Judgement and disaster in Luke 13
In that location is a very deep-seated man tendency to see disasters that befall others equally somehow indicating a moral sentence of the victims. At a personal and piddling level, we discover information technology in the linguistic communication of 'Serves them right!' and 'They got what is coming to them!' The converse of that is the way that we somehow grant those who take prospered a moral status which allows them a platform from which to tell us how we should be living our lives. Later all, if they have got on in life, and so surely they have something important, useful—perhaps even moral?—to tell us. Nosotros find information technology immensely difficult to get our heads round the reality that, very ofttimes, these things appear to happen by chance—that either someone was just in the wrong place at the wrong time for no particular fault of their own, or conversely that someone else happened to be in the right place at the right fourth dimension. I take been struck by how often those who are very well off came by their good fortune because they just happened to come up across an opportunity at the correct moment.
There are, of course, adept reasons why we want lifenon to be and so random. We call back that doing the right thing, working hard, making difficult and courageous decisionsshould exist rewarded with good fortune, and lazy fecklessnessshould meet disaster. This kind of longing is establish, for example, all over the Psalms. This might have a theological footing to information technology—merely in fact we all have the longing that life is meaningful, and that such meaning has a articulate moral dimension to it. (If you don't believe me, just go and watch i of the popular blockbuster movies, where, past and large, the goodies win out.) The problem arises when we encounter actual disasters, especially on a large scale, and our moralising is not but clearly wrong, but it is damaging to those who experience information technology and reduces our chapters for empathetic response.
This Sunday's lectionary reading asks precisely this question of the connection betwixt the judgement of God and the disasters that befall people—a question that carries a sharp relevance just at present in the low-cal of the shooting by a white supremacist of Muslims in New Zealand and the natural disaster this week of a cyclone which has devastated littoral regions of Mozambique this week.
Outset: a confession. I have no thought why the lectionary has reversed the order of this reading and last week's, so that this one comes before what we looked at previously. Answers on a postcard…or in the comments please!
The wider context of this reading is Jesus' journey to Jerusalem begun at Luke ix.51, equally for all the teaching in this section. Luke organises his tape of Jesus' teaching in quite a different way from Matthew, who tends to group it together more. Looking back over the previous affiliate, we tin can run into general teaching to the crowds (e.g. in Luke 12.13 and 54) with didactics directed more at the disciples (e.k. in Luke 12.i, 22). There seems to be, for Luke, a permeability and interchange between these two kinds of pedagogy, and in our passage Jesus' teaching is introduced with a general question from an unnamed person (Luke 13.1). The question Jesus engages with here is one that is relevant to all, and his teaching here addresses questions that all need to consider.
The more firsthand context is the preceding teaching on eschatological judgement, repentance and division. Stephen Langton (the Archbishop of Canterbury who introduced chapter divisions into the Bible) has probably done usa a disservice here, since at the end of this department at that place is a new temporal marker ('On a Sabbath…' Luke 13.ten) and a change in focus from the instruction of Jesus to his healing, and Luke 13.1–9 is clearly connected with what comes before with the Lukan phrase 'at that fourth dimension' (ἐν αὐτῷ τῷ καιρῷ, a variation on ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ὥρᾳ which we saw last calendar week Luke uses vii times in his gospel and twice in Acts). This episode in fact appear to office as a closing climax to the pedagogy that began in 12.1.
The incident that the people mention, of Pilate slaughtering worshippers and 'mixing their blood with the sacrifices' is otherwise unattested in other sources. But this is not surprising; information technology is a unmarried incident in a fourth dimension for which nosotros do not have detailed historical chronicles—merely it fits well with the barbarous behaviour of Pilate that we know from other writers.
Afterward this he raised another disturbance, by expending that sacred treasure which is called Corban upon aqueducts, whereby he brought water from the distance of four hundred furlongs. At this the multitude had indignation; and when Pilate was come to Jerusalem, they came about his tribunal, and made a clamor at it. At present when he was apprized aforehand of this disturbance, he mixed his own soldiers in their armor with the multitude, and ordered them to conceal themselves under the habits of individual men, and not indeed to use their swords, but with their staves to beat those that made the clamor. He then gave the signal from his tribunal [to do as he had bidden them]. Now the Jews were so sadly browbeaten, that many of them perished by the stripes they received, and many of them perished every bit trodden to death by themselves; by which means the multitude was astonished at the cataclysm of those that were slain, and held their peace. (Josephus,Jewish Wars two.9.4)
The fact that those who suffer are Galileans implies they are ordinary people, and the only time when they might be 'offer sacrifices' is the Passover, the about significant festival in the Jewish calendar, which only serves to heighten the distress of the issue. The mention of Pilate might propose that at that place is a political motive behind the question, with the speakers looking for Jesus to take sides in a political statement about Roman authorisation. In that location is not much hint of this in the way the question is put, and the shape of the narrative suggests that the question is operation more than as a distraction from the issues of judgement and repentance that Jesus has been addressing—and to which, in response, he quickly returns.
