Jesus
and his disciples live in a brutal world.
In this reading from the Gospel of Luke, mention is made of Pontius
Pilate, the Roman governor who later condemned Jesus to death, murdering a
group of Jewish worshippers as they offered sacrifices in the Temple. And there’s also the story of another group
of God’s people who were killed by a falling tower. What do such things say about the power and
the purpose of God in the world, either then or now?
A man owned a fig tree
planted in his vineyard. He came looking for fruit on it and found none.
He said
to his gardener, “Look, I’ve come looking for fruit on this fig tree for three
years now,
and I’ve never found any. Cut
it down! Why should it continue
depleting the soil’s nutrients?”
If you were the gardener, how would you respond?
If you were the gardener, how would you respond?
Jesus and his
followers are discussing the news of the day.
Sitting in a Starbucks or at Tim’s, making sense of the world around
them over a cup of coffee.
“Do you remember
the Temple massacre?” someone asks.
“Oh yeah, when
Pilate had that group of Galileans killed, right in the Temple when they came to
Jerusalem to offer sacrifice.”
Pilate is the
Roman governor appointed and supported by Rome to keep the peace in the
province of Israel. And actually it’s not
much of a surprise he had the Galileans killed.
Galileans are known to be a subversive lot, more than a little resistant
to authority and ready to rebel.
“So, I wonder,
had that group gone too far? Were they
executed because they crossed a line, and become not just a nuisance but also
criminal in their activity?”
“Like that other tragedy,” someone else chimes
in. “The eighteen crushed to death
in Siloam – in that neighbourhood of south Jerusalem, when a tower fell on
them. I mean, why did that tower fall on
them and no one else?”
“Yeah, and why
did it kill them, not just injure them?
There must be a good reason.”
“Was there something
especially bad about them, something horrible they were guilty of, that they
suffered that way more than others around them.”
This view – that
people in the world can be divided into good ones on one side, and bad ones on
the other, and that one of the ways you can tell them apart is when bad things
happen to those who are bad, is an ancient view. Which means that it was held not only in old
and bygone days, but that it’s born and bred deep in our bones and seems part
of our ancestral DNA all through history and even today.
The world can be
brutal and hard. Bad, tragic, even
terrible and horrific things happen. Being
who we are, we work hard to try to make sense of it. And one of the ways we do that is to assume the
world is made up of two kinds of people – good people and bad, and when bad
things happen it must be, in most cases, because bad people are being punished
for the bad things they do. It’s a kind
of logic that’s hard to escape and be free of.
It’s one of the
reasons Americans, for instance, have had such a hard time with what happened
on 9-11. A friend of mine was teaching
high school in a rich, Republican, fundamentalist-Christian part of San Antonio
the day the towers were attacked and fell.
And the anguished question all his students asked, and that he knew he
dared not try to answer, was “Why do they hate us so? How can anyone want to do that to us?”
The reason he
could not even begin to answer that question for them, was the unspoken and
unquestioned assumption held by all of them that the world is made up of two
kinds of people – simply good and simply bad, and that of course, they were
among the good. And how could anyone
hate them that much, to do them that much evil?
Reasons and
explanations were found, of course. The
pure evil of the other was part of it – always easy to argue because when we
divide the world into good and bad, it’s funny how it usually matches the line
between me and you, and between us and them.
And then there
was also the suggestion that God allowed such evil to be done to punish America
for how liberal and evil its elite had become in tolerating homosexuality,
abortion and other abominations. So it
made perfect sense for people to recommit to fundamental goodness, to simple
morality, and in the words of their president, to be either for or against the values,
the country and the people that are good.
Unlike their
other president – the fallen one, the no-longer-in-office one, the one named Clinton with a
moral scandal hung around his neck, who on national television stood in the
rubble of the towers and without words simply wept agonizing tears with all others
who suffered there. Also unlike so many
others – that wide variety of people we have heard about in so many stories who
in response to the tragedy and evil of the day without thinking about it forgot
about the lines that divided them from others, and just acted spontaneously in
reaching out in whatever way they could to help whoever they could.
