3rd Sunday of Lent

Wallaby Theodicy

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Sunday 23 March, 2025

Luke 13.1-9

Seven or eight years ago, we were driving to Thetford Forest for a day out with the kids. As we were zooming down the A11 just before the Elveden War Memorial I looked out my window and saw a wallaby.  I nearly drove off the road in surprise, and yelped to my family to look —  confusion followed, we had already driven past the spot, and I’m pretty sure Iza still thinks I’m making it up. It was a momentary glimpse, from the corner of my eye, while driving at highway speeds. Perhaps it was an eccentric sheep, or a very large hare.  But I’d like to think it was a wallaby.

The opening of today’s Gospel can feel a little like that, a surprising truth that races past us on the way to the parable of the fig tree.

We’ve a habit of imagining Jesus as, well, a nice guy. Sure, he got up Herod’s nose, and had questionable taste in friends, but really, just a decent chap, talked about love, got along with folks… And if that is our image of Jesus, this passage from Luke is really going to throw us, a theological wallaby on the side of the road.

In response to a basic question of theodicy — why is there evil and suffering, why do terrible things happen,  both human injustice, and unexpected disaster — Jesus seems to offer a surprising response:

Well actually, you’re all horrible people. All of you. Sinners every one.

Ouch.

I’ve got to say, raised in a privileged liberal environment — and, most of the time aside from an hour or so on Sundays, a pretty secular one — I’m much more comfortable with a Jesus whose theodicy is more gentle roe deer than unexpected wallaby, the comforting nice Jesus who says: I feel sad too when bad things happen.  More tea?

Rather than: Think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

Where’s the good news in that?

Well, for one, in a broad swipe that does not compromise with oppression. for without God’s love manifest in God’s judgement,  where is the good news for the oppressed?

Jesus rejects four violent forms of theodicy:

That suffering is proportional to sinfulness.

That tragedy is a sure sign of God’s judgment.

That bad things happen only to bad people.

That we have the right to make such judgments.

To each of these assumptions, Jesus says, no.

These are forms of spiritual rubbernecking, smug drivers crowing over someone else’s misfortune — and they are also forms of moral cowardice,  victim-blaming created to keep suffering and fear at arm’s length.

It’s the sort of attitude that makes actions like the proposed disability benefit cuts more politically palatable — someone who is visibly suffering must somehow be bad, and therefore less-than, because thinking so helps us pretend suffering might not happen to those of us temporarily able-bodied.

Instead of a false prosperity Gospel, aping faith for riches, Jesus reminds the crowd that the very frailty of the human condition even when seen in the lives of others is a clarion call to repentance in our own lives.  So there’s one piece of good news in Jesus’ words — he will not side with oppression, he will not side with fear,  he will not side with moral cowardice.

And there’s more good news hidden in this Gospel. It’s in the doctrine of grace at the heart of Jesus’ words when he calls the crowd to repentance.  Grace to know that, sinners every last one of us, “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.”[1]

We are all of us broken, all of us in desperate need of repentance and salvation. A stumbling block and foolishness to the rest of the world, but we know that truth for freedom  — we cannot pull ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps, we are wholly and entirely dependent on God, who loves us perfectly. And until we recognise our own sinfulness, we are trapped by sin. Yet as soon as we see our sin and turn from it and turn to Christ, we are set free to live, to bear fruit worthy of repentance.

And here we are come to the third offering of Good News  which Luke has hidden in this story. Luke tells stories of victims lifted up and dashed to the ground,  stories of sacrifice and blood and death, in Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem, where Jesus had already set his face; Jerusalem, to which Luke tells us Jesus was already travelling for that final time. Jerusalem, where the one born without sin would be lifted up; Jerusalem, where Jesus would  make by his one oblation of himself once offered a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.

And there’s the Good News, hiding in plain sight like a wallaby in the fens: It is the good news of Christ, and him crucified.

While the crowds wrung their hands over Pilate’s victims in Jerusalem, Jesus turned his face to that city, to become both victim and redeemer,  to shelter his people once again, that as a mother hen spreads her wings over her chicks, so on the cross he would spread his arms wide to embrace the whole world — in all its brokenness and beauty — sheltering us in his love, and by his death delivering us from death, and in his sacrifice setting us free from sin.

On our Lenten journey, may we too learn to face the truth of God’s judgement and the surprising good news of Christ’s love for us, even as we are, that we might reach out in love, and bear fruit worthy of repentance.

Almighty God,

whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain,

and entered not into glory before he was crucified:

mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross,

may find it none other than the way of life and peace;

Amen. [2]

[1] Collect for the Second Sunday of Lent

[2] Collect for the Third Sunday of Lent