Jesus Wept’: A Moving Caroline Sermon on Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem. 1637

MADEN, Richard   Christs love and affection towards Jerusalem. Delivered in sundry sermons out of his words and carriage when he came unto her, as they are recorded. Luke 19.41,42. Wherein are handled 1. Christs teares which are shed for Ierusalem, and the matter of singular observation in them. &c.
London: printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for John Clark, and are to be sold at his shop under S. Peters Church in Cornhill, 1637

Christs love and affection towards Jerusalem is a deeply affecting sequence of Caroline-era sermons on one of the most poignant moments in the Gospel narrative: Christ’s weeping over the doomed city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–42). Preached and published on the eve of the English Civil War, Richard Maden’s work explores Christ’s tears not merely as an episode of compassion, but as a theological lens through which to examine divine mercy, human blindness, repentance, and the tragic consequences of spiritual obstinacy.

Structured as a series of closely argued sermons, the volume meditates on Christ’s lament as both historical event and living warning to the contemporary Church. Jerusalem becomes a mirror for seventeenth-century England: a nation favoured by grace yet imperilled by pride, division, and neglect of divine visitation. Maden’s rhetoric moves between tenderness and prophetic urgency, combining patristic exegesis with the richly emotional preaching style characteristic of early Stuart devotional culture.

Printed by Miles Flesher in 1637, this is a scarce pre-war sermon collection, emblematic of the intensely charged religious atmosphere of the late Caroline Church. A powerful witness to English pulpit eloquence at the threshold of national crisis.

Richard Maden was an English Church of England divine active during the reigns of James I and Charles I, remembered chiefly for his devotional and homiletic writings. Although comparatively obscure today, Maden belonged to the learned clerical culture of the early Stuart Church, trained in scriptural exposition and steeped in patristic and Reformation theology.

His preaching reflects the pastoral and moral concerns of the Caroline clergy: the cultivation of inward repentance, the interpretation of national events through biblical history, and the urgent call to spiritual reformation. In Christs love and affection towards Jerusalem, Maden shows particular sensitivity to the affective tradition of English preaching, using Christ’s tears as a vehicle for both consolation and admonition.

Works such as this situate Maden within the mainstream of pre-Civil War Anglican devotion — a generation of preachers whose sermons reveal the emotional, theological, and political tensions that would soon erupt into open conflict.