Disastrous Days, a Peculiar Perspective and a Fresh Focus (Lk 13:1-9)

By David Sund, Lay Preacher
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Thanks to the Lenten emphasis of the lectionary, we have another opportunity to think about repentance.  But today’s Gospel passage doesn’t start with a call to repentance, it starts with talk of disastrous days.   It’s almost as if someone had ripped tear-stained, above-the-fold headlines from the Jerusalem Gazette Recorder and tucked them into a fanny pack before heading out with the crowds that were always swarming around Jesus.

Given our current national and global circumstances, the first verse weighs heavily.   Like me, do you feel buried alive beneath mountains of distressing headlines; confused, frustrated, stalemated? Do we value Jesus’ opinion enough to bring those headlines to him?  If he offers a peculiar perspective on our disastrous days, will we allow that perspective to fix our blurred focus?  

In Luke’s Gospel, there is a recurring phrase, “[Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51, 13:33 17:11).   When it came to his perspective on life direction, Jesus was definitely laser-focused.   His clear-eyed intent would become confusing and frightening for His followers.   But he was un-deterred.  

While crowds shuffled up clouds of dust from Galilee to Jerusalem,  the incessant words of Jesus’ sceptics, critics and detractors were a like a buzzing cloud of flies,  unable to harm (much to their chagrin) but annoyingly persistent.   All along the way they hoped to discredit, tarnish or ideally derail this Messiah-in-the-making.   Their attacks were crafted around hypothetical scenarios and loaded questions.   But in Luke, 13 the conversation turned to real-life current events.   Someone pulled the crumpled headlines from the fanny pack and recited them to Jesus.  Were his enemies delighted with this gift of current events?  When faced with brutal or tragic deaths of real-life people, how would Jesus react?  

There was a backstory for the first disastrous headline. The Roman governor Pilate, like every good Roman, made a religious sacrifice to the Emperor—every Roman acknowledged the Emperors as demigods.  But adding injury to insult, as a part of that burnt sacrifice, Pilate slaughtered protesting Galilean Jews, and placed their remains on the sacrificial pyre.  Horrific? Unquestionably so!

Then, practically in the same breath, someone shares news that a tower in Siloam has fallen, crushing eighteen people.  Tragic?  Unquestionably so! 
The interest of the crowd is piqued:  In the back of everyone’s mind was a universal question; a question that had echoed throughout the Hebrew scriptures, throughout the recorded musings of Greek philosophers, and reverberates still; a question that will probably outlive all of us!  It was a one word question: “Why?”  

We humans have a subconscious, calculus that quickly muddles circumstances with consequences.  Like Job’s uncompassionate friends, there is the assumption that God has his thumb on the divine scales, intent on meting out retribution.   If the victims in the gruesome news were “good people” surely God would have protected them from Roman swords and toppling towers.   

I’m pretty sure that none of us here would verbalize anything like this. None of us wants to admit indulging in the blame game.    But deep down in our all-too-human nature there is that judgmental eight year old child that wants to draw black-Sharpy-marker-lines of clear connection.  The blame game is a default setting.  While we might not blame the victims we ache to blame someone.  That’s one of the ways we try to make sense out of senseless tragedies.   Doubt this impulse?  Haven’t we all had one of those days, where we’re running late, only to discover a flat tire on top of it all?  Or we’re baking for a special event and the leavening agent has failed?  Or the kids have been dressed for a special occasion and the family pet conspires with the youngest to create a filthy mess?   Or more seriously, there is a heart-wrenching divorce or an ominous diagnosis, or even the death of a loved one….Aren’t the first words out of our mouths often, “WHY me? “  It’s an angry reflex, and self-centered, but the blame game still!

Truth be told, often there is someone or something to blame: a cruel dictator, a greedy corporation willing to cut corners, a vindictive former friend, an  embittered family member, a lapse of self-discipline or an impersonal but potent weather front sweeping across a continent… Someone or something really can be blamed for igniting disasters big and small.  

But Jesus is quick to quench the fatalistic assumption that bad things only happen to bad people.  In our Gospel narrative Jesus refuses to play the blame game.  He anticipates it and deflates it.   He quenches the toxic impulse to blame the victims. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you.” “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.”

The victims from the disaster headlines did not die because they were especially sinful.  These victims of tragedy died because life is fragile and unpredictable.  That fragility and unpredictability of human life is the basis of Jesus’ peculiar perspective on our disastrous days.   

