Lent 3

Sermon preached by Revd Anna Matthews

On the ground, in big, block Cyrillic letters they’d written the word ‘deti’, children. On Wednesday Russia bombed the theatre building in Mariupol where over 1000 people were sheltering from relentless bombardment. No one knows how many are still trapped.

We call it barbarism, evil, a war crime. Because it is. We don’t think it happened because the terrified Ukrainians sheltering inside were bad people.

‘Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?’ asks Jesus.

This was a popular view at the time. It explained why bad things happened to good people – by saying that they didn’t. Bad things happen to bad people, so if a bad thing happens, it must mean you’re a sinner. It’s tidy. It sets a very public example of sin being punished to deter others from the same path. If you’re good a tower won’t fall on you, and a tyrant won’t make you the victim of his bloody quest for power. As an explanation it satisfies the human need for order and control. But it’s not true.

I still, though, find myself asking questions. Why? How? Why would anyone target sheltering civilians? How did all this happen? And that same urge to order things, to establish some sense of control or explanation, rears its head. I feed it by reading and by listening to podcasts, by trying to inform myself – about geopolitics or Putin – in the so far vain hope that then I could understand how someone could target frightened children and their mothers.

I want to know why. And this urge, this instinct, brings me close to Jesus’ audience in the Gospel reading today. I don’t think that towers fall on people because they are sinners. But I have sat with enough people trying to make sense of their pain to know that this reasoning doesn’t entirely go away. I’ve listened as people have raked through their lives trying to find cause for something that’s happened to them, some key that will unlock their suffering, give it a reason, an explanation. I’ve listened as they’ve racked their consciences and offered up any small item they can hook onto that will give it a logic, even where there’s no causal connection at all. Because better, sometimes, to blame yourself for your bad diet or bad habits or bad character than to face the randomness of the cancer that claimed your child or the crash that claimed your partner. I’ve done it myself, berated myself with the ‘ifs’: if I’d noticed sooner that something was wrong, would my dad have got a quicker diagnosis and more treatment options? If I’d been pushier about the care he received would it have made a difference? If I’d been different, acted differently, would the things that have hurt me most still have happened?

Perhaps you’ve done it too. Scrutinised your life, your habits, your behaviour, your beliefs, looking for something that can explain your suffering because if you can find what caused it then maybe, just maybe, you can control it. You can fix your diet, change your habit, practise virtue. We may think ourselves too sophisticated to articulate it, but a lot of us, I think, operate within an unspoken contract: if I do the right things, live the right way, try to be a good person, then