Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. —Luke 13:3
IA. Bad Things, Good People, OT
We’ve all heard
the question, Why do bad things happen to
good people? If we don’t ask it ourselves, we certainly hear it from others.
Many people who think they’ve come up with the correct answer to that question
seem to think that they’re the first person who’s ever given it much thought.
But the reality is that it’s one of the major themes of the Bible. And though
the Bible doesn’t speak with one voice on this issue, it does lean in one
direction—and the answer it gives is not the easy answer.
If we look for the answer in the Bible, one of the things we’ll see is that obedience to God’s law is rewarded with material blessings or good health. The flipside of that, naturally, is that disobedience is punished. There’s even a class of psalms called imprecatory psalms that call upon God to come down hard on sinners. I think this way of thinking is summed up in the 58th Psalm which calls on God to do horrible things to to evil people. The last verse tries to reason with God, saying, if you do these things, then “people will say, ‘Surely there’s a reward for the righteous; surely there is a God who judges on earth.’”
If we look for the answer in the Bible, one of the things we’ll see is that obedience to God’s law is rewarded with material blessings or good health. The flipside of that, naturally, is that disobedience is punished. There’s even a class of psalms called imprecatory psalms that call upon God to come down hard on sinners. I think this way of thinking is summed up in the 58th Psalm which calls on God to do horrible things to to evil people. The last verse tries to reason with God, saying, if you do these things, then “people will say, ‘Surely there’s a reward for the righteous; surely there is a God who judges on earth.’”
But
there’s another voice that says something very different. One of the main
places you’ll hear this voice is in the Book of Job—a section of the Bible that
deals almost exclusively with the question, Why
did bad things happen to this good person? And the answer is hardly
satisfying. Job and his friends all try their hands at answering the question,
and all of them are wrong. God’s answer is simply that God is sovereign and
that God is wise. No offense, Bible, but I could’ve come up with that one. I
was really hoping for something a bit more satisfying.
IB. Bad Things, Good People, NT
Which
brings us to the New Testament and to Jesus. In this morning’s passage in Luke
it appears that Jesus confronts the question without any prompting from those
around him. Though it’s also possible that he is responding to a question that
somebody asked.
Either
way, he approaches the question from the standpoint of current events. He
starts talking about some of his fellow Galileans who had made their obligatory
pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem only to be murdered by a tyrannical
foreign governor. Apparently Galilee was seen by Rome as a hotbed of rebellion,
and most of those who paid the price were probably entirely innocent of the
crime of insurrection. “Do you think the ones who were killed were the worst of
the Galileans who’d gone to Jerusalem?” Jesus asked.
He didn’t leave it
there, however. The violence against the Galileans was targeted and
intentional. But that’s not the only kind of bad thing that can happen to
innocent victims. What about those who were killed when a tower fell on them?
These deaths were clearly unintentional. They may have happened because of
human error, but the victims hadn’t been targeted.
And so the first
thing Jesus does is to let his listeners out of the frying pan, but they end up
in the fire. Evil people do evil things to people who don’t deserve it. But
just in case you were willing to say that maybe they did deserve it—maybe those
Galileans really were rebels—that’s not the only kind of disaster. There’s also
the natural kind, or the kind doesn’t target anybody—like a falling tower.
Pilate is the frying pan, but the tower of Siloam is the fire.
II. Frying Pan & Fire
Two thousand years
later, we still have both the frying pan and the fire. We’re only in the second
month of 2016, but already this year we have seen dozens of mass shootings in
this country alone. None of the shooting victims deserved to be shot. And yet there
they lie: injured or dead, victims of misdirected hatred and government
neglect. That’s the frying pan. Syria is also a frying pan. As is every other
place where human intention results in senseless violence and death.
Escaping the
frying pan often only brings us into the fire, however: storms at sea,
tornadoes at home, collapsing buildings, deadly epidemics. Bad things are not
limited to human intention. Some bad things are forces of nature, and others
are human accidents or the lack of planning.
