Lent 3: Why?

Isaiah 55.1-9, Luke 13.1-9

Why do bad things happen?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Why do bad things happen to me and to those I love?

These are questions which are as old as humanity.  Perhaps pondering them is one of the things that makes us human. We are aware of suffering and death even when they’re not happening to us. We know that we are mortal. We know that a whole host of things can easily go wrong in our lives– sickness, conflict, natural disaster. A whale  or an earthworm may feel pain, but they don’t lie awake at night worrying about whether tomorrow they will harpooned or sliced in half by a gardener’s spade. Imagination is both the gift and the curse of humanity.

To cope with our anxiety we look for patterns and signs that might help us to predict and control what happens to us. Sometimes it works. Human beings are very clever. We’ve discovered the causes and the treatments for many diseases. We’ve found ways of predicting earthquakes and volcanoes. Our lives are safer, easier and less painful than our ancestors as a result.    

But we still know that in the end we will all die. We can avoid many threats, but not all of them. We might be walking under a tree at the precise moment a branch falls off; a few seconds earlier, or later, and we would have survived. We might catch a disease that no one has yet found a cure for. We might be on the train that crashes, the bus that is blown up by a terrorist, the beach that is hit by a tsunami. That means that whenever there is a tragedy, those old, dark questions surface. “Why did it happen to those people , in that place, at that time?” If we can find the answer we think that maybe we can avert the same fate befalling us and our loved ones, and push death away at least for a while.

But in asking that question, we can end up seeming to blame the victim, as if they did something to bring what happened upon themselves, something we would have been clever enough, or good enough to avoid.

Take the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, for example. Many people died in that because when the water retreated before the tsunami hit, instead of running away, they went to take a closer look. Isn’t it tempting to think that we would have behaved differently, been more cautious, run like the clappers in the opposite direction?  I doubt it is true, but it makes us feel safer to think the victims could have acted differently and saved themselves.

Victim blaming can easily creep into religious faith. Those who suffer must have offended God, people say, but if we keep the rules, whatever we think they are, we’ll be ok.

That’s what the people who come to Jesus in today’s Gospel are thinking. There’s been a massacre in the Temple in Jerusalem. People were seriously rattled. Surely the Temple should have been the safest place in Israel, the dwelling place of God? If it had happened once, it could happen again. How many of us felt like that at the thought of travelling on the Tube after the 7/7 bombings, just felt a bit on edge, a bit nervous…?

The only way Jesus’ questioners can feel safe in the Temple again is to find some reason why these particular victims were killed. Perhaps they were troublemakers, deliberately provoking the Romans. Perhaps they had broken God’s rules, so he had withdrawn his protection.  Cruel though it seems, they want to feel that these people had it coming to them. They are desperate to avoid the conclusion that they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, because  if that was so, then everyone is at risk. But Jesus won’t support their twisted logic. He reminds them of some people killed in another disaster, the collapse of a tower at Siloam in Jerusalem.  “What about them? Did they have it coming too?”

Victim blaming won’t do, says Jesus. There was nothing about these people that invited these tragedies. But then he goes on to say something that really doesn’t sound reassuring at all.  “No, I tell you;” he says “ but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”

At first sight it looks as if Jesus is actually making a bad theological situation even worse here. “No, it’s not that these people were uniquely wicked. You are all wicked and deserve to die too.”

Well, thanks Jesus! That really helps!

I am indebted to a colleague*   on an internet preaching forum this week for saying something which may help us out of the hole we now seem to be in with this story.

He pointed out that we often misread this story with an individualistic and narrowly spiritual focus instead of understanding its historical and political context. We make it about me and my faith and my individual salvation when we should be reading it through the eyes of the community who first heard it, in the particular time in which it was set.

Luke’s Gospel was written a decade or so after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. This was a huge calamity. The Jewish people were expelled from their homeland, scattered across the Middle East and the Mediterranean. They didn’t have a nation to call their own again until after the Second World War.  They lost their homes and their Temple, the centre of their faith. It had a profound emotional and spiritual impact on them. It brought to the surface all those anxious questions I started with. “Why has this happened?” “What have we done to deserve it?” “Who is to blame?”  The early Christians were caught up in this turmoil as well – most of them were Jewish and the Church’s main base was in Jerusalem. Their lives were turned upside down along with everyone else’s.  The Gospels were written in the shadow of this calamity, when it was fresh in everyone’s minds, and when the aftershocks were still rippling through the community.

