There is a lot in the Gospel this morning about tragedy and what it might mean to us. We all face tragedy both personally and as a people. What does it mean to us? Is God getting even with us? Do tragedies reveal a God who is wrathful and seeking to punish us? Just in case you check out before I’m done, let me answer that up front, and the Gospel will underline the truth of this: No. That’s not what Jesus is saying. In fact, he is saying something very important to each of us about where God is when the world is set on fire.
When it comes to tragedies, I find it easy to put my focus on war, especially when it’s far away from me. I do experience frustration when I must pay more to fill up my gasoline tank in the car but when it’s something far away from me, it keeps me from any self-examination I might be forced to do. In a way, this is what the questioner is doing when he asks Jesus about these two events that are recounted for us in this mornings Gospel. The questioner refuses to focus on anything that might cause any sort of self-reflection. I suspect that the questioner hoped Jesus would go after Pilate, the first century authoritarian leader who ruled with violence and terror. But Jesus seems to ignore Pilate in his response and turns the table on the crowd in order to make this personal. And it’s not just personal for them, it is for us as well.
Jesus asks the crowd if those who had been innocently killed were worse sinners than others because of the suffering they endured. Most of the crowd wrongly understood punishments were from God, especially the kind these Galileans faced and they were directly proportionate to the crime or sin people committed. In other words, the more you sin, the more you will be punished. Or as Jesus asked: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way [because] they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” And then to make his point even clearer he brings into the conversation another event that had taken place. Eighteen people had been crushed under a tower in Jerusalem had died. In this rather random event, the prevailing theology that Jesus was now confronting would have suggested that random events like both were evidence of God’s retribution. With friends like this, who needs enemies?
Yet I cannot tell you how many times I have heard countless people suggest that God is the one responsible for similar horrific tragedies. I am old enough to remember that some so-called preachers blamed the tragedy following Hurricane Katrina as divine retribution. I don’t want to list other such accusations but there are many, many people who believe that God is actively punishing people for random acts of violence and tragedy that have happened through the years. But listing them isn’t important. What is important is how Jesus responds. He emphatically says NO this isn’t why these things happen.
It’s ironic that the remainder of this morning’s Gospel is often twisted to miss the point Jesus is making. At first blush it sounds like Jesus is saying unless you repent, you’re going to find the same divine retribution. This is a classic reason why you should not form a theology around a verse, but we need to go deeper, motivated by what we know is what all scripture points to: the unmerited, undeserved love of God available to all.
Jesus does say that the crowd needs to repent. The word here is metanoia, and it literally means to change your mind. Jesus is saying that the crowd’s understanding about injustice and unrighteousness is wrong. God is not the author of either. And when he says that unless they change their mind, they risk dying just like the people in the two examples. But hold on a second, this means that unless they change their minds they risk dying “suddenly and unprepared.” There is no promise that they can avoid death, even one that might be as tragic and catastrophic as the two examples that are described. But if they change their minds about how God is present in the world, even during cataclysmic catastrophes, they will be prepared for whatever they face, and their lives will bear fruits that come directly from both an understanding and experience of God’s love. God’s love even (and maybe most especially) in the context of suffering and death.
Then Jesus shares a parable about a fig tree that has not produced fruit in three years. “The significance of fruit bearing is a theme throughout Luke. John the Baptist’s preaching in Luke 3:7-14 describes just, interpersonal dealings as the fruit of repentance. In the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:43-45, Jesus states that a good tree produces good fruit and similarly a good person produces good from the goodness of their heart. In the parable of the Sower in Luke 8:4-15, Jesus explains that those with good hearts hear the word of God, hold fast to it, and patiently produce fruit. With this evidence, the fig tree represents the human heart.” (Jeremy L. Williams)
And how easy it is to spend our lives on how bad other people are and fail to live our lives n such a way that bears good fruit: loving and accepting and allying ourselves to those the world rejects. We cannot bear such fruit when we are constantly taking everything that happens and making it about ourselves or assigning fault to others because of the way they live. This is wrong and like fruitless fig tree, we simply waste our opportunity to be part of the plan God is unfolding before us, loving the unlovable and standing alongside the rejected.
