Lent 3
Jesus’ words in the gospel sound difficult. ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’ Jesus is adamant that these events are not punishments from God.
As we hear this we have in mind the fifty worshippers in Christchurch who perished in a hail of bullets. We have in mind those in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe drowned by storm floods.
Jesus says something similar to this at his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. When a disciple draws a sword, Jesus says, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” “You will all perish as they did.” In other words: If you think that Jesus wants us to kill the bad guys in order to bring God’s punishment upon them, then you’re wrong. If you don’t repent, if you don’t turn to a different way of thinking and doing things, then you will die in that same way. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
But Jesus even extends this point about death from this instance of violent death to one of accidental death. It’s not just about death involving human violence. The same point can be made about accidental deaths, like a tower falling over and killing people, or a deadly tornado, or catching AIDS. If we see these things as punishments from God, and if we don’t repent, if we don’t turn to another way of thinking, then we will die under the delusion of that same way of thinking. We will die thinking that God is punishing us. “We will all perish just as they did.” We will die believing in a false God, We will die believing in a false notion of what God is like. That is what Jesus is saying.
For Jesus came to show us that God absolutely does not bring death to punish sinners. Jesus is quite clear that death was not the invention of an angry god who decided to punish Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Jesus does not believe that myth, because he knows his father is not like that.
Quite the opposite, Jesus took our human form of punishment upon himself to show us the foolishness of such things. Our thoughts and ways may be tied to death, but, when God raises Jesus from the dead, God shows us once and for all that God is all about life, not death. God is about forgiveness, not punishment. God is about blessings, not curses.
The longest story we have in the gospels explaining this in great detail is the healing of the man who was born blind in John’s gospel. It takes the whole 40 verses of chapter 9, and it begins with a question. “Seeing the man, Jesus’ disciples ask ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ‘Neither’ says Jesus.
It is very difficult for us to imagine the huge change of perception underway here. It is nothing less than a change of gods, a conversion, because the people Jesus is talking to have not been listening to the true God’s words of life. It is as a change from a god who is both good and bad, who both loves and punishes, to a perception of God who is only love, in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). Jesus is beginning to teach this to his disciples here, but it will remain incomprehensible to them until after the resurrection.
I’m afraid there are people, many evangelicals among them, who just don’t get this. There is this tendency in Lenten piety to focus on the cross and say things like ‘Jesus died for me.’ It’s a kind of romanticising of death like the story of Romeo and Juliet where the couple, stupidly and accidently, both of them end up dead. A far better love story is that of my next door neighbour’s parents who loved each other for 5 years before marriage and then 69 years after, celebrating life and love together and not giving up on each other in all of those years. Surely this is a greater love than that of Romeo and Juliet, which was a mere infatuation lasting little longer than the duration of Shakespeare’s play. The point of the gospel story is the resurrection. ‘They cut me down and I leapt up high, I am the life that’ll never, never die.’
St. Paul, in today’s epistle. Is mistaken when he quotes from a story of the Exodus, “‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.’ We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.’” God doesn’t punish people like that, not even idolaters. If God punished all sexual immorality the world’s population would be considerably reduced, to say the least.
When they ask Jesus about the resurrection, with that trick question about the woman who marries seven brothers in turn, Jesus says ‘But concerning the dead rising, have you not read about the burning bush in the book of Moses, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”
He is god to the living, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, of 50 worshippers shot down in Christchurch, of people in Mozambique swept away by a hurricane. They are not lost. In the words of Richard Baxter’s hymn
As for my friends, they are not lost;
The several vessels of Thy fleet,
Though parted now, by tempests tossed,
Shall safely in the haven meet.
When the Christian Church divided at the great schism a thousand years ago western Christianity made a great mistake, following Anselm and all the rest. In his question ‘Why did God become man’ his answer focussed on Jesus’ death. But the answer is that God became man to demonstrate that for all humanity there is life beyond death. Surely today’s gospel should make us suspicious of seeing meaning in death, whether it is caused by deliberate wickedness or simply the result of an accident. It follows from the persistent Christian myth that this is not the world which God made, but a world which Adam and Eve broke. That is plain nonsense. This is, Jesus says, the world God made in which God does not intervene, to throw people out of a mythical garden of eden, to stop deliberate acts of wickedness, or to divert accidents. God made a real world in which we are responsible for our actions.
This Lenten season we once again have the opportunity to repent, so that we will not perish like others who died enslaved to death. Eternal life begins now when we embrace that love which breaks into our romance with death. It empowers us to live anew today, because we are forgiven. Let us listen and live. Let us repent once again this Lent, so that we will be ready to truly hear and celebrate those words of eternal life that we proclaim on Easter. Amen