What Will You Do?

Priest and teacher Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of the young mother she met in the pediatric surgery waiting room of the hospital where she was a chaplain.1 Earlier in the week, the woman’s little daughter was playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time the mother found her, the child could no longer see. When doctors did a CAT scan at the hospital, they discovered that a large tumor was pressed against the child’s optic nerve. They scheduled the surgery as soon as possible. The day of the surgery Taylor found the mother in the waiting room. An ashtray full of cigarettes stood beside the mother’s chair. Taylor sat down beside her. After a little bit of small talk, the mother blurted out, “It’s my punishment, for smoking these damned cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.” She began to cry and then wailed, “Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m going to kill my own child.”

Have you ever said anything like that? Have you ever blamed yourself for something that happened to someone else? Why do bad things happen? Why does tragedy strike us? Why do innocent and good people especially seem to get struck down? Does God punish people for the sins of others, as the young mother thought? These are just the questions put to Jesus by those who listened to his teaching. “What about those innocent Galileans, Rabbi?”

These are age-old questions. We ask ourselves the same questions whenever disaster strikes. Is this God’s judgment on me, on us? Whose fault was it? Why did it happen? Even today, when disaster strikes, there’s always someone who stands up and declares that the disaster is God’s punishment on gays, or feminists, or the “party culture” of New Orleans. Would Jesus agree with that judgement?

There is a strand of Scripture that would agree with that judgment. Certain verses in Deuteronomy and Proverbs support the notion that people get what they deserve. We find it easy to believe that. We say, “If she hadn’t been in the passing lane, the drunk driver would not have hit her.” Maybe. But Scripture also reminds us that the innocent suffer and the guilty prosper. The psalms and the book of Ecclesiastes are filled with laments for the suffering of the innocent. And we can easily believe that too. The residents of the Lower Ninth ward in New Orleans might have read some of those psalms, for they did nothing to bring catastrophe on themselves when Katrina struck, while government officials stood by, slow to recognize their plight. While we might lay sin at the door of the gunman, the twenty children and six adults who died in Newtown, CT, like the Galileans in today’s gospel, did absolutely nothing to bring about their tragic deaths.

In an attempt to understand disasters, sometimes people, especially we religious people, offer another explanation: suffering is part of God’s plan. Would you agree? Is that what your experience tells you? One woman suffers a miscarriage at twenty weeks, while another, who did exactly what the first woman did, delivers a healthy full-term child. Did God really “want another angel in heaven?” Is it really the case that “God won’t send us more than we can bear?” Perhaps the people querying Jesus were also asking this question: did God intentionally cause these disasters?

Contrary to all our expectations, in Luke’s telling of this encounter, Jesus does not answer the question put to him. That’s because ultimately, there is no answer to these questions. While Jesus doesn’t rebuke his questioners, neither does he tell them that the Galileans killed by Pilate – and there is historical evidence that something like this really did happen – or that those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them deserved what happened to them. He doesn’t tell them that their deaths were all part of God’s plan. Instead, he reminds all his followers – and by extension us – that life is precarious, that we cannot claim to know the cause of suffering, that we cannot control the events in our lives, and that we cannot smugly assume that we are immune from disaster – even if we say our prayers every day, worship regularly, and give generously. Even if we take every precaution, there are still abusive Roman soldiers in the world. Even if we drive defensively, the drunk driver can still cross over into our lane and crash into us. There are no guarantees in life. The best we can do, Jesus reminds us, is continually and intentionally try to orient our lives towards God and do our best to overcome our own sins and shortcomings. “Look at your own life,” Jesus in effect tells his hearers. “Reflect on how you are living, but don’t think you’re immune from disaster.”

But Jesus doesn’t stop with that admonition. Jesus adds one more piece to his call for reorientation and self-examination. To what could be a bleak message of despair, Jesus adds a message of reassurance and hope. Don’t we hear it in the parable that follows his warning? A fig tree has yet to produce the expected fruit. The gardener appeals to the owner for the tree to get another chance. Perhaps with a new trench for better water, or with extra fertilizer, the tree will produce the fruit it was meant to produce. We do face judgement, Jesus tells his hearers, and the opportunity for repentance is time-limited. But, the parable reassures us, God’s judgment is never separated from God’s mercy. As we might expect from Luke, Jesus’ parable reminds us of divine compassion, reassuring us of the abundant grace that is available to us – if we are willing to accept it while we still can.

So what does all this mean to us? I’d like to suggest three things we need to hear in this Gospel reading. The first is this: we are called to heed the warning in Jesus’ words. In this Lenten season especially, hear again his warning that, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Whoever we are, we do face God’s judgment. Even if we are absolutely certain that we follow the law, even if we diligently engage in every appropriate spiritual practice, we can never be smug or arrogant, we can never think that therefore we can avoid tragedy or bypass God’s judgment. High on the center of the doorway of the south transept of the great cathedral in Chartres in France is a magnificent sculpture of Christ sitting in judgement at the end of time. While we no longer live in the mindset that would easily understand the importance of that image for our own lives, even we must remember that what we do with our lives has consequences.

Second, we are to hear the words in the parable warning us that our time to reorient our lives toward the Holy One is short: the gardener says, “Sir, let it alone for one more year.” We are called to be intentional about lives now, we are called to engage now in the self-examination that Lent calls for, not at some distant time in the future. Can we be sure that we even have a future? An old rabbi told his disciples, “You should repent the day before you die.” “But, Rabbi,” replied the disciples, “how can we know when that day is?” “Exactly,” said the rabbi, “that is why you must repent every day of your life.”

But third, Jesus never calls us to despair. Ultimately, Jesus calls us to trust and hope that God is at work in our lives. We are called to hear, and hear again, that God hears us when we call, that God upholds us and provides the hand to which we can cling, even when tragedy strikes, and that God always wants to nurture us so that we can bear good fruit.

How are we living our lives? Even though it’s still cold out there, I invite you to hear and meditate on that question through the words of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day.”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Know that you have been gifted with an eye blink of time. Even when bad things happen, commit to living in that eye blink with your hearts and minds turned towards God. Trust that God is at work in your life. Be ever open to the leading of the Spirit.

1. “Life-Giving Fear,” Christian Century, March 4, 1998, p. 229.