Jesus foretells this destruction in all the Gospels – it’s an important theme in them. The Gospel writers could have been reading backwards, putting words in his mouth, but not necessarily.   Trouble had been brewing with Rome for the whole of Jesus’ life, with recurrent rebellions happening. It didn’t take a genius to see where it would lead. 

When we read this passage in the light of that catastrophe, it starts to sound very different. Jesus isn’t talking about God smiting people here. He isn’t talking about individual salvation. He is talking about the destruction the Roman Army will unleash, the political tensions which will tear the nation apart. There is a real prospect that  Jesus’ hearers will “all perish” like those massacred in the Temple or those killed by the tower collapse, and even if they aren’t physically killed, they are facing the death of their way of life, their collective culture and their faith. There’s no mystery here, no deep spiritual puzzle to be solved.  Jesus is saying “never mind why this person or that person happens to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is a calamity coming which will fall on you all”

The good news is that there is something they can do about this – maybe not to prevent it, but at least to ensure that the “death” it brings isn’t permanent and total. They can repent. This doesn’t mean going about beating their breasts and wailing. The Greek word for repent - “metanoia”  - literally means to change your mind, to change your perspective, your worldview, your priorities, to learn to see things in a different way. A few chapters later, Jesus will weep as he looks out over Jerusalem, “If only you had known… the things that make for peace” he says.  Whether this would have prevented the destruction of Jerusalem is open to question, but it would certainly help them weather the storms, and find new life after them.

When trouble strikes, when the walls around us come crashing down, it reveals who we really are, what we are really made of. It is bound to feel tough, maybe unbearably so at times, but if we have put down our roots deep into the nourishing soil of God’s love there will be sustenance to draw on, and good fruit in the midst of the chaos. That is what the parable Jesus goes on to tell is saying. Act now. Get the growing conditions right, and the most hopeless fig tree that looks like it is a complete waste of space can show itself to be full of life. In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah had the same advice in an earlier time of trouble – “eat what is good” “Incline your ear and come to me; listen, so that you may live.” Don’t waste your resources “for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy.” That’s what we do when we try to kid ourselves that if we are good enough or clever enough we can be immune from trouble. That’s what we do when we spend our energies blaming others rather than looking at the faults that lie within us. 

We don’t have the Roman Army breathing down our necks today, but our challenges are just as frightening. Take climate change, for example. At the moment the poorest nations of the world are bearing the brunt of it, but already we are being affected as people from those areas are forced to migrate to avoid starvation and the inevitable conflicts that result from resources being scarce. We have time, if we act now, to do something to help the world through this. But to do so we have to repent, to change our view of ourselves. We need to address our craving to consume. We need to learn that we are part of one family, with one planet and find better ways of living together on it. Above all we need to learn to trust God for the courage and the love these challenges will demand of us.  

Why do bad things happen? We’ll never be able to answer that question completely. But God, like the gardener in the parable Jesus told, longs for us to put our roots down into him, now, before the storms of life come, so we are firmly anchored, richly fed, and able to bear the good fruit we need to sustain us and the world around us.

Amen

*Many thanks to Greg Crawford.

Lent 3: Why?

Isaiah 55.1-9, Luke 13.1-9

Why do bad things happen?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Why do bad things happen to me and to those I love?

These are questions which are as old as humanity.  Perhaps pondering them is one of the things that makes us human. We are aware of suffering and death even when they’re not happening to us. We know that we are mortal. We know that a whole host of things can easily go wrong in our lives– sickness, conflict, natural disaster. A whale  or an earthworm may feel pain, but they don’t lie awake at night worrying about whether tomorrow they will harpooned or sliced in half by a gardener’s spade. Imagination is both the gift and the curse of humanity.

To cope with our anxiety we look for patterns and signs that might help us to predict and control what happens to us. Sometimes it works. Human beings are very clever. We’ve discovered the causes and the treatments for many diseases. We’ve found ways of predicting earthquakes and volcanoes. Our lives are safer, easier and less painful than our ancestors as a result.    

But we still know that in the end we will all die. We can avoid many threats, but not all of them. We might be walking under a tree at the precise moment a branch falls off; a few seconds earlier, or later, and we would have survived. We might catch a disease that no one has yet found a cure for. We might be on the train that crashes, the bus that is blown up by a terrorist, the beach that is hit by a tsunami. That means that whenever there is a tragedy, those old, dark questions surface. “Why did it happen to those people , in that place, at that time?” If we can find the answer we think that maybe we can avert the same fate befalling us and our loved ones, and push death away at least for a while.

But in asking that question, we can end up seeming to blame the victim, as if they did something to bring what happened upon themselves, something we would have been clever enough, or good enough to avoid.