Almost as if we skipped a paragraph in the story,  Jesus changes the narrative.   There’s no “why” given.   His peculiar perspective kicks in.  

Jesus begs us to see our frailty and mortality as OPPORTUNITY.  Again, I’m convinced that Jesus wants us to see our frailty and mortality as OPPORTUNITY.  He doesn’t want us cowering in fear over our unpredictable futures.  He doesn’t want us hiding behind the blame game in an attempt to deflect accountability and responsibility.  Instead he encourages us to own our weaknesses and failures and then take a path to healing and wholeness.   Jesus says, we all make mistakes and lose sight of God’s will for our lives, in short, we are all sinners.   If we will acknowledge that, if we will embrace his call to repentance we will find an exit from the crisis mind-set and a way through disaster.

What does it mean to repent?  Most of our dictionaries would answer something like this: “to feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one’s wrongdoing.”  Mea culpa, mea culpa. But that is merely an Apology!  Sincere repentance should have a component of regret over past sins.  But, like the word “conversion,” Scripture uses the word “repent” in the potent, figurative sense of “turning around,” and “changing direction.”  I don’t know about you, but especially in crisis, I want to reinforce my narrative, batten down my hatches and dig in my heels.   Jesus’ peculiar perspective of repentance feels threatening.  With God’s help, and an honest assessment of our own lives, we can make fertile choices that will have fresh consequences. Repentance means that we pro-actively steer clear of fruitless, self-destructive choices and seize every opportunity to walk in God’s grace. 

The value of repentance is built into our Anglican tradition when week after week, there is time for confession.   Confession of course simply means “telling the truth.”   And what is the focus of our weekly, corporate truth-telling?  We recognize our impoverishment to FIX everything that is wrong with this world, AND admit our complicity in that wrongness.  Confession is the first step in a repentant direction. 

 Jesus says there’s too much at stake for us to waste time assigning culpability.  This is especially important if, when we’re pointing out a problem with some one or some system, we refuse to examine where we might be the wrong ones too!  

The great prophetic voices of the Hebrew Scriptures set a precedent:   In prayers of confession on the behalf of their besieged or exiled nation, even the most praise-worthy prophets included themselves in their pleas for mercy:  Forgive US, deliver US,  heal US… In our Gospel reading, those judgmental voices in the crowd willfully ignored this precedent. “Hey Jesus, look at THEM!   What about THEM?  Of course the unspoken comparison is, ‘since we’re still alive and well, we must be O.K.  Those corporate confessions don’t really apply to us;   we’re just joining in for the benefit of the real losers…the real offenders.  Ignoring our need for confession and repentance will always have sad consequences. 

    Did you notice how Jesus words about repentance are full of urgency?   That’s probably because existence is precarious. God is infinitely patient, but our finite lives mean that time is running out to participate in the productive life of faithful, fruitful community.  Especially in disastrous days; justice, kindness, compassion, making amends, and generosity are urgent business.   This sort of repentance can’t be just a when-convenient side-gig or merely a rare spontaneous, emotive reflex.  Repentance cannot be seen as a once-and-done transaction.   Repentance might be an annual Lenten theme, but to be real it must be ongoing; a daily life-style.   Repentance isn’t so much about ideas or feelings.   It is about Being and Doing.  As a preacher friend of my likes to say, “It’s doing that makes the difference.” 

More specifically, in the familiar prayer of Saint Francis, repentance looks like this:  “Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.”

I was recently introduced to a popular, charismatic chorus with this refrain:  “You rescued me out of the mess I was in…now I’m dancing on the grave I once lived in.”  Jesus’ brand of repentance isn’t about shame, or blame.   It isn’t vain regret over the past.   It has a purpose-filled, future focus.  If we will own our wrongness rather than projecting it, if we will seek reconciliation with God and others, we can learn to dance on the graves in which we used to cower.   

Finally, when we’re tempted to sort the world into camps of Good Guys and Bad Guys, let’s cling to the focus of repentance:  Love.   In a recent email message from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, Br. Curtis Almquist put it this way: “Who is on your list of appalling people? These same people are the people Jesus associates with and welcomes indiscriminately. It seems the Jesus even loves them. He tells us to do the same. If loving them is too far of a reach, then remember that God loves them, and that the God of love is not done with them yet… nor with you and me.  (Brother Give Us a Word:  Enemy 3/5/25, SSJE)   AMEN.    

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