Jesus is not addressing, and will refuse to address, the specifics of the tragedies that were mentioned but uses them as a springboard to face the existential questions of our existence, why God put us here and how we should look to God during struggles, suffering, racism, wars and unrest. Where is God?
God is in the suffering and the loss. God is with the mother and unborn child who were killed in the bombing of the Ukrainian hospital. God is with those who wait in waiting rooms as their child faces an uncertain surgery. God is there with the grieving parents as they watch their adult son leave this world, connected to an IV machine and intubated. God is with those clinging to life having been invaded by a virus that now keeps them from breathing.
No one sinned to cause such struggle. If that’s what we believe, we need to have our minds changed; or to use the words Jesus did, we need to experience metanoia. For God understands our suffering. Not in just a way where he acknowledges our suffering, but God is physically and emotionally present in our loss and suffering. God participates with us, in our struggles.
When we get our mind and our heart around this, we come to a basic understanding that we are called to walk with those who struggle and to love them by being willing to participate, just like Jesus does. How that happens is different from person to person and situation to situation. But removing ourselves from the struggles of others or, even worse, to blame their struggles on God somehow causing the loss, is to be like a barren fig tree.
I read this week that it is important to note that “One of the themes of Jesus’ … ministry that becomes more and more prominent the closer he gets to Jerusalem is his dire warning about the impending fate of Jerusalem. Jesus is informed about some Galilean pilgrims who were probably involved in a political uprising against the Roman occupation and were subsequently put to death by Roman soldiers in the Temple complex—thus mingling their blood with the sacrifices. Jesus’ response is to tell them not to imagine that these Galilean victims were worse sinners than any other Galileans. Instead, Jesus says if they don’t rethink their intentions they will all perish in the same way. Jesus then brings up an incident of a recent building collapse in Jerusalem that had resulted in eighteen fatalities and comments on it by saying, “Do you think that they were more blameworthy than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you! Unless you repent, you will all be destroyed in the same way.” What is Jesus saying? Is he talking about Galileans and Judeans going to hell? Yes and no. Jesus isn’t talking about a postmortem spiritual hell, but an impending literal hell. Jesus has been calling Jerusalem into the kingdom of God and the way of peace by the practice of enemy love and radical forgiveness. But for the most part Jerusalem has rejected this message of peace, believing instead that when the time comes God will fight with them in a war of independence and help them attain freedom by killing their enemies. In response to this enormously dangerous holy war assumption, Jesus warns Jerusalem against resorting to violence by telling them that if they don’t rethink war and peace according to the kingdom of God, they’re all going to die by Roman swords and collapsing buildings. And this is exactly what happened a generation later. After four years of violent revolution led by a cadre of false messiahs claiming that God was about to give Israel victory over Rome, General Titus and the Roman Tenth Legion marched on Jerusalem. On August 4, AD 70, after a brutal four-month siege, the Romans launched their final assault. Hell had come to the holy city. Buildings collapsed from the bombardment of catapult stones (the hundred-pound hailstones of the Apocalypse), the city was set ablaze, and hundreds of thousands of Jerusalem’s citizens were killed by Roman swords. In the end Jerusalem was reduced to a smoldering Gehenna—the garbage dump where the fires are never quenched, and the maggots never die. This was when Jerusalem went to hell.
In the 21st century, the [satan] still tells big lies. In an age of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capable of eradicating all human life, the way of war is still foolishly romanticized and deemed a legitimate way to shape the world. But Lent is a time to repent, to rethink, to reimagine. Today let us heed the warning of Jesus and remember that there is no way to peace…peace is the way. Zahnd, Brian. The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey (p. 84). Kindle Edition.
Wars and rumors of wars will always be with us until the Kingdom arrives in its fulness. But don’t lose hope. God calls us to work for justice and pray for peace. And if God is on our side, who can be against us?
Wonderings of a Deconstructed Priest
Found Jesus along the road of grief