March 7, 2010
The Third Sunday in Lent

BLOOD IN THE SANCTUARY
Luke 13:1-9

Philosophy deals with two kinds of questions – questions to which everyone already knows the answers, and questions to which no one knows the answers. Religion shares this dynamic with philosophy. It is the reason for the Gospel lesson we have heard this morning.

It is a situation that could have come out of our own newspapers, or our own TV news. The pastor of a church in (you pick the country – Korea, Taiwan, Zaire, China, Nicaragua, El Salvador) is arrested, or simply “disappears” because he has been helping the poor, and telling them that God does not will their remaining in poverty. He was bucking the “powers that be.”

Young people coming home from a post-football game party are hit by a drunk driver. What did they do to deserve that? Were they just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Thousands of people in Port au Prince, Haiti, are going about what seems to be another normal day. The earth rolls and shakes, and there is fire, confusion, dust, and death, and dark entombment in the rubble of their homes. Were they more evil than others for this to happen to them?

The two tragic instances in the Gospel are comprehensive. Worshipers are struck down by the soldiers of the Empire in the midst of the Sanctuary, only a few of the millions of victims of cruel and oppressive governments. They were Galileans, Northerners, outsiders. The others were the victims of a completely natural calamity – a stone tower fell on them, like the millions who have died in earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires. Here are both human-initiated catastrophe and natural disaster. Why do these things happen, and why to these?

It’s a religious, philosophical question.

But as interesting as such questions are to us, and as many books they have sold for authors like Rabbi Harold Kushner, notice Jesus’ reaction. First of all, he made no distinction between the calamity we inflict upon one another and the pain and suffering which come to us by natural or accidental means. Evil is evil, he would say – hurt is hurt.

Secondly, Jesus refused to answer the questions which were posed to him. Instead, he probed more deeply into the questioners’ reasons for raising these issues in the first place. This is not a question of fairness, he said, in effect. Nor is it an opportunity for you to congratulate yourselves for having survived. Jesus has no patience for those who come through calamity and say, “The Lord must have been with me!” as if the Lord were not with those who perished.

Jesus says, This is not a philosophical dilemma. We’re talking about real people here and real life. Let’s pause to offer humble thanks that those people are right where all of us have always been – in the hands of a loving God. Jesus also says to the questioners, Face up to it, you don’t want God, you want answers, and not just any answers, but answers that make you feel better about yourselves!

Why did this happen to me? is an understandable question, but we had better be prepared for there to be no answer, at least no answer that will finally satisfy us. The whole story of the Gospel is a reminder to us that the notion that only good things happen to good people was blown to smithereens when the authorities nailed Jesus to a cross. Jesus takes our unanswered questions and turns them back toward us. Can we trust God to be God for us? in joy or in pain? Can we love God without tying our love to the cards life deals to us? Can we deal with the reality that God’s love carries no promises about good or bad save the promise that God will not allow anything worse to happen to us than what happened to God’s own Son.

You see, we have this distorted view of reality which affirms that, whatever the source, the suffering that life brings to us is patently unfair and undeserved – any tragedy, any confusion, any unanswered questions. We say to our children, and we say it to ourselves – “Life isn’t always fair,” and people don’t always get what they deserve, for better or worse. And if we take a good, hard, honest look at ourselves, Jesus reminds us, that’s good news!

The good news is that God’s doesn’t deal with us as our sins deserve! God deals with us out of God’s own love, grace, and justice. The good news doesn’t try to make the world simpler than it really is, doesn’t try to make us feel better about our “little” sins by comparing them to somebody else’s “big” sins. The good news confronts us with a life given for our sakes, so that we might more freely give our lives to God.

That’s probably not the answer we were looking for, but it is what it is. And what it is, believe it or not, is grace.