Jesus himself puts aslope this offset tragedy some other one, the collapse of the tower of Siloam, the pool in Jerusalem mentioned in John 9.7 at the terminate of Hezekiah's tunnel. Again, nosotros accept no parallel historical tape of this, merely the collapse of buildings is hardly an unusual occurrence, and nosotros do appear to take archaeological evidence of a tower there that was rebuilt on earlier foundations. It is striking that, past adding this example, Jesus is offering two contrasts: outset, between those from Galilee and those native to Jerusalem; and, second, those who have suffered at the easily of another, and those who accept suffered equally a result of some natural calamity.
This pair of examples is responding to a widely held conventional view that when disaster comes, there is some sense in which it is deserved by those who endure. Apart from our instinctive response in this management which I described above, at that place are some of import texts in Scripture which makesome sort of connection between disobedience and disaster. In Israel'southward narrative, the foundation of this is found in Deut 28–30 with its promise of blessings and woes:
If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give yous today, the LORD your God volition set you high higher up all the nations on world. All these blessings will come up on you and back-trail you if y'all obey the LORD your God:… (Debt 28.1)
However, if you exercise not obey the LORD your God and do not advisedly follow all his commands and decrees I am giving yous today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you lot:… (Deut 28.xv)
Read in proper theological context, this contrast was never intended to set God upward equally a divine moral slot car, into which you could put the correct or incorrect moral response and, pulling the handle, receive either blessings or curses every bit appropriate. Rather, every bit the following 'Deuteronomic' narrative sets out, running through 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, to the final clinical description of the devastation of Jerusalem and the kickoff of exile, it sets up God'due south people every bit moral agents who are able to make meaningful moral decisions which will shape their destiny. The same kind of connection, moving from decision to its consequences, is found in Proverbs, and in office of the Psalms; it is of import that we sympathise that what we exercise has consequences, and that we are not merely being blown through life past the unpredictable winds of fortune (as Forrest Gump appears to be learning in the final scenes of the 1994 motion-picture show, focussing on a helpless, floating plume).
But alongside that, there are counter voices, both in the Psalms and in Job and Ecclesiastes. Equally one witty OT scholar once said: 'Proverbs says "Do this and life volition become well with you". Ecclesiastes says "I did, and it didn't"'. Life in all its complication does not yet reverberate the will of God, and we live in patience while we wait for that to be revealed.
And here is where we need to mind to Jesus' response. In reply to the assumption that the Galileans 'deserved' their fate at the hands of wicked Pilate, or that the Jerusalemites 'deserved' their deaths at the hands of whimsical fate, his answer is the same: an emphatic 'No, I tell yous!' twice over. We see the same dynamic in the other episode mentioning Siloam, John 9, the episode of the man born bullheaded:
As he went along, he saw a man bullheaded from nativity. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was built-in blind?" (John 9.1)
Jesus' answer there is emphatic: 'Neither!' Joel Greenish puts information technology like this:
It is true that Deut 28–30 (to proper noun only one example) insists that sentence will overtake those whose lives are characterised past disobedience, but this is not the same thing as arguing that disasters come only to those who are disobedient. In fact, Jesus' reply does not deny sins its consequences, nor that sin leads to judgement; instead, he rejects the theory that those who encounter calamity have necessarily been marked out by God as more deserving of sentence that those who exercise non. (NICNT p 514)
In doing this, Jesus isboth acknowledging the unpredictability of disaster—but at the aforementioned time refusing to permit go of the notion that nosotros are morally responsible agents.
That then leads into the second half of this reading, which functions equally a conclusion to this block of instruction before the next narrative section. Over again, the scenario depicted in Jesus' parable, of a fig tree growing in a vineyard, is entirely plausible (I have both growing in my garden). And the image of either vine or fig tree as pictures of God'due south people is rooted (pardon the pun!) in the Old Testament, frequently with an eschatological dimension to them, as in Micah 4.4. Only what is striking here is the contrast with other parables or stories featuring these 2—whether the narrative of the vineyard in Mark 12.one–11 or the unproductive fig tree in Marker 11.13 = Matt 21.nineteen. In those stories, the main lesson is judgement—merely in this 1 it is the staying of sentence by the one tending the tree. Jesus makes information technology articulate that the desire of the gardener is that the tree volition become fruitful, if at all possible:
'Sir,' the human replied, 'leave information technology solitary for one more than year, and I'll dig effectually it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! (Luke thirteen.8–9).
For those eager to regard others as more deserving of God'southward judgement than themselves, Jesus continues by insisting that the unrepentant have escaped sentence not because of their relative sanctity, but considering of God'due south mercy. (Joel Greenish, NICNT p 515)
John Bradford was an English Reformer in the 16th century; it is said of him proverbially that he is the originator of the phrase, 'There but for the grace of God go I'. He was supposed to accept watched men get to the stake, and said 'There but of the grace of God goes John Bradford'. That period of grace came to an end for Bradford himself was burned at the pale in 1555. Whether the saying originated with him or not, the force of it remains, and this reading gives information technology weight. When nosotros see disaster befalling others, the appropriate response is compassion and solidarity, every bit we share with our beau humans the frailty of mortality, and we tin can say with full seriousness: 'At that place, but for the grace of God, get nosotros'. And in the light of our shared mortality, we need to hear anew Jesus' telephone call to repentance in the calorie-free of final sentence.
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