Take the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, for example. Many people died in that because when the water retreated before the tsunami hit, instead of running away, they went to take a closer look. Isn’t it tempting to think that we would have behaved differently, been more cautious, run like the clappers in the opposite direction?  I doubt it is true, but it makes us feel safer to think the victims could have acted differently and saved themselves.

Victim blaming can easily creep into religious faith. Those who suffer must have offended God, people say, but if we keep the rules, whatever we think they are, we’ll be ok.

That’s what the people who come to Jesus in today’s Gospel are thinking. There’s been a massacre in the Temple in Jerusalem. People were seriously rattled. Surely the Temple should have been the safest place in Israel, the dwelling place of God? If it had happened once, it could happen again. How many of us felt like that at the thought of travelling on the Tube after the 7/7 bombings, just felt a bit on edge, a bit nervous…?

The only way Jesus’ questioners can feel safe in the Temple again is to find some reason why these particular victims were killed. Perhaps they were troublemakers, deliberately provoking the Romans. Perhaps they had broken God’s rules, so he had withdrawn his protection.  Cruel though it seems, they want to feel that these people had it coming to them. They are desperate to avoid the conclusion that they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, because  if that was so, then everyone is at risk. But Jesus won’t support their twisted logic. He reminds them of some people killed in another disaster, the collapse of a tower at Siloam in Jerusalem.  “What about them? Did they have it coming too?”

Victim blaming won’t do, says Jesus. There was nothing about these people that invited these tragedies. But then he goes on to say something that really doesn’t sound reassuring at all.  “No, I tell you;” he says “ but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”

At first sight it looks as if Jesus is actually making a bad theological situation even worse here. “No, it’s not that these people were uniquely wicked. You are all wicked and deserve to die too.”

Well, thanks Jesus! That really helps!

I am indebted to a colleague*   on an internet preaching forum this week for saying something which may help us out of the hole we now seem to be in with this story.

He pointed out that we often misread this story with an individualistic and narrowly spiritual focus instead of understanding its historical and political context. We make it about me and my faith and my individual salvation when we should be reading it through the eyes of the community who first heard it, in the particular time in which it was set.

Luke’s Gospel was written a decade or so after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. This was a huge calamity. The Jewish people were expelled from their homeland, scattered across the Middle East and the Mediterranean. They didn’t have a nation to call their own again until after the Second World War.  They lost their homes and their Temple, the centre of their faith. It had a profound emotional and spiritual impact on them. It brought to the surface all those anxious questions I started with. “Why has this happened?” “What have we done to deserve it?” “Who is to blame?”  The early Christians were caught up in this turmoil as well – most of them were Jewish and the Church’s main base was in Jerusalem. Their lives were turned upside down along with everyone else’s.  The Gospels were written in the shadow of this calamity, when it was fresh in everyone’s minds, and when the aftershocks were still rippling through the community.

Jesus foretells this destruction in all the Gospels – it’s an important theme in them. The Gospel writers could have been reading backwards, putting words in his mouth, but not necessarily.   Trouble had been brewing with Rome for the whole of Jesus’ life, with recurrent rebellions happening. It didn’t take a genius to see where it would lead. 

When we read this passage in the light of that catastrophe, it starts to sound very different. Jesus isn’t talking about God smiting people here. He isn’t talking about individual salvation. He is talking about the destruction the Roman Army will unleash, the political tensions which will tear the nation apart. There is a real prospect that  Jesus’ hearers will “all perish” like those massacred in the Temple or those killed by the tower collapse, and even if they aren’t physically killed, they are facing the death of their way of life, their collective culture and their faith. There’s no mystery here, no deep spiritual puzzle to be solved.  Jesus is saying “never mind why this person or that person happens to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is a calamity coming which will fall on you all”

The good news is that there is something they can do about this – maybe not to prevent it, but at least to ensure that the “death” it brings isn’t permanent and total. They can repent. This doesn’t mean going about beating their breasts and wailing. The Greek word for repent - “metanoia”  - literally means to change your mind, to change your perspective, your worldview, your priorities, to learn to see things in a different way. A few chapters later, Jesus will weep as he looks out over Jerusalem, “If only you had known… the things that make for peace” he says.  Whether this would have prevented the destruction of Jerusalem is open to question, but it would certainly help them weather the storms, and find new life after them.

