The Falling Tower and Other Disasters
Lent 3, Year C 2025; Luke 13:1-9
The two incidents reported in the first part of this reading, a massacre in Jerusalem by the occupying Roman forces and an engineering disaster nearby, are not otherwise known, Luke alone including them in the Gospel. They are however all too plausible, given the setting. It is not only from the coming story of Jesus’ death that we have a sense of Pilate as a repressive overlord, and buildings do still collapse.
The way these events are presented, or at least the way Jesus responds, raises the question of divine favor and judgement. Why do people suffer? How are suffering and blessing related to faith or character or behavior? Yet this is not first and foremost a general discourse about morality or theodicy.
Both these disasters take place in Jerusalem. A murderous act there in the Temple by Romans—with Galileans as the victims— and the destruction of its buildings are ominous anticipations of what will follow, not merely random examples of mayhem and suffering. They hint at the unfolding story of Jesus himself, and also the catastrophic events that will take place some decades later when Jerusalem was destroyed, of which Luke’s readership was also aware. So this exchange should not be used too quickly to create general theories, at least before we have taken care to read it first as part of the narrative of the mounting crisis that is Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem.
Jesus’ response to these items of bad news is to criticize attempts to correlate moral goodness or divine favor with suffering or prosperity. These victims were not being singled out as especially bad. Yet then as now people seem to have been tempted to think that good things should happen to good people, and the reverse only to the wicked. Perhaps this is inevitable. Certainly for those who experience suffering there can be a struggle to understand how and where God is at work. Like the Psalmist or Job, we may ask why, or at least “how long,” we have to undergo what seems unjust, and rightly look to God for deliverance.
Deliverance however is not the same as continued ease or wealth. The other side of the coin, wherein not just health and happiness but wealth and power are taken to be signs of God’s favor, rather than as opportunities for thanks and hence for sharing of divine provision with those who need it, is also very evident today. The present US leadership has unsurprisingly associated itself with a version of this “success theology” which offers no hard questions to injustice, and whose advocates would probably have suggested that the victims of today’s stories suffered because they had not contributed enough money to their own ministries.
Jesus of course opposes these views completely, but does so from a challenging perspective. The unfortunate Galilean pilgrims had not been punished personally by God, but by Pilate. The bystanders in Siloam that day had done nothing worse than others to pay the price for bad workmanship, or whatever else. Yet they are not quite innocent victims; for these purposes at least, Jesus implies that the fates of these individuals were representative and exemplary, rather than exceptional: “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Judgement, it seems, is universal rather than partial. Yet before we decide Jesus is saying that suffering is universal or justified, or that all people are always justifiably condemned, we must remember what is happening in the story. Jesus is not making universal statements but hinting specifically at the fate that awaits Jerusalem as a whole, all those still sacrificing and all those near any other tower, who will in time face the same things as these Galileans and those eighteen.
So this is not a general theory of success or suffering, but an analysis of the signs of the times. In particular, for Luke this is first and foremost Jesus the prophet speaking, calling the people to return to God. Jesus speaks as Jeremiah and Isaiah had, warning that injustice and oppression, infidelity to God’s covenant, were the heart of the problem—not some real or imagined version of negative divine selectivity—and that all Jerusalem was likely to suffer as it had done before.
Just as for those earlier prophets, Jesus’ dire message to Jerusalem is offered neither to prove the accuracy of his insights, or to underline the profound nature of the city’s faults just for the sake of it, but to elicit a response, however unlikely. The following parable of the fig tree makes this clearer. Even though we, from a later standpoint (shared with Luke’s readers), know it would ultimately prove futile for Jerusalem itself, Jesus’ prophetic warning was offered in hope. Luke intends that we grasp that Jesus was correct in foreseeing what would take place, but also (and more importantly) that God’s will expressed through his and all those prophetic voices is not destruction or rejection but comfort and redemption—and if destruction was not avoided, then that deliverance would come next.
This does not offer a quick answer to the desperate and lost regarding the reasons for suffering. It does however remind us that all who observe others’ suffering can take no comfort from the contrast. We may all experience tragedy and loss at any time. Rather, the frailty of human existence in other’s lives is always a call to repentance. We must resist the temptation to let tragedy reinforce our imagined distinctions between the good and “the rest,” with ourselves presumably among the first group; all of us must constantly be seeking to live as God intends, in loving and just ways. And the need of others is always an opportunity for loving service.
This also reminds us that judgement has a point which is very different from the general idea, all too prevalent still at least in many people’s minds, that God is mad and bad at us all. Judgement exists because God is loving and because of injustice. Without judgement, there is no good news for the oppressed. Without the reminder that God’s love is manifest in judgement against cruelty, indifference, and the meaningless accumulation praised by the “success” theologians, we fall into similar traps.
Jesus does however have something more to say to the reader, as well as to doomed Jerusalem, aside from the incessant call to repentance and justice. As we noted, the fates of these unfortunates seem to hint at his own—this other Galilean, whose blood will be shed along with the coming Passover sacrifices— as well as the events to come in AD 70. Jesus is not merely a conveyor of better (if bracing) prophetic information about divine judgement and repentance; he will share with Jerusalem in its sufferings, and with all of us in our own. He does not speak about Jerusalem and its people as some “other” whose bad end is a tragic necessity; he journeys on to meet Jerusalem, to call his people like the hen calling her chicks. He will open his arms to embrace them in his own fate, trusting in God’s power to deliver us from sin and death.
Funny to me that the Lectionary goes BACKWARDS in the same chapter this week.