Life is Not Fair! (A sermon on Luke 13:1-9)

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'” (Luke 13:1-9)

One of the painful things I have had to come to terms with in the case of my friend Sheikh Mansour, who is under threat of being deported (any day now), is that I can think of so many other people who really should be deported!

Any number of politicians come to mind – people that this country could very happily do without – but not just politicians. I can think a whole range of persons I’d put on the deportation list if I was asked, including any number of local trouble-makers as well people who made fun of me when I was little, girls who refused to go out with me in high school, etc. I can think of any number of people worth deporting, and there’s not a single Iranian Sheikh amongst them! It’s not fair, and life isn’t fair. We know that.

More seriously, I received an email from a dear friend on Friday, and it was a one-word email, if I remember, and the word was ‘guilty‘.

It was an update on a court case my friend was attending where the man on trail had killed his daughter in a car accident. His daughter had been making a right-hand turn and this character had run a red light at over 100km/hour and killed her, and now he was attempting to plead his innocence!

And I appreciated the sense of relief my friend felt, that some level of justice had been served with this verdict. If the guy had walked away I appreciate that he would have found that unbearable – not because the guilty verdict did anything to bring his little girl back, but because a ‘not guilty’ verdict would have implied that there was somehow nothing wrong with what had happened!

For behind the call for justice in the courts is a recognition of a terrible injustice – a tragedy that just never should have happened! It just should never have happened. It wasn’t her fault. It was so unjust. It totally wasn’t fair

How do you go on after something like that, as a father. And (very pertinently for us) how do you go on as a person of faith after something like that?

For an injustice like this is not just an terrible emotional and human issue. It’s also a critical faith issue because it challenges our belief in any God of justice who is supposed to be ultimately in charge of this world!

Of course you don’t have to be struggling with a family tragedy or even defending your local Sheikh to be confronted with this dilemma. I confront the same issue every day when I look at what is going on in Gaza – the slow strangulation of the population, as the people are deprived of food and medicines, and now access to clean water as well. And I cannot work out how the rest of the world’s population stands by and puts up with this, let alone how God can just let it all happen!

And it’s not just a theological question. In many ways it is the theological question. And so it is not surprising to find that it’s a question that the Bible deals with a number of times, though the problem of course is that the answers we get in the Bible can appear so intellectually unsatisfying!

Read the book of Job, for instance. Job rails at God over 42 grinding chapters, pleading the case of the suffering innocent, and what is Job told at the end of the book that the world is a complex place and that he needs to pull his head in! Hardly the answer we were looking for!

And yet the response Jesus gives to the same question here in Luke chapter 13 is worse, surely, for Jesus here doesn’t just fail to solve the problem for His disciples. He seems to mock them for having the gall to ask about it!

‘Do you think you’re any better than those who died in the tower tragedy? Think again! You could be next!’

That’s a paraphrase, of course, but it pretty much sums it up. Is this the black humor of Jesus – the dark side of Jesus’ jostling with His disciples? For after all, the examples that He’s dealing with here are pretty significant human tragedies.

They were telling Him, we are told, ‘about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices’. Now we don’t have any independent record of this exact tragedy but these people were evidently at prayer when Pilate’s troops stormed in and cut them down, mingling their blood with the blood of their sacrificial offerings, which is just a tragic and disgusting detail.

And whatever these people were allegedly guilty of, it does make you wonder why things like this happen – perhaps most especially to people at prayer. And so it does not surprise us that the disciples bring this situation to Jesus. It’s Jesus’ response – ‘watch out, you may be next’ – that is a bit of a surprise!

And in case you missed the point, Jesus reinforces it with the example of the collapse of the twin towers (or in this case, it may have been a single tower). ‘Do you think those people who got killed by the tower somehow deserved it? Think again! And don’t assume that the next tower won’t fall on you!’

Now I confess that I have never taken Jesus as my model in this regard when counseling people who have lost loved ones in a tragedy. I’ve had the privilege of working with quite a few grieving families over the years – a number of whom have lost family members (most often children) to drugs or in an accident or in some other tragic circumstance, and I certainly don’t take the hard line that Jesus takes here with any of them!

And yet maybe that’s the key to understanding this passage, because the people Jesus is discussing these tragedies with were NOT members of the grieving families. They were people who (presumably) had no personal involvement with any of those who had tragically been killed.

And of course Jesus tended to answer different people in lots of different ways, depending on who was asking him and what was behind their question. Lots of people came to Jesus asking Him to perform a miracle for them and lots of people received miracles. Drunken King Herod, you will remember, also asked Him to perform some miracles, and Jesus didn’t even answer him, let alone perform!

