1 Corinthians 10.1-13, Luke 13.1-9
Third Sunday of Lent, 20 March 2022, Austwick, Clapham
How often have you heard it said of someone’s misfortune that they must have done something wrong to bring it on themselves? In today’s gospel we have people in the act of worship murdered by armed soldiers - they must have done something wrong to have brought that on themselves; and civilians caught in a falling building - there must be a reason why this happened to them.
In this supposedly secular age people still do talk about God intervening in the world, but it’s often in these sort of terms - God must have let this happen to those people to punish them for something they’ve done. The question is, is that really the God we know? And are these sort of questions really how God wants us to respond to news of other people’s troubles?
These questions address the way that people speak of each other today. You will recall how, when AIDS was first identified and thought to be an affliction unique to gay people there was no shortage of Christian preachers who identified it as a divine judgment on sexual perversion. Now that we know AIDS afflicts people of all sexual orientations, some people are still enlisting God to point the finger: now AIDS is God’s judgment on promiscuity. Or on Africans.
‘It’s their fault, they’ve brought it on themselves’ - whether victims of state terror opening themselves to the assaults of government forces, or victims of a disaster caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether people who decades ago bought houses on the edge of East Yorkshire clifftops, or whether the teenaged mother whose child is born disabled, society is always quick to judge, to find a reason to blame people for their troubles and afflictions, a reason to assert that this situation is what is to be expected, it is the way things are, it’s God’s will, so nothing need be done about it. And if nothing need be done about it, we can leave the victims to suffer in their shame.
And we sometimes find ourselves applying this toxic attitude to ourselves. Have you ever asked yourself the question, ‘What have I done wrong for this to happen to me’? When you’re already troubled by a health problem, or affected by a family crisis, have you found yourself asking if it’s somehow your fault, and thus adding the strain of unfocussed guilt and shame into the mix?
Is this really the Christian way? No-one comes out if it well, us or God. It’s unavoidably true that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is often written of in terrifying, wrathful terms, the sort of deity who will happily heap trouble on those who have angered him - and who seems to anger very easily. But is that the God who we find expressed in the life and witness of Jesus Christ?
In our gospel reading today we find Jesus asking those around him, ‘The Galileans Pilate murdered in the very act of bearing sacrifice to the temple - do you think that they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?’ And asking, ‘Those eighteen people the tower in Siloam fell on and killed - do you think that they were more guilty that all other people living in Jerusalem?’
These are rhetorical questions of course, to which the answer is, ‘Of course not!’ and in recognising that answer Jesus’ audience would realise that the judgement now falls on those who accuse the victims of some sort of wrong-doing. ‘Of course not!’ he says; ‘but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’ Unless you stop heaping guilt and shame on people for their misfortunes, things don’t look good for you either. You’re in a lose-lose bind.
Jesus is addressing people who assume that bad things happen only to bad people, and that we who escape such tragedies must therefore be good. This assumption is the same as the one in which if you receive no presents at Christmas you must be a bad boy, and that you can assure presents by being a good boy. It also lies behind our knee-jerk tendency to blame others so as to justify ourselves.And so, repent, Jesus says, of your judgmental attitude towards all victims. Repent, he says, of telling people they’ve brought their misfortunes on themselves, repent of saying that this must be God’s will, repent of disengaging yourself from these victims’ lives, of doing nothing to help them out in their troubles, of leaving them alone to suffer. [2]
Causing us to face the realities of the situation, repentance is liberating for all concerned. Repentance brings healing to the victims, and it empowers us all to change our attitudes so that we are no longer passive observers of a world from which we’re disengaged, but active in making a positive difference in that world; we are no longer detached from others in misfortune, but able to help bring goodness, grace and healing into their troubled situations.
The point in living on planet earth is not to spend our time distancing ourselves from others, blaming the victims for disasters or distress that befall them. The point in living on planet earth is to find the joy in standing together with other people, finding the blessing in spending our days encouraging and strengthening each other, under the guiding hand and generous heart of God.
Jesus reinforced this point with the story of a man who said to his 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 climaxes this story by making the gardener the bearer of the wondrous, merciful message which was Jesus’ point all along: “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”’
Don’t be too quick to judge the unfortunate; give others the benefit of the doubt; permit second chances; open up for struggling ones the space and grace to grow and flourish. Don’t trouble yourself and others with useless questions about why a thing has gone wrong; give yourself instead to graciously helping put it right.
Thank God that he is generous-hearted enough to give each of us second chances to get right our attitudes and behaviour towards others. We may feel like the barren fig-tree in the story Jesus told, locked into a repetitive cycle of failure, incapable of doing well, incapable of bearing fruit; but in the story the gardener pleaded with the owner, ‘Give it another year’. We give thanks, for God always, always, gives us another year, to work at our repentance, to work at our faith, to work at our grace and generosity and our witness to the world we are in.
Notes
[1] This is a rewrite of Repentance and reorientation - breaking the bonds of blame, preached in Devon in 2013, which borrows heavily from a sermon of Robert Hamerton-Kelly (March 14, 2004, Woodside Village Church), referenced in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: Lent 3C page (link no longer active).
[2] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, “Unless You Repent…”, 7 March 2010.
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