After nearly every
massacre or disaster, there’s always a call for blame. While individuals might
ask, “What did I do to deserve this?” when something bad happens, in a much
more sinister way, there are always those on the outside who are quick to
assign blame. I say sinister, because such words are often spoken in the Name
of of the very Christ who refused to blame victims for the calamity that arises
against them.
And so when Jesus
moves from Pilate and the Galileans to the tower of Siloam, he’s basically
pulling the carpet out from under all his listeners. “None of you are safe,” he
seems to be telling them; “anytime, anywhere, from every quarter, bad things
happen. And you know what? The people they happen to are no worse than anybody
else; they’re not being punished for something they did.”
III. Life Before Death
Is there comfort
in the words of Jesus? Well, yes, I think there is. To be relieved of
self-recrimination when something bad happens is an important step in healing.
To know that the Bible can speak with a very loud voice when it tells us about
bad things happening. They don’t just happen to bad people. And on the
flipside, good things don’t just happen to good people; and so we can’t measure
a person’s goodness by how rich or healthy they are. This will always be an
aspect of life we don’t understand. Call it chance or fate, coincidence or
providence, there are a lot of things that are outside our control.
On the surface, it
sounds as if he is, in fact, blaming misfortune on sin. But is he really
saying, “They didn’t repent, so they died”? Both the context and the language
actually suggest otherwise.
One possibility is
that Jesus is actually making this an issue not of life or death, but of life after
death. And I won’t discount that possibility completely. Jesus is definitely
not saying that repentance is a charm against dying. But it is possible that
he’s saying that unless we repent, we’ll die in our sins and be forever
separated from God.
But there’s yet
another possibility, and it’s the one that I prefer. I don’t hear Jesus saying that
it’s an issue of life or death; and I
think it’s possible that he’s not even talking about life after death. But what he could be speaking of here in the opening
verses of Luke 13 is life before death. So think of him saying
it like this: Yes, these people’s lives
were all suddenly wiped away, and unless you turn your lives around, you’re
going to be just like they were when you die.
In so many other
places, we see Jesus teaching people to live for the moment, to make peace, to
embrace the outsider, not to fear suffering or even death. If those are the
values he stood for, then why would we suddenly expect him to preach a
different gospel here in this story? Repentance, therefore, isn’t about
wallowing in your sins so you won’t go to hell when you die. Though I won’t
totally separate repentance from the issue of life after death, I do think that
it’s much more about life before death. Jesus spent his ministry teaching
people to live before they went to the grave; to change direction so that their
lives would have meaning here and now, and not just in the hereafter.
Conclusion: Day & Night
Though I wish I’d
been able in this sermon to give the definitive answer to the question, Why do bad things happen to good people?
all I’ve really done is muddy the waters. But, quite frankly, that says a lot
more about Jesus than it does about me. Humans try to give easy answers to
difficult questions. We come up with formulas that we can remember and
solutions that make our lives easy. We like things to be black and white.
So let’s not think
of the rules of our faith as black and white. Let’s think of them as day and
night. And you know what happens when night merges with day? Dawn, that’s what
happens. And when day merges with night, there’s dusk. Instead of times of
confusion, sunrise and sunset are instances of extreme beauty; they are moments
of contemplation when we’re alone, or occasions for sharing something wonderful
with someone else if we’re not alone. When the Bible leads us into these times
when one way of thinking butts up against another, let’s not bemoan the
confusion but praise the beauty; let’s not shut our mind to the gray area, but
embrace the dusk or think about the dawn.
I suspect we’ll
never find a good answer in this life to the question of why bad things happen
to good people… or why good things happen to bad people. But I think Jesus did
an awful lot to lead us away from judging people as good or bad, and the gospel
of Christ helps us to see the good in bad things and even the pitfalls in good
things. Instead of asking for easy answers, let’s use our questions as
occasions for meditation and even praise.
And so, one more
time, unless we change the direction of our lives, we may go to the grave
having never lived. Let’s think about what that statement means…
—©2016 Sam L. Greening, Jr.
