In Luke’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem the Sunday before his crucifixion, Luke recounts how some of the Pharisees asked Jesus to rebuke his disciples. The Pharisees were concerned because the disciples were a large crowd and were obviously proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah. There are several different ways to understand what was going on here, but I am going to give the Pharisees the benefit of the doubt (at least for this article). The Pharisees were concerned because they were afraid that those praising Jesus’ entry would rise up in revolt against the Romans. The Pharisees were afraid of how the Romans would respond to this revolt (justly so).
      Jesus’ response was that if these people did not cry out to praise God, the stones would do so. In part Jesus was saying that there was an underlying desire/longing to see God move through the arrival of the Messiah that was going to break through no matter what was done to suppress that. I am not saying that the stones would not have literally cried out if the people had been silent, merely that there is more to what Jesus is saying here than just that. The Holy Spirit had been laying the groundwork and the people were ready for the moving that God had planned. The people were primed and ready to seek the will of God.
     After this Jesus weeps over the city of Jerusalem. He expresses grief over what will happen to Jerusalem. This seems to me to be a response to the Pharisees, and others, resisting the movement of the Holy Spirit. There are two ways to look at this. The first is that Jesus knew the future and knew what was coming in 70 A.D. (more or less). I am comfortable with that understanding. However, the other way to look at it is that Jesus just knew people. He knew that those who rejected God’s plan would attempt to take God’s place and save themselves, with disastrous results. Jesus knew how the Romans would react to this. There is a final way to look at this. That way is that both of those are true.