Judgment and Mercy

Third Sunday in Lent, Luke 13:1-9

“If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

 – Luke 13:9

 For several years I served as associate pastor of a congregation in Wichita, Kansas. One spring season, and over a period of several days, I visited in the hospital with church members who were the parents and grandparents of a 15-year old girl struck by lightning.  When the lightning bolt came, the girl was hugging her boyfriend as they said good-bye in a library parking lot.  Paramedics found metal from a large belt buckle fused into the skin of both young people.  Mercifully, the boy was killed immediately.  The girl went through the amputation of both legs, before succumbing to death a week later. 

This is one of several horrific dramas in which, as a pastor, I’ve been involved in either deeply or at least providing support at the edges. A family and congregation does what is needed to make it through care at time of death and the funeral. In the weeks that follow, it’s not unusual for at least a few people to wonder, “If such terrible things can happen, even to God’s people, then what is the point of faith?”  

A similar question helped form the context for the events recorded in today’s gospel reading. During Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, he listens to a group analyzing tragic news. The first report was about the murder of some Jews from the north who had traveled to Jerusalem to worship at the temple.  Probably they were zealots advocating revolt from the empire, and for that reason, the Roman governor ordered their execution.  The second report was about a structural collapse near the Pool of Siloam, which was located in a narrow valley in the extreme southeastern corner of the old city.  In Jesus’ time sick people were brought to the pool because of a belief in the water’s magical healing quality.  One day, from a ridge overlooking this pool, a tower fell, and eighteen people were killed.  Whatever the particular circumstances were, many people believed that any such incidents were punishment for sin. Jesus overheard such thoughts, or perhaps someone offered this interpretation to him.

There always have been people who approach religion as a system of rewards and punishments.  They believe that health and prosperity flow directly from obedience to God.  Conversely, they believe that illness and tragedy are the result of disobedience, and represent the punishment of God.

The Book of Job, for more than 1,000 years before Jesus’ time, contains an alternative viewpoint.  Job gives us an example of a person with deep faith who experiences terrible tragedy and evil.  In Luke 13, Jesus’ offers a similar message: tragedy experienced is not always proportional to sin committed. 

Jesus suggests that even the innocent face evil and suffering.  A lethal virus may attach itself to the cells of an otherwise healthy person.  A structure intended to provide shelter may become a death trap when struck by enemy missiles.  Lightning may strike right where someone is standing.  All of these things may happen without any regard for the relative goodness or badness of the people affected.

Jesus spends little time lamenting this state of affairs.  He shifts the focus from tragedy to the state of the debaters’ souls.  He suggests that given the moral track record of his listeners, they could make better use of their time in self-examination.  Jesus challenges his hearers to avoid unproductive speculation about evil they cannot control, and instead do something to remedy the evil they can control.

Though tragedy and suffering deserve our compassionate response, that is not the point of this text.  Rather, Jesus says that suffering sometimes functions as a convenient excuse for those who prefer to remain distant from God.  Tragedy can be a shield for those who would rather not function in light of God’s claim upon their lives.

Novelist Annie Dillard writes about the time in her teen years when this happened to her.  “I quit the church.  I wrote the minister a fierce letter.  “The associate minister of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Dr. Blackwood, and I had a cordial meeting in his office.  He was an experienced, calm man in a three-piece suit; he had a mustache and wore glasses …. I had already written a paper on the Book of Job ….  If the all-powerful creator directs the world, then why all this suffering?  Why did the innocents die in the camps, and why do they starve in the cities and farms?[1] In the mind of sixteen-year-old Annie Dillard, the problem of suffering was too much, and drove her from the Church.  

I’m more fascinated by folks who look at suffering, and instead of losing faith, are driven closer to God. One such person was J. Christian Beker, one of my New Testament professors at Princeton Seminary.  Briefly, Beker was a young man when he was conscripted in Holland by the Nazis, and sent away to work as a slave in a munitions factory. He contracted typhus, and while deliriously ill, watched from a window as the city was bombed. It was at this trying hour that Beker had his Damascus-Road experience, and Jesus spoke to him. With such large-scale suffering and evil illumined by explosive fire, Beker saw that beyond it, God was the most real and true entity in which to put his trust

One of the lessons, I think, of these two approaches to suffering, is that we need to be careful that the suffering of others doesn’t become a convenient excuse for denying God’s existence or neglecting God’s call to us.  Sometimes, like Professor Beker, the people who are suffering will tell you the same thing. Don’t let suffering distract you from God, but rather draw you toward God . This is something like the word of Jesus to those who examined the causes of suffering out there, without taking time look inward at the state of their souls.  “Time is short!  Examine your life!  Come back to God!”

Commentator Edward Sweitzer says this passage from Luke reveals something to us about a debate within the mind of God.  It is a debate between divine judgment and divine mercy, a debate between a God who gives us what we deserve (cut down the tree!), and offers us what we do not deserve (give the tree more time!).”[2]  

While contemplating this text featuring a tree, I’ve also been contemplating a tree on a daily basis.  Sandy Stuart and I have had some conversations about the river birch in her back yard, and the river birch in my front yard. Mine has been trimmed back at least three times, and each time comes back stronger than ever, shedding a landscape-waste bag of branches per week. I finally convinced Therese that it was time to end the near-constant state of clean-up. I signed the tree-removal proposal, and tomorrow, the crew is supposed to arrive to take the tree down, then grind the stump. I feel the emotional struggle, on the one hand, wanting to preserve the old friend that has shaded our front yard, on the other hand, wanting to decisively end the drudgery of weekly cleanup.

My ambivalence about the tree helps me hear both voices in the gospel text, the voice of mercy and the voice of judgment. We are listening in to a struggle deep within the very heart of God about us, and about the fate of all humankind in this increasingly over-populated, war-mongering, dangerous world.  Jesus calls us to repent, and to change course, to live faithfully, and in ways that make for peace. Meanwhile, our lives hang in the balance between tomorrow’s judgment, and the patient, gracious mercy of God.  

NOTES

[1] Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

[2] Sweitzer’s commentary is summarized by William Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 45.

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