What’s the first thing you think of when you hear of falling towers and people dying? Right. Nine-eleven. And looking around on the web I found that even though this is the gospel passage for the third Sunday in Lent of Cycle C of the lectionary, by far the most sermons were written on this topic right after September 11, 2001. Some links are just too obvious to ignore. The connection is obvious. How to fit it into a sermon that is for today instead of for twenty years ago is somewhat less so.
Why us? Why here? Why now? Those questions filled people's minds and troubled their hearts. You may remember that some preachers suggested that this might be evidence of God’s judgment. Of course, the media jumped all over them; that doesn’t fit the journalists’ world view. Geo-political reasons were offered instead, as if removing God from the equation made the event somehow more endurable. The same questions are asked today, in Spanish and French and German. But this time I haven’t heard anyone explain that God is judging the people of Europe for moral decadence. I haven't even heard anyone suggest that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is punishment for corruption.
A couple of years after 9/11 a terrible earthquake hit Iran. The death toll was something like ten times the number of people killed in the Twin Towers bombing, something on the order of 35,000 people dead, not counting the injured. I’m sure there were people who believe that God was judging Iran, though they can’t explain why he hit the relatively innocent folk of Bam instead of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Others said, “God has opened up a window of opportunity for us to minister to the Iranians who have been taught to hate and fear Americans." More recently the earthquake on the border between Syria and Turkey killed around 60,000. But I don’t think either the Iranians or the Turks or the Syrians were crying out “Why?” The Allah of Islam is not the same as the loving God whom we call Father. The Arabic response to tragedy is “inshallah.” God wills it. It is written. Islam means submission. You do not question God.
But Jews and Christians alike have always questioned God, arguing with him since Abraham and Moses and David. Whenever something terrible or tragic happens, there are always two questions asked. The first one is “Why?” “Why, O LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” [Ps 10:1] “Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?” [Ps 44:24] Why do the wicked renounce God, and say in their hearts, 'You will not call us to account'?" [Ps 10:13]
Those who have been raised to believe that a loving God would not let this kind of thing happen if he were also in control of everything are especially lost and bewildered when tragedy strikes. So many people wind up with the idea either that God is not all that powerful, or that he really doesn’t love us. That’s part of what lay behind the outrage at the suggestion in 2001 that God might be judging America. In this theory of God, love and judgment are incompatible.
Since this isn’t 9/11, and we’re not asking those same questions with anywhere near like the same kind of urgency, I’m going to answer that first question, “Why?” very briefly, just as Jesus did.
Jesus’ listeners wanted to know if the Galileans who had been massacred by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate while they were visiting the temple, or if the people who had been killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed on them “were worse sinners than all the others.” They figured that God must have been punishing those other people for something. And maybe they hoped that it was a judgment for some terrible sin that they themselves, good people listening to Jesus, couldn’t possibly be guilty of, so they were safe. But Jesus answered, “No, I tell you;” [you’re no better than they are, and] “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” [Lk 13:2,5]
This wasn’t a whole lot of comfort, was it.
But Jesus didn’t give them time to complain about the answer. He moved on to the important question, the one they hadn’t asked. They didn’t ask, “What should we do?” But he told them anyway.
After 9/11, what did we do? Well, on a national level, we went to war. And that’s an important question for a government to answer, and it’s not as easy as it may look in hindsight. Right now, the French and the Swedes have to decide what they're going to do about the violence in their immigrant communities. But remember, there are two kinds of disaster. There’s one kind that’s clearly caused by people, and there’s someone to blame, and someone to punish. But there’s the kind that insurance companies call Acts of God, and there’s no one to blame, and no one to punish. Of course, after an earthquake, it's easy to blame the building codes; after a riot, it's easy to punish the police. Blame and punishment are very comforting.
But that’s not an issue that faced the people Jesus was talking to. They neither had the power nor the duty either to punish Pilate or to invent a new kind of building technology.
It’s not the most important question for most of us, either.
For most of us, the important question is, “What do I do now?” And after 9/11, a lot of people asked that question, and did the right thing. They re-evaluated their lives, re-prioritized, mended relationships, and returned to God. But you know, it didn’t last. There hasn’t been a major attack on American soil for years, and most Americans have gone back right back to the old ways, cheating on their taxes or their spouses and wondering why the government doesn’t do something about - well, what’s your favorite cause?