When trouble strikes, when the walls around us come crashing down, it reveals who we really are, what we are really made of. It is bound to feel tough, maybe unbearably so at times, but if we have put down our roots deep into the nourishing soil of God’s love there will be sustenance to draw on, and good fruit in the midst of the chaos. That is what the parable Jesus goes on to tell is saying. Act now. Get the growing conditions right, and the most hopeless fig tree that looks like it is a complete waste of space can show itself to be full of life. In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah had the same advice in an earlier time of trouble – “eat what is good” “Incline your ear and come to me; listen, so that you may live.” Don’t waste your resources “for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy.” That’s what we do when we try to kid ourselves that if we are good enough or clever enough we can be immune from trouble. That’s what we do when we spend our energies blaming others rather than looking at the faults that lie within us. 

We don’t have the Roman Army breathing down our necks today, but our challenges are just as frightening. Take climate change, for example. At the moment the poorest nations of the world are bearing the brunt of it, but already we are being affected as people from those areas are forced to migrate to avoid starvation and the inevitable conflicts that result from resources being scarce. We have time, if we act now, to do something to help the world through this. But to do so we have to repent, to change our view of ourselves. We need to address our craving to consume. We need to learn that we are part of one family, with one planet and find better ways of living together on it. Above all we need to learn to trust God for the courage and the love these challenges will demand of us.  

Why do bad things happen? We’ll never be able to answer that question completely. But God, like the gardener in the parable Jesus told, longs for us to put our roots down into him, now, before the storms of life come, so we are firmly anchored, richly fed, and able to bear the good fruit we need to sustain us and the world around us.

Amen

*Many thanks to Greg Crawford.

Lent 1: The Spirit in the wilderness

Deuteronomy 26.1-11.Psalm91. 1-2, 9-16, Romans 10. 8b-13, Luke 4.1-13

I was in Seal School earlier this week, leading a school assembly, as I normally do every other Thursday. It was the beginning of Lent, so I told them the Gospel story we’ve heard today, the story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. But before I did so, I asked them to imagine a desert of their own. We sat in silence, as we thought about what we could see in our desert, what was in front of us, and around us. We thought about what we could hear – was the wind blowing, was it silent? We thought about whether it was hot or cold? What were we standing on? Rock or sand maybe? We thought about what it felt like to be there; did we feel peaceful or frightened?

Then I asked the children to describe “their” desert for me. As always there were all sorts of answers. There were cacti and “that sort of bush that blows around “ – tumbleweed, I think they meant. One child told me how the sand was tickly under her feet. One had a pyramid in his desert. Another told me that his desert was completely black, no light, no stars. Some admitted to being a bit frightened, but then one girl said “I felt a bit lonely in my desert at first but then I remembered that I wasn’t alone after all.” “ So, who was with you?” I asked. “God was with me,” she said….

Out of the mouths of babes…

I thought of her comment when I read the beginning of today’s Gospel. There’s an odd little detail in Luke’s version of this story which  is different from the way it is written in the other Gospels. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. But Luke says that he was “led by the Spirit in the wilderness.” 

“In” or “into”. It seems like such a small thing but it makes a big difference to the meaning.  “Into” implies that the Spirit just took Jesus into the wilderness; after that he was on his own. But if he was led by the Spirit in the wilderness then the Spirit was with him the whole time, guiding him, strengthening him. That’s what Luke wants to emphasize. As that child at Seal School said, he wasn’t alone at all.

The Spirit is immensely important in Luke – he mentions it far more often than the other Gospel writers. Gabriel tells Mary that  ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you” (21.39) when he announces that she will be the mother of the Messiah. The Spirit brings Simeon to the Temple to see the new-born Christ (2.27). The Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism. (3.22). As he begins his ministry he quotes the prophet Isaiah - ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me, to bring good news to the poor. (4. 18) I could go on, but you get the picture. And in the second volume of Luke’s writings – the Acts of the Apostles – the Spirit has a starring role again, this time coming on the Disciples and driving them out across the world to spread the good news.

The Spirit is often the overlooked member of the Trinity, the one we are vaguest about, but in the Bible the Spirit is everywhere; at Creation, hovering over the waters of chaos to bring order out of them, inspiring the prophets, bringing them the word of God. The Spirit was the way the people of Israel talked about the real, immediate presence of God. The Spirit wasn’t a distant figure, enthroned in the heavens, but around them and within them, whether they were aware of it or not. “Where can I go from your spirit?  Or where can I flee from your presence?” says Psalm 139. The answer is, nowhere. The Spirit is with him always and everywhere.

