Lent 3

Reformation, Media

Imagine for a moment that Jesus is watching television with his twelve disciples. They're on furlough from teaching and healing, taking it easy in the living room of Peter's mother-in-law, doing a little mindless channel surfing. Maybe they catch a little of an NCAA Tournament game between Duke and North Carolina in March Madness. These are guys, you know, just relaxing from a demanding schedule. 

But after the game the evening news comes on. They put down the popcorn and listen intently to the day's tragedies. One disciple says, "Hey, Jesus, that horrible bombing over on the West Bank where that guy drove a bus into a crowd of people. Do you think that because these Palestinians suffered in this way they were worse sinners than the rest?" It was a popular question in Jesus' day. Still is. If something bad happened, it must have been for a reason. Jesus scratches his beard for a moment. "No, they didn't die because of anything they did. It was a purely random thing. But let me tell you something. Unless you guys clean up your acts, you'll die just as tragically." 

There is a low murmur in the room. The disciples look at each other like Jesus has missed his morning medication. As two begin to leave, one for the bathroom and the other for the kitchen, the newscaster reports another catastrophe, this one halfway across the world. Jesus pipes up this time. "Hey, guys," he says, "those people over in Indonesia on the 747 that  crashed, do you think they were worse sinners than others who were flying?  He waits for his question to sink in. "No, the tragedy had nothing to do with their morals. Those people just were in the wrong plane at the wrong time." The disciples breathe a sigh of relief, gladdened to know that God doesn't work that way. But then Jesus looks at them all. "Let me tell you something, though. Unless you people start going in the right direction, you will share a similar fate as those Indonesians and it will seem like a plane crash that crushes the life out of you." I believe somebody got up and changed the channel after that. 

Am I getting these details right? For my money, this story of Jesus and the day's headlines is as strange and befuddling as any in the Gospels. What was Jesus thinking? His followers were clearly concerned about the news events of the day. Both reports are about atrocities visited upon innocents. One news story describes a case of evil devised by intentional malice. Pilate gruesomely kills some Galileans as they knelt at worship. The other story describes suffering by random chance. Eighteen people over near the pool of Siloam are crushed because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. These two headlines pretty much cover the waterfront of any modern headline that deals with suffering. Any sad news report. A bad person caused it or someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- malice or chance, take your pick. 

But watch what Jesus does. He doesn’t agree with those who want to say bad things happen only to bad people. "No, I tell you, it doesn't work that way," he says. But neither will Jesus spend much time with the faith-shaking, all-time favorite question of "enlightened" Christians. Why do bad things happen to good people? I get asked that all the time. In fact, I ask it all the time myself. We pick up the newspaper, listen to the evening news where 8 kids and an adult are killed in a fire, and ask, Where is God? Could God not have prevented this tragedy? Was God asleep or something? And our real unspoken question is perhaps this: Does God even act in the world today at all? Is this whole life simply an exercise in randomness? Theologians today say that the number one question facing young people in this country is not atheism, whether or not God exists, but rather the question of meaninglessness, whether there's any real purpose to anything at all. 

It's rather peculiar that Jesus doesn't really tackle our favorite questions in this story. He doesn't go there, even though he could have, even though we wish he would indulge us at least for a moment. Here's a perfect opportunity to talk about the very thing that troubles us: Where is God? Why doesn't God do something? Endlessly interesting questions for most of us. Instead, Jesus does a rather shocking thing. 

They are all sitting around watching the evening news, stories of malice, stories of chance, and Jesus says the unthinkable. "No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." Jesus, Mr. Compassion, said that. The gentle man who frolicked with children and hugged lepers. "Turn yourself around or someday you can count on a building collapsing on you on the way to work." What is that, anyway?

What is Jesus doing here? I'll tell you what he's doing. He is slyly shifting the conversation away from God's responsibility and toward us. We love the God question. Where was God when this happened? It may be our all-time favorite philosophical question. One of the real classics. Not only that, it is also quite easy to watch the evening news and point out examples of really evil people and really evil events. The nation breathed easier, for example, when Timothy McVeigh was finally executed -- one less atrocious human being in the world. It's easy to spot people like him. We are far less comfortable, however, discussing our own role in the suffering and injustice of this world. 

And we may say to Jesus, "Look, I never slit anybody's throat. I never designed a shoddily constructed building that collapsed on anybody." And you would be right. But Jesus is saying today, at least in part, that the headlines that grab our attention and raise our moral revulsion can become a smokescreen for the more subtle sin that is in each of us. And who is to say that the collective sin of a whole nation of nice, but comfortable people does not do more damage -- more damage to the ecosystem, more damage to the hope of eradicating global poverty, and more damage to the widening racial divisions in our country than a boatload of evil villains and a century's worth of natural disasters? 

It is far easier, you see, to locate evil in somebody or something else rather than in ourselves. Far easier to rant and rave at the evening news rather than ask what I'm going to do about that or consider how the way I now live may, in fact, be contributing to the problem. 

Today Jesus will not allow his followers to blame others or God. He turns their philosophical gymnastics squarely back on them.  Jim Wallis, one of the founding members of the "Sojourners" community in Washington, D.C., writes these pointed words:

Many think conversion is only for nonbelievers, but the Bible sees conversion as also necessary for the erring believer, the lukewarm community of faith, the people of God who have fallen into disobedience and idolatry ..”

That’s why the parable of the fig tree is so profound – The only “sin” of the fig tree is that it was doing nothing.  It was supposed to bear fruit, but it was simply depleting the soil without bearing any fruit. 

Jesus knows something that we often forget. It isn't the headlines that define the world's problems. It's us. We're all the problem. "For three years I've come looking for fruit on this tree, and still I find none." 

It’s like this poem by Toyohiko Kagawa:

I read
In a book
That a man called
Christ
Went about doing good.
It is very disconcerting to me
That I am so easily
Satisfied
With just
Going about.

Ultimately, our obsession with headlines is just a diversion from the real territory Jesus wants to enter. There are bloody tragedies every day across our country and world. I don't deny that. But Jesus turns the focus back to his followers – those still living, and asks that they look at their own lives.  If the news tells us anything, it tells us that life is uncertain, at any moment the ax can fall. 

But the parable doesn’t end there.  Jesus gives this hopeful conclusion – There is still time.  If you have things you would like to do, if you have been spending time and money and effort on things that don’t satisfy, there is still time to change.  Let it alone for another year, let me dig around it and put manure on it and see if it will bear fruit. 

Jesus is more interested in you and your life than he is in the evening news because he knows that more fruit will be harvested from people’s changed and purposeful lives than from a lifetime of watching the sensational stories on the evening news.  And for Jesus, those changed lives would really be Daylight Savings Time.