and other Sermons,p. 290; Homilist,vol. vi., p. 104; Ibid.,3rd series, vol. i., p. 156; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvi., No. 1570; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 92; J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,p. 28; J. Keble. Sermons for Sundays after Trinity,part i., p. 353; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons,No. xx.; Ibid., The Life of Duty,vol. ii., p. 85; W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 152; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 21.