THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
One of the ugliest sounds in Christendom is the smug chortle of the self-satisfied.
“God helps those who help themselves”. “I’ve done very well for myself and I thank God for smiling on my efforts”. “I thank God that I am not as other men.”
I hope we have all made enough spiritual progress through the ups and downs of life by now to have learned that material success is not necessarily - indeed not very likely to be - a sign of God’s special favour. The rich, famous and successful need to be particularly on their guard not to lose their very souls through greed, pride and vanity.
As S.Paul warns,: “If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.”
But in Luke 13.1-9, Jesus asks us to look at the other side of the coin: the equally false and dangerous idea which people for some reason cling on to: namely that those who come a cropper in life must have done something to deserve it.
The earliest and most obvious example is the book of Job in the Old Testament - a fictional history of a heap of disasters and suffering piled on one innocent and thoroughly good and decent man which would be funny if it were not so tragic.
The point of the story is that Job’s so-called friends, his comforters, have completely missed the point. One after another, all they can say is “Look, dash it all, come off it old chap, you must have done something wrong to deserve all this - you must have some skeleton in the closet which nobody knows about.
But he hasn’t. And in the end, the twist is that there really is no pat explanation after all to the problem of suffering.
God finally reacts to Job’s complaints and questions by appearing at the end of the story and giving voice.
But all God really says in effect is what He said to Moses - “I am who I am.” I am your God. I created the entire universe. Your little individual life, whether your little, individual experiences are for better or worse, pales into insignificance. My purposes and plans are an utter mystery to you, far beyond your comprehension. So just knuckle down and take the rough with the smooth.
The book of Job has a rather ridiculous happy ending tacked on - but its overall message remains bleak: God will not explain or justify what happens to us and we just have to lump it. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Well, perhaps that’s just the Old Testament for you.
Jesus can certainly do a bit better for us. He reveals, in the pages of the New Testament, a whole new face of God, a God who does care passionately about the detail of the lives of each and every one of His children.
I’m afraid that doesn’t mean a God who will intervene like a fairy godmother with a wand to magic the pain away. He’s not going to strike the Satanic Putin down with a thunderbolt to win the war in Ukraine for us. We had to slog through 5 years of death and destruction to get rid of Hitler.
But it does mean a God who will weep over our suffering and share it with us and help us try to bring the best outcome from it.
We hear about two small groups of Christ’s fellow countrymen:
One lot were murdered by the governor Pontius Pilate and the other lot were casualties of a tragic accident when a tower collapsed.
So here we have some victims of human wickedness and some victims of a natural disaster. Just as we have plenty of each category these days.
Were the victims of Herod or the tower any more guilty of sin than the rest of us because they suffered this fate? Were they being singled out for punishment in suffering this fate?
No. Of course not, says Jesus. They were not, I tell you.
And, you know, the irony is that this moral lesson is probably best learned, not by those like Job’s comforters who might point the malicious finger of accusation, but by the very victims of the suffering themselves.
I’m suddenly thinking of the pastoral visits I’ve made in my 25 years of ministry to the prematurely dying, who are torturing themselves by genuinely believing that they must be being punished for something they have done to displease God.
And I try to tell them the good news of Jesus Christ.
Not just, as with Job, that, no, they mustn’t blame themselves because God is above that sort of vindictiveness - He’s the remote creator we cannot fathom, the mysterious great “I am”.
No. Much much more than that - God loves them and cares desperately about them and feels for them and suffers with them and wants the best result for them through the skills of doctors and nurses and the faithful patience of friends and family, whether that best result be recovery or whether it be a peaceful early death and the onward journey of the soul.
More guilty of some sin than the rest of us? They were not, I tell you says Jesus.
Then He goes on to say No, but unless you repent, you will all perish.
Is this a sting in the tail?
Well, on one level you can see what He was getting at for the benefit of His original hearers.
You Israelites, wake up for goodness’ sake, before it’s too late. Don’t be so smug. Don’t point at the Galileans whom Pilate executed or who fell off the tower and say “Serves them right” or even, if you want to be more mealy-mouthed, “There but for the grace of God go I”. Nobody is more entitled to God’s grace than anybody else. The point is you’ll all heading for disaster, every man woman and child, because, instead of turning back to God, you think you can take on the Roman empire single handed and you’ll find the Romans are soon going to flatten your precious temple and all Jerusalem with it.
And indeed the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in ad70 is a matter of historical record.
But what matters is what Christ is saying to us.
Suffering is not a mark of guilt or God’s displeasure. But refusal to repent and turn away from sin will be a spiritual disaster for any one of God’s children, irrespective of whether they happen to be suffering or prospering.
If we do not repent, if we do not turn to God and put Him first in our lives and seek to do His will, we are inviting spiritual disaster, cutting ourselves off from His love and sending ourselves to a kind of hell of loneliness and isolation.
When will that disaster, that loneliness and isolation kick in? When will it be too late to repent?
I can’t tell you that. I don’t think anybody can.
But Jesus leaves us with one of the most beautiful and moving metaphors of God’s love in the whole bible.
Your soul is a fig-tree. You have hardened your heart, gone your own way, given two fingers to God and to any poor beggar who needed your help for three years, i.e. you have not borne any spiritual fruit for three years, which could symbolically mean almost a lifetime. “Enough is enough. Put this tree on the bonfire.” Is that what God says? No. Give it another year. You never know. I won’t quite give up hope on it yet.”
If God is so undeservedly patient with us, perhaps we should be that little bit more impatient with ourselves during Lent 2022 to change our ways.
Do good things happen to bad people? Do bad things happen to good people? The answer in both cases is clearly YES. But then that’s not the point. The point is first God’s love and patience, then our repentance and finally God’s forgiveness.