(Luke 13:1-9)

Jesus is unpicking the idea of a religious meritocracy where people earn blessings or are punished for wrong doing. He is describing a new reality underpinned by God’s grace – it is not what people do that is important but what God has done for them. The righteous and the unrighteous are treated indiscriminately. God causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Mt 5:45). The idea that we simply receive from and can not contribute to God is an uncomfortable one in a commercial world where we are expected to pay for what we want (everything has a cost and a place - at Hammersmith Town Hall I am described as a customer and the council is a service provider). It is the same point made in the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20: 1-16). The people who work all day get paid the same as the people who are hired at the 11th hour. They are then annoyed thinking that they should be paid more for working the whole of the day. The owner (who is God) replies to them saying. “Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

Jesus is direct and bold in what he says. He is deliberately overstating his case to make a point. On pilgrimage, Jews would come to Jerusalem in order to offer sacrifice at the Temple. Many times they brought their own animals for sacrifice. When Pilate "mixed human blood with the blood of animal sacrifice," he had Jewish Galileans murdered or executed. It is a nasty disaster. It was offensive, sickening and nauseating. Were they to blame for what had happened? Of course not! It is the equivalent to saying the people who were killed on 9/11 when the planes crashed into the World Trade Centre – were they to blame? Of course not! Jesus does not appear to be saying anything more profound than bad things happen. At first glance what he is saying appears to be quite lame. It is not much of an answer to the perennial question of ‘why does God allow so much suffering in the world?’ The problem of suffering is more than existential. It tests the very core of our faith. "Something is wrong," critics of religion tell us. "Either God is not loving and merciful. Or, he does not have the power to control what he created."

What Jesus is actually doing is to loosen the idea of there being cause and effect between actions and consequences. Ultimately, Jesus implied, people cannot read the mind of God and understand his sense of justice. Nor should they try. Both the good and the evil suffer. God is God. His ways are mysterious and we can not know them. It is an exciting, confusing, threatening idea that our good behaviour can not earn us a blessing and our bad behaviour is not automatically going to be punished. We like to feel that there is something we can do and something that we can contribute to a situation (We script ourselves in at the centre of the picture: assume that if someone can’t see us it must be something we have done & superstition – if we are on a car journey and say that ‘it is going well’ imagine that we are then bound to run into roadworks)

“No,” he tells the crowd, “ there is no connection between the suffering and the sin; terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame – never mind that what are you going to do about it! Don’t let that stop you from doing what you are doing”.  The second part of this passage appears more tongue in cheek rather than accusatory. (If you stand still then you get s**t thrown over you). Jesus is not offering protection but salvation. It is a new world of faith in God. No situation is beyond redemption but that does not mean that God will protect people from themselves and the responsibility for the life choices they have to make. Jesus challenges those listening to give up (repent) on their illusion that they can protect themselves by righteous living rather than by trusting in God - life is fragile and vulnerable and things do go wrong. However that is no more their fault than a run of good luck might be because of something they have done. The Bible is not just a relationship where a person believes in God.  God believes in the person. There is always this temptation for people to believe that they have all the time in the world, whereas the truth of it is that they do not.  There will eventually be an end to the gardener's patience over a tree that is producing no fruit. You have only a life, and the choice of how you are going to live it must be made."