There's Stuff We Can't Explain (Reflections on Lent 3, Year C 2022)

 

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Isaiah 55:6-7) 

I can’t imagine a more poignant gospel lesson for today than the one appointed for Lent 3, Year C in the RCL (Luke 13:1-9). While Jesus is preaching some of his listeners inquire about a recent atrocity. It seems some Galileans were just brutally—albeit officially—murdered under the direction of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate. I say “brutally” because the questioners say the victims’ blood was “mingled with their sacrifice.” Obviously, these Galileans were in the middle of performing some religious ritual when the governor’s goon squad came upon them and killed them on the spot. That would be like someone getting gunned down inside a church service. Even in a sacred space where you’d think you were safe violence can occur. 

We know from sources contemporary with the New Testament that Pontius Pilate was pretty much a thug.[i] He was in charge of keeping the peace and collecting taxes and he wasn’t particularly gentle about how he dealt with the conquered population. Today we’d consider him a war criminal just as we consider Vladimir Putin. Human life, at least the lives of other (non-Roman) humans, didn’t seem to be that important to him. Reading this account of an oppressive regime’s barbaric, indiscriminate slaughter has to make us think of the horror currently raging in Ukraine. It also may bring us, just as it brought Jesus’ audience, back to that most basic and vexing of religious questions: If God is so loving and desires so much good for us, why does God permit senseless evil to exist? Why does God let the Pilates and the Putins of the world get away with doing what they do?

 For the folks in Jesus’ day, the only answer had to be because God wanted this to happen. They all fully believed that rotten, tragic things happened to people because God was punishing them. They might’ve referred back to the passage in Deuteronomy 28:20, ^“The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.” I’ll bet these guys approached Jesus about the massacre because Jesus was also Galilean. I’m sure they wanted to know his take on the subject, and they figured he’d know what awful crime the Galileans had committed that made God so mad at them they deserved to have Pilate’s henchmen cut their throats. 

But Jesus doesn’t give them a simple answer. It might’ve made these guys feel a little better, a little smugly safe, to know that the Galileans got what they deserved, but the honest truth is God doesn’t work like that. Sometimes bad things happen because bad people make them happen. There’s lots of unpredictable things happening on this crazy rock, and we’ve all got to die from something. Jesus challenges his audience to get their act together in the here and now. Rather than trying to make themselves feel better by coming up with answers where there are no answers, they’d be much better off considering their own lives and their own relationships with God.

 I have to point out, however, that the RCL readings don’t let us get off with a simple c’est la vie attitude. Sometimes, as the scripture says, bad stuff happens because we brought it on ourselves. This gospel lesson is paired with St. Paul’s message to the Corinthian congregation (1 Corinthians 10:1-13), a pretty messed-up and dysfunctional bunch of early Christians. Paul warns them with the example of the Hebrew nation in the wilderness. This is part of the first major macro-story of scripture, the Exodus story. It’s a great victory story if you just consider the part where Moses rescues the Hebrew slaves and leads them triumphantly through the Red Sea while Pharoah’s army gets drowned. But the story goes on for another forty years—forty years which could’ve been a whole lot shorter if the people involved hadn’t been such a whiney bunch of pusillanimous babies. God kept God’s promise and brought these folks right back to the land promised to Abraham, but they were too wussy to try to go in and take it.[ii] To use Jesus’ horticultural analogy, they just weren’t bearing any fruit—fruit like faith, gratitude, and commitment. Therefore, it was their own darn fault they wandered around in the desert for four decades until the lukewarm, self-involved complainers all died out and their kids grew up to be a nation worthy of God’s promise.

 Our First Lesson for Lent 3 (Isaiah 55:1-9) is actually part of the conclusion of the second macro-story in scripture, the Exile story. Here’s a case where a disobedient people were punished by being captives in Babylon even longer than their ancestors had wandered in the wilderness. The people of Judah suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Babylonians because they had become a corrupt, unjust, and spiritually weak nation. The Exile lasted 70 years, but God’s faithfulness eventually allowed the descendants to return to their ancestral homeland.

So what are the take-aways here? First, we can’t try to get into God’s head. Isaiah says, ^“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Stuff happens. There’s a lot we don’t control. But we can control our own relationship with God, and we can be obedient to the Word we’ve been given and the love we’ve seen in Jesus. Second, we haven’t been put here just for our own enjoyment. God expects us to be loving and committed, to work for justice and equity, and to be here for each other. We’re not here to explain another’s misfortune, but to love them through it. Finally, even when we have screwed up and suffer for it, we have a faithful God who is patient and willing to repair us, restore us, and make us new.

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[i] A Jewish Roman named Flavius Josephus mentions Pilate in his book The Jewish War written around the end of the first century off the Common Era.

[ii] See the story in Numbers 13:1-33