We have very short attention spans, don’t we? And besides, we’ve gotten used to tragedies, whether they are crimes or accidents. There’s something about 24-hour-a-day news that numbs us. We have information overload. When the whole world is filled with blinking neon signs, each one trying to outdo the next in an eye-catching display of techno-dazzle, we go numb. Instead of letting God speak to us through the events that occur around us, we simply turn our hearing aids off.
In Jesus’ day, things were different. Although life was hard and people suffered and died no less then than now, the information usually came in manageable chunks of data. That made this a teachable moment for Jesus’ hearers. Jesus has been trying to teach the people how to interpret the events unfolding around them, and they keep missing the point. "Quit pointing at the Romans or the weather or the people across the street, he’s been telling them, look at yourselves. All these things happening around you should you remind you of two things: God is in charge, and you are accountable." He takes this opportunity - when people are actually thinking about sin and its consequences - to redirect their attention away from other people’s behavior to their own. It’s one thing to ask, “What does this mean?” It’s quite another to ask, “What does it mean for me?”
In Jesus’ day, people still believed that suffering was a punishment for sin, not an inexplicable pothole on what should be the seamless highway of life. Not merely that it was a consequence of sin in general, mind you, but a that it was evidence that you particularly had been guilty of offending God. We have inherited a vestige of that world view, when we ask, “Why me?” as if there should be a clear one-to-one correspondence. But Jesus challenges that view. He doesn’t explain why the victims of those two disasters died; he reminds them that everyone dies. Why and when people die is not the issue. The important thing is how they live.
Then Jesus told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’“ [Lk 13:6-9]
Only Luke has Jesus giving the gardener another chance to get the fig tree to shape up. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus curses the barren fig tree right then and there. This reminds us that even Jesus’ patience eventually wears out. There is such a thing as “too late,” even with God. Although we don’t know exactly when death will come, we know that no one gets out of this world alive. And by then it is too late to change.
Jesus tells us to view the deaths of others and the tragedies that befall us all as prophecies, as messages from God, regarding our own deaths. If we interpret these experiences in the light of eternity, they will motivate us to reform our lives rather than fear our deaths or the manner of our deaths. To simply turn philosophical and wax eloquent on the brevity of life and the uncertainty of the future is to attempt to escape the real message and meaning that God constantly is teaching us through the signs he gives us. Every event is potentially a sign from God, containing both his presence and his message that we can and should change. There is always something within our lives that needs changing. Even the deaths of those not close to us should be interpreted by us not only as proofs of the evil in the world but also as signs of the necessity to reform - and reform now.
Not everything that happens is directly orchestrated by God, although nothing happens that he does not permit.
Sin happens all the time and sin, by definition, is not God’s will.
. Murders, massacres, and accidents are not God’s will.
. Even bad things can be interpreted in the light of eternity and good results can follow.
. No one is exempt, no matter what his or her disabilities, from living a life of fruitful love.
We do not have to live for very long to realize that many bad things happen to ordinary, decent, “good” people. There are several easy responses. One is to wax philosophical and debate the paradox of a good God allowing evil. Another is to decide that there is no God and that everything is random and meaningless. A third is to focus on blame and punishment, or diagnosis and prevention.
Each one of these responses is a way of avoiding our responsibility to God. Denying God is obviously suicidal. There’s no upside to that particular response. Philosophical and theological speculation does have its place. We are called to understand, as well as to trust. We are allowed to argue with God, and we are encouraged to seek wisdom and understanding. And retribution also has its place. The state wields the sword on God’s behalf to punish evil and protect the innocent.
But these are short-term, human-scale responses. And if that’s all we do, we’re in trouble. God calls us to see what happens in the world around us in the light of his eternity. “Thus says the LORD: Do not learn the way of the nations or be dismayed at the signs of the heavens; for the nations are dismayed at them. For the customs of the peoples are false.” [Jer 10:2]
The difficult response, but the one God calls us to, is to take each of these incidents as signs from God reminding us that life is temporary but that God is eternal. Reminders of judgment are unwelcome to those who do not want to life their eyes above the present. “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish.” [1 Cor 2:6]
We live in a world or politics and economics, of medicine and money and jobs and all kind of mundane things that occupy our energy and our attention. But if we let ourselves be guided by the Holy Spirit, we can negotiate through all these tangled priorities and read the signs that God has given us. God gives us lots of warnings. If we keep our eyes open, we’ll see the sign saying “Last exit before toll” before it's too late to stop and get changed.
