Third Sunday in Lent
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Two tragedies had happened in Jerusalem, and the news about them is spreading like wildfire. One tragedy was that some Galileans had gone to the temple to offer sacrifices, and Pontius Pilate demonstrated his power in his typical, ruthless way by having them all killed. It must have been a horrible scene in the temple, the blood of the victims mingling with the blood of the sacrificed animals, as our text puts it. Awful, senseless deaths. Tragic.
The other tragedy was the collapse of the tower of Siloam. It had fallen over, and 18 people died in the rubble. What a tragedy for those people, for their families, and for the community.
Whenever such tragedies strike, we try to make sense out of what has happened. That’s what the disciples are doing. They explain the situation with the only solution they can come up with: The Galileans who were murdered must have been worse sinners than everybody else, and that’s why they died.
It’s tempting to scoff at this sad logic of faith. However, we have to take an honest look at the fact that we today are still quick to explain tragedy by finding fault in the lives or behaviors of the victim. Blaming the victim, we call this ruthless game.
There is the Westboro Baptist Church, which thrives on travelling around the country to the funerals of fallen soldiers and shouting things like “God is glad you are dead.” and “You deserved to die.” and the more general slogans of “You hate God” and “America is doomed.”
There is Pat Robertson, declaring that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on the gays in New Orleans.
There is Sam Morris, a conservatives Baptist in Tennessee, who attributed the tragic shooting in the Sandy Hook Elementary School to the public school teachings on evolution and sexuality.
In a more local setting, we ask the battered wife what she did to make her husband so angry. We ask the victim of company downsizing what mistakes he had made on the job. We assume that the person in poverty somehow caused his or her own poverty.
Do you remember the shame that once surrounded getting cancer? To some degree it still exists. When someone is diagnosed with lung cancer, we immediately ask if that person was a smoker. If the answer is “yes”, we say “aha” and think we know what caused the cancer.
Why do we do this? Why are we so driven to find the reason why tragedies happened?
It stems from our desire for order. We want our world to be orderly and predictable. We want there to be cause and effect connections for everything that happens. Order gives us a sense of safety and predictability and control. Random tragedies threaten that order. They bring chaos to our lives. And we really don’t like chaos.
Therefore, we desperately try to restore order by finding causes for tragedies. The Galileans died because they were sinners. The neighbor got lung cancer because he smoked. Katrina was only meant for gays.
As long as we can pretend that bad things happen only to bad people, our world is safe and orderly. Everything has cause and effect, and since I am not a bad person I am safe. Tragedies only happen to “those people”.
This whole construct gets even better when we can place this safety and orderliness into the hands of God. If God rewards the good and punishes the bad, well, then we are safe, because we are basically good people.
Our need for order leads us to see any disaster as punishment for something, to blame the victim, and to assume God as the instigator of it all.
And so the disciples come to Jesus and tell him of the murdered Galileans. In the way they ask their question, we can detect that they assume these men to have been bad people, sinners who brought this judgment upon themselves. If they can believe that, then they can handle the tragedy: God is still in charge, order is maintained, and their world is still safe and predictable.
Except that Jesus does not agree with their explanation, not at all. He will not let his disciples blame the victim. In fact, he says, neither those Galileans nor the 18 who died in the tower collapse are any different from you and me. They were just normal people doing their normal thing when tragedy struck.
Jesus doesn’t assign any blame. He doesn’t blame the victims. He doesn’t blame Pilate or the construction company. He doesn’t blame God. He doesn’t blame anyone.
Sometimes, he implies, sometimes these things just happen. Sometimes there is no reason why tragedies occur and people die. Sometimes we have to accept that bad things can happen to absolutely anyone and that chaos can mess up our lives. Sometimes we have to admit that life in this world is fragile and insecure and unpredictable.
We don’t like that. We don’t like insecurity and unpredictability. We do everything we can to avoid them.
During the depression years or the war years, people experienced insecurity big time. Chaos broke into their lives and pulled the rug out from under them. It was a terrible time to live through. To prevent that feeling of insecurity from ever coming back, what did the survivors do? They stockpiled everything. They saved everything. They filled their attics and basements with stuff. They never threw out a thing because it might come in handy some day. All that stuff was like a security blanket to ward off chaos and insecurity.
We are still doing that. We all have much more stuff than we will ever need. We have bigger houses than we need. We have stronger cars than we need. We have more toys than we need. We have more clothes than we can wear. We have more books than we can read. We have surrounded ourselves with surplus stuff, as a protective layer against chaos and scarcity and unpredictability. If we can control a lot of stuff, the illusion goes, then we can control our lives.
Except that it doesn’t work.
No matter how much stuff we own, we can still get murdered like the Galileans. We can still die in a building collapse. We can still get cancer or lose a job or lose a loved one to death. All that security blanket stuff does not protect us and does not help us when chaos strikes.
The Prophet Isaiah says today: Why do you spend money on that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Why, indeed? Why don’t we instead go after the bread that truly satisfies? Why don’t we seek peace in the only place where it can be found? And that, of course, would be in God.
In a world filled with chaos and unpredictability, with disease and death, with accidents and murder and violence, the only truly reliable constant is God. God is always there. And God is always there for us. Jesus is very clear in our gospel story: God is not the one sending disaster our way to test us or punish us.
Instead, the God Jesus talks about is a God of mercy, a God who gives us time, a God who is with us in time of trouble and helps us emerge from it. Jesus describes a God who nurtures and cares for us like a gardener nurtures a fig tree. Isaiah speaks of a God who invites everyone to bread and wine and milk, a God who wants to nourish the people with things that truly satisfy.
Being a child of God does not mean that life will be safe or easy. Jesus’ words for us today come from his journey to Jerusalem, where shortly he will die a terrible death.
But being a child of God does mean a life filled with God’s presence and love and mercy. Being a child of God means knowing that disasters are not God’s punishments, but a tragedy God will help us to get through. Being a child of God means accepting that life is unpredictable and being rooted in the only sure thing in life: God’s love. Being a child of God means finding peace not in things and stuff, but in God’s never-ending faithfulness and mercy.
As children of God, Jesus wants us to look at the tragedies of life with the eyes of faith in a merciful God. Then what do we see? Not sinners being struck down. Not a vengeful God exacting judgment. Instead, we see a hurting world struck by chaos forces yet again. We see how fragile and precious life is. We realize that we, too, might die suddenly, and that we should use the days we have been given wisely.
And that whole view point drives us to God all over again. It makes us head God’s invitation to nourishing food. It makes us welcome the gardener’s nurture and care. It makes us want to produce fruit. And all this is wrapped up in Jesus’ word “repent”. Repenting is what this season of Lent is about. Repent. It means: Return to God. Rely on God. Receive God’s nurture and care. Receive the food that truly satisfies: God’s word and God’s meal. Grow into productive trees in the vineyard of our God.
Repent. Repent of any belief in a vengeful God. Rather return to a God who is merciful and kind, who helps us in times of trouble, and who always welcomes us to his table to bless us with forgiveness, love, and hope. Amen.