Bible Passage: Luke 13:1-9
Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: March 20, 2022

Bulletin March 20, 2022

Please note the first video is the start of the service. The second video is the main service.

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

Toward the end of last calendar year, the Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 6500 Americans and asked them, “In your own words, why do you think terrible things happen to people through no apparent fault of their own?”  Here is a sampling of some of the responses.  One person said, “The universe is a chaotic mess of random molecules bumping into each other.”  Another responded, “They may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  Another said, “We are made to pay for our parents’ and grandparents’ sins.”  One more.  “The world is overcrowded and nature finds a way to push back.”

Trying to answer that question is nothing new.  The people who come to Jesus in our text are evidently trying to figure it out, too.  They have come to the right place for an answer!  They have come to Jesus.  But Jesus’ answer might not satisfy many.  For Jesus doesn’t really answer “why.”  His answer centers more around answering this question, “So what are YOU going to do when you realize that you are living in a world where tyrants kill and towers fall?”  Answer?  In a World where Tyrants Kill and Towers Fall…Repent!

 Our text begins with some people coming to Jesus and telling him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. (v. 1)  This is the only reference in the Bible to this specific event.  There is no other known reference from secular history of this event, either.  It appears, though, that some people from Galilee had traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem and while offering their sacrifices, Pilate ordered them cut down and killed right there.  Pilate was known for doing this type of thing to “flex Roman muscle” and discourage any Jewish thoughts of revolt.

It’s what Jesus says in reply that is more important.  He says, Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered these things? (v. 2)  And then, never one to shrink from a difficult case, Jesus asks them to think about another one.  Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower in Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse sinners than all the other people living in Jerusalem? (v. 4)  Once again, this is the only reference known about this incident.  Evidently, a tower, perhaps it was one of the watchtowers in the Jerusalem city wall, collapsed and killed eighteen people.

The question Jesus asks twice in this text strikes at a tendency people have.  “Do you suppose these people were worse sinners?”  Many would answer, “Yes!  They must be extra-bad people because this extra-bad thing happened to them.”  Many people believe the organizing principle of the universe is “karma.”  “Karma” holds that if a person does good things, then good things will happen to them; if you do bad things, then bad things will come around to you.  If you are killed because an evil tyrant orders a mass execution, then you must have done something to make you deserving of such an end.  If a tower collapses and you are killed by the rubble, you must have had it coming.

Do you suppose people are asking questions like that today?  “Those people in the Ukraine, do you think God is punishing them for something?”  “Those people who died of COVID over the last two years, do you think they were getting pay-back for the bad they had done?”

In our text Jesus is very quick to stop us from going down that path.  After asking the question “do you suppose they are worse sinners” he himself answers, “No!”  We cannot simply, and simplistically, say, “Bad thing = bad person.”    God operates on a different plane.  He says in his Word, My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts. (Isaiah 55)  Suppose we lived next door to Job and we saw all that happened to him and we concluded, “He must have been a bad boy for all that to happen to him,” we would have botched the whole story!  That’s not at all what was going on!

Or think of the life of the apostle Paul.  Suppose we lived in Rome and one day we opened the newspaper and there on page 3 below the fold was the story of a man named Paul, a follower of Jesus Christ, who was beheaded in the Mamartine prison the other day.  We sip our coffee and conclude that Paul is really a bad guy.  I mean, why else would a guy meet such a horrible end?  And we would have missed the “big picture,” that this was the way Jesus finally took this faithful servant home to heaven!

Here’s the other problem with drawing such conclusions.  It betrays a little germ of self-righteousness, doesn’t it?  If that horrible thing has happened to so-and-so because they are such a rotten person, and that thing hasn’t happened to me, then I must be a really good person!  In this world where tyrants kill and towers fall, we must guard against judgmentalism and self-righteousness.

So what shall we do in this world where tyrants kill and towers fall?  Jesus tells us.  Unless you repent, you will all perish too. (v. 3, 5)  We stop trying to analyze everyone else’s sin and figure out what they deserve, and we repent of our own! We stop seeing “sin” as this horrible corruption “out there” in “all those people.”  And we confess sin is a horrible corruption right in here, in this poor, sinful being.

And then we turn our eyes to see Jesus.  And what do we see?  We see what we so desperately need to see!  We look out in this world and we see humanity’s evil. We look to Jesus and we see God’s Son die for humanity’s evil.  We look out on the world and we see death, by accident, by illness, by natural causes.  We look to Jesus and we see the Resurrection and the Life.  We look out in this world and we see sin’s dysfunction and dystopia.  We look at Christ and we see restoration and the hope of glory.  And like a fig tree given one more year of grace to produce fruit, we repent NOW, today.  And in faith, we can live unafraid of hot-headed, unpredictable tyrants, or walking beneath crumbly old towers.

As I worked with this text this week, it occurred to me that the positive way of saying what Jesus says in our text is really John 3:16.  It is really this simple:  In a world where tyrants kill and towers fall, we know God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Amen.

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