And it’s the
latter response – not the former, that seems more in line with the attitude and
way of Jesus when bad things happen. Not
to try to make sense of it by dividing people into good and bad, and assuming
that the point of history and the purpose of God are to reward the one and
punish the other. But to do the sensible
thing of recognizing good and bad intermingled in all of us, and committing to
work for the healing of us all together before we all end up losing more than
we can ever imagine and ever recover from.
In 1946, after the
second Great War in as many generations, an historian named Herbert Butterfield
suggested a few simple things in a series of BBC radio broadcasts. Enormous atrocity and terrible sin happen in
history, he said, because of the freedom God gives us as human beings. And when terrible things happen we should not
first of all be looking to see what punishment God has somehow arranged to fall
upon those who are evil. Rather, we
should be considering what good thing God is hoping to nurture in us, in
response to what has been done and what has been suffered.
The greatest
judgement of heaven, Butterfield suggested, is reserved for those who imagine
they can sit in judgement upon the other, and think that they are the ones who
can best rule and dominate the world according to heaven’s best wishes. And the greatest blessing of heaven is
reserved for those who more simply seek to achieve some good in their little
corner, do the good that’s possible right under the noses, and in whatever way
is available to them with whoever is in front of them to hold to, and live out
the way of Christ.
Last year when
Japhia was in the hospital for a few weeks, there was one terrible night she
suffered. That day she had a new
room-mate moved into the bed beside her – an elderly woman who seemed both weak
and quiet. That night, though, as this
woman left her bed to go to the bathroom, she attacked Japhia and had to be
restrained and returned to her bed by the nurses that came running to answer
Japhia’s calls for help.
Then
it happened a second time, an hour or two later. The woman had clearly slipped into a level of
dementia and aggression that no one had seen or foreseen. She thought Japhia was her enemy meaning to
do her harm, so she decided she had to get in the first blows.
In response, a
soon as they could the next day the medical team – nurses, resident doctor and
floor manager all came to Japhia to apologize for what had happened and to help
her move to a bed they arranged for her in another room where she would be safe
from further attack, and hopefully would be able to feel safe again.
And the team also
responded as best they could to the other woman’s needs. They moved no one else into the other bed in
her room, both for other people’s safety and her own peace of mind. For two days a hospital volunteer was
assigned to sit outside the door of the other woman’s room, and accompany her
any time she left the room for a walk. And
that first day, even while the team was still arranging Japhia’s transfer to
another room, they took the other woman for walks and invited her to join them
for an hour or more at a time into the nurses’ station, where they let her use
a computer to email family and friends, to read online what she wanted, maybe
even play games – in part to let Japhia rest undisturbed in the room, but also
to give the other woman the care that she needed.
Because she was
still their patient as well. It was not
their job to divide and choose sides, to give care to one and a cold shoulder
to the other. It was their job to reach
out to, and to care for all who were there in whatever way was best and most
helpful for each.
And isn’t that
what and how and why a church, a community of faith, humanity informed by the
spirit of Christ is called to be? Not to
be a place or a people that ignores wrong-doing and evil; that’s not what this
means. But also not a place or people where
lines are drawn between good and bad people, as though we know how to do that,
as though such a distinction is even possible and we can make it in any
absolute sense.
But rather, to be
a place and a people and a way that’s more like a hospital – a place of
healing, of growth, of nurture, of redemptive and transforming care for all us
together. I like the way that Richard
Rohr puts it, that “we are all mixed blessings and partly sinners, and we will
always be.” Or what Muriel Coker used to
say, that there’s none of us so good there isn’t some measure of bad, and none
of us so bad there isn’t some measure of good.
And the way of
Christ surely is to work for the healing of us all together in some way, before
we all end up losing more than we can ever imagine and ever recover from.