So perhaps Luke is just stating something that he thought should be obvious. The Spirit doesn’t just lead Jesus  into the wilderness, but in the wilderness too, day by day through that 40 day long ordeal. Jesus is not alone, and he will never be alone in Luke’s Gospel, even as he hangs on the cross. His last word’s in Luke’s Gospel are “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”, word of trust and faith. In Mark’s Gospel he cries out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, but there’s none of that sense of forsakenness in Luke. He knows God is there even at that most terrible moment, that second wilderness of pain and death, because he’d found him to be present long before in this first wilderness.

When Satan comes to him with all sorts of seductive suggestions, he’s ready to answer him because he knows God is with him.  He hears Satan’s words, slippery words which twist the Scriptures, taking them out of their context so they sound as if they mean things they don’t mean. But the Spirit’s voice within him is louder and clearer.

“Turn these stones into bread”, says Satan. After all, God had given people miraculous manna in the wilderness before. But Jesus knows that he needs to hunger and thirst for righteousness and wisdom, not a slap up meal.

“Exercise the power you’ve been given in my service”, says Satan. But Jesus knows that he has been given authority so that he can do his Father’s work, loving and serving others, not grabbing glory for himself.

“Do something spectacular to prove God loves you”, says Satan, but Jesus already knows that – he doesn’t need to put it to the test. He trusts that God will take him where he needs to go, and will be with him whatever happens.   

The Spirit leads Jesus  in the wilderness because the Spirit leads him everywhere.

We might say at this point, bully for Jesus – that’s great for him! He is filled with the Spirit, never alone. But what about us? How are we supposed to manage in our wildernesses? After all, Jesus is the Son of God, which gives him a bit of an unfair advantage over the rest of us. What are we supposed to do when we are in the desert, and feeling deserted?  

If we are starting to feel disgruntled we need to look again at Luke’s Gospel, and especially at the words which come immediately before this story. Between the story of Jesus’ baptism and this story, Luke puts in a fascinating interlude. It is his account of the genealogy of Jesus. That might not sound very fascinating at first sight, but, trust me, it is. It starts from Jesus and works backwards. “[Jesus] was the son (as was thought) of Joseph, son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi,” and so on and so on it goes, back through the generations, until we get to “Canain, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam - son of God.” That’s what Luke writes. Jesus the Son of God is the descendant of Adam, who is also described as son of God.

Christians believe that Jesus is Son of God in some sense uniquely, of course – we’ve just been exploring that in the first session of our Lent course – but we also believe that every one of us is his son or daughter too.

God made Adam out of the dust, according to the book of Genesis, but it was only when he breathed his own breath into him that Adam became a living being.  The word for that life-giving breath was “ruach” in Hebrew, which can also be translated “spirit” – the words are interchangeable. We don’t have to take the Genesis story literally to understand what it is trying to tell us. God’s own breath, God’s own Spirit, is what filled Adam. Without it, he was just mud. According to the Bible, being fully alive, fully human, means being filled with God’s Spirit, having his presence deep within you, as close as the breath you take. That’s not just something that is true for Jesus, but for all of us, because we are all descended from Adam in the Bible’s view, like Jesus, children of Adam and therefore children of God.  

Our life is given to us by God, says the Bible. All of us have his God-breathed Spirit within us, whether we acknowledge it or not. God's presence might be more obvious at some times, than at others. We might have  smothered the Spirit with our cares and worries, with the distractions of wealth, with all the other inner rubbish we accumulate. But the Spirit of God is stronger than our junk, calling us to breathe with God's breath, and allow God's life to be our heartbeat.

That’s why we keep this season of Lent. It is a chance to face our wildernesses, so that we can find  the Spirit of God leading us within them. In Lent, we give up some of the things we thought we couldn’t live without, so that we can discover God’s riches within us. We look for ways to love and serve others, to stretch our love and  compassion, and in the process discover that God’s love and compassion are inexhaustible. We carve out time for prayer, for discussion, for reflection, so that we can tune our ears to the voice of the Spirit and learn to tell the right pathways from the wrong in the trackless desert that life can often seem to be.

I began by talking about the wildernesses the children of Seal School imagined for themselves. They were all very different, but very real. I wonder what yours would be like if I asked you to describe it? I wonder how you feel as you imagine yourself standing in it?  It may be that your wilderness isn’t just a place you go to for Lent, but a place you have to live in long-term.  It may be a wilderness of chronic illness, or family problems or financial worries. But whatever our wilderness is like, and however it feels to be there, as I was reminded by that child this week, we aren’t alone. God is with us. The Spirit leads us in it, and if we know that we will know that we can never be truly lost, and our desert will never be a place in which we are deserted.

Amen