Lots of people came to Jesus with spiritual questions – eg. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life’ (Mark 10:17) and Jesus gave them spiritual responses. Others came to Jesus trying to trick Him with their questions (eg. Luke 11:54) and they received a different sort of response from Jesus altogether.

And so the question we need to start with, in coming to terms with this dialogue ‘what was behind these question Jesus’ disciples were asking about the persons killed by Pilate and those crushed by the Tower?’

What was driving their questioning? Was it grief? Probably not. Was it then curiosity or perhaps even a thirst for knowledge? I think it’s pretty clear from Jesus’ response that what was behind these questions from His disciples was fear.

‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?’ Think again, says Jesus, whereas I think the response Jesus’ disciples were hoping to receive from their master was something like, don’t worry, boys, those guys killed by Pilate and those squashed by the Tower were evil people, otherwise God would not have let such terrible things happen to them. You, on the other hand, are nice respectable people and so nothing like that will ever happen to you!

I’ve recounted this before, I know, but I can never forget the story told me by the French Episcopal priest that I met in the Philippines back in the 80’s. He told me how one day the bus he was on stopped to reveal bloody corpses in the gutter at the side of the road. The other passengers, he said, looked out briefly and then returned to reading their newspapers saying – ‘Those guys must have done something really bad!’

Now the Philippines was a rough place back in the 80’s. It’s still a rough place, but I was there at election time and there were regular bombs going off at street corners and in all sorts of places you least expected. How do you maintain your sanity in an environment like that? How do you live with the insecurity of never knowing when or where the next bomb is going to detonate? How do you deal with the sense of helplessness that comes with knowing that you are vulnerable to the swift hand of fate at any moment?

The answer is that you tell yourself that it could never happen to you because things like that only happen to bad people and that because you are not a bad person such things as that will never happen to you! Problem solved! Let’s get back to reading the paper!

I appreciate that faith can be a lot of different things to different people, but it seems that for some people faith is sort of like a lucky talisman that you wear around your neck – something that protects you from the misfortunes of life.

So long as I go to church, say my prayers, accept the teachings of the Athanasian Creed and oppose gay marriages I’m sure I will be protected from those calamities that fall on the great unwashed. I won’t be subject to sudden mishap or financial ruin and none of my children will ever take drugs, etc, etc. Ah! If only it were that easy!

No! Do you think you are somehow better than those guys who got crushed by the tower or than that girl who was tragically killed in the car accident? No! Sorry! Life is short. We are all equally vulnerable. Repent and be ready to meet your maker, for you never know when your time may come!

It’s a difficult thing to swallow, isn’t it, but the Christian faith was not designed to help nervous people feel more secure about life. ‘The ship safely tied up at dock’, Kierkegaard used to say, is not an image of faith! ‘Swimming out over 30,000 fathoms of water with nothing else to support you – that is faith’! It’s not so much a path to safety as to adventure.

St Augustine reflected on this in ‘City of God’. During the great suffering that occurred when the barbarians sacked Rome, Augustine noted that, when the barbarians raped and pillaged, Christians suffered as much as everyone else! Where the axe fell, there people died! He wrote ‘Christians differ from pagans not in the ills that befall them but in what they do with the ills that befall them.’

Good point, and one that helps us see the relevance of the story of a fig tree that follows this dialogue. The tree isn’t bearing fruit! ‘Rip it up’ the boss says to the gardener, but the gardener says, ‘Give me one last shot. Let me heap manure all over it, and see if it does’t produce something worthwhile?’

We students of the Bible are familiar, I think, with the image of the fig tree as a symbol for Israel or for the church. We are also familiar, I think, with the experience of having manure heaped all over us.

In truth, we can’t avoid the crap. We’d like to think we can but we can’t. It’s not fair of course that good, decent, peace-loving, clean-living folks like us can’t get away with hassle-free lives, but we can’t. That’s the way it is, and no amount of theologising or wishful thinking is gonna change that. In the world to come, yes, things will be different, but we ain’t there yet! This life is not fair, and Jesus does not see it as His role to make it any fairer.

We can’t avoid the crap, but (at the risk of sounding cliched) let me say that we can grow through it. We, the weak, we, the weary and vulnerable. We can grow through the crap and come to respond to tragedy – be it natural disaster or criminal activity or the threatened deportation of a friend – not with fear but with compassion and action, so that we become the sort of hard-nosed but soft-hearted, battle-scarred, long-suffering, persevering, ever-loving, non-judgemental, nurturing, fruit-bearing people that God requires. Amen

First Preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, March 2010.