Text: Luke 13:1-9, 31-35
I
don’t know about you but it seems to me that as bad as television has gotten
the worst thing on TV has got to be the nightly news. It’s a little different
out of Grand Forks but in the Twin Cities it’s so-and-so was murdered,
such-and-such tragedy happened somewhere in the United States, bad weather is
coming, the economy is crumbling, gas prices are rising, these countries are at
war. You know the story. It’s always the same. It’s amazing any of us get by in
such an awful world. I’m joking, of course, but you do get that sense from the
nightly news that the world is an awful place that is out to get us.
A
few years back I was at a friend’s cabin for the 4th of July and for
some reason the nightly news was on the television. I suggest not trying this,
but if you do happen to have around twenty people in a room watching the news
just notice how the atmosphere in the room changes. Twenty people will go from
enjoying a beautiful summer day off at the cabin to depression and anxiety and
silence. I remember thinking, “Somebody please turn it off!”
None
of us could have known, of course, that one of us was going to be one of those
sob stories on the news a couple of weeks later. The 16-year-old girl whose
parent’s cabin we were staying at died two weeks later in a car accident.
Looking back, I remember that time of watching the nightly news and her death as
if what we were really watching was the forecast of her demise ahead of time.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
That’s really the question that people are asking Jesus in today’s reading. How can a God who is good and powerful allow
such senseless suffering? Some questions change and some questions are the
same in the first century and the twenty-first.
What’s
fascinating to me is that Jesus doesn’t answer the question or avoid it. As he
so often does, Jesus redirects to the real question with which the people
should be concerned. Jesus does not explain by what means God chooses who is
going to live and who is going to die in part because God does not sit up in
heaven deciding that some people are going to get it and some people are going
to be OK. God doesn’t cause car crashes or wars and he doesn’t direct people to
shoot other people with guns. Those are our choices, not God’s. Jesus, however,
feels no need to even go there. It doesn’t matter what God is doing because the
reality obscuring your question about bad things and good people is that “All
deserve death.” That’s the punishment for sin. It’s not hard; look back at Adam
and Eve. Sin is our universal death sentence.
Oftentimes
tragedy is something that challenges our faith, because—whether we intend it to
be this way or not—we treat faith like an explanation, like an answer to a
question. That’s what those people wanted from Jesus. They wanted an
explanation to a troubling problem that they saw with the world. Jesus has absolutely
no interest in playing those games because these people are treating faith like
a test, but it’s not a test: faith is a way of life; it’s an orientation toward
God. This is why I think it always sounds a little shallow when we tell people,
“Oh, you just have to have faith” as if faith is some magical glue that fills
in the cracks between things that don’t make sense. The easy thing to say is “You
just have to have faith,” but the harder, and more useful, thing to do is to
point out that the question they are asking is the wrong one.
Don’t
ask “Why do bad things happen to good people?” because you think you know what
you’re asking so when you get the answer you don’t trust it. The answer is that
there are no such things as “good” people, at least not East of Eden. You don’t
like that answer. Surely, my aunt who died of cancer in her forties was a
“good” person. Surely, Emily, who died in a car crash at 16 years old, was a
“good” person. Or at the very least, surely some people are better than others,
you might say. Surely some people are more deserving of life than others.
Surely, that 16-year-old girl was not deserving of death more than somebody who
was older and who had done more awful things. God should have taken them. These
are the questions that you start asking, and it’s a deep, deep tunnel to
follow.
Faith
is not about accepting that grief and pain are alright. It is simply saying
that death does not have the final word, so I will not dwell on it. Why does Jesus say that all people
are deserving of death? Because Jesus is the one who will conquer death. When
the Tower of Siloam
fell and killed those eighteen people in today’s reading they did not die
because they were worse sinners than other people in Jerusalem, nor because they were better; they
died because sin had entered the world thousands of years before and the
repercussions are still being felt today. Our lives down here seem to be
governed often by chance, but most importantly what happens after this life is
not. Jesus teaches us to live with our questions unanswered, because those
questions will not matter in the end. Nobody is going to ask on the day of the
resurrection, “Why did my friend die?” because on the day of the resurrection
death will be only as important as brushing your teeth.
This
is a hellish topic for pastors, because part of the job of the pastor, or any
other teacher in the church, is to think about God and to teach something of
who God is and what that means for our lives. The problem with what we do is
that it’s easy to think that we are after understanding. If we could only study
enough we could figure out God, but I can think of no more horribly sinful
approach to life than that. How better could we put ourselves in God’s place
than to honestly think we can figure God out? Again, faith is not about
offering an explanation to a problem. Faith is about taking up our crosses and
following. This goes way beyond those old “WWJD?” bracelets or anything like
that. We should not only try to emulate what Jesus did. We should attempt to
live our lives in the promises that Jesus made.
That is a stinker
of a challenge! Because to live into the promise means that when we are
confronted with death we must eventually let the questions go. I tell our
Confirmation students that everything is on the table during class—they can ask
about anything—but I do this in the hope that someday the difficult questions
won’t hold the same kind of power that they do today, because when you have a
life oriented toward Christ death is not the greatest obstacle. When Emily died
at sixteen years old she was freed from having to explain death. The rest of us
were stuck with it, and that is the harder place to be. At the family service
before her funeral one of her teachers stood up—I’m sure I will remember this
to my dying day—and he said, “She would have changed the world.”
No, I thought then
and I still think now, she did change the world, because what
she began is lived out in me and in countless others who knew her much better
than me. But more importantly still she changed the world because Christ knew
her and chose her, not because she was any less sinful than the rest of us, but
because we all deserve death. That’s not the question. The only question is
when death comes what will give us life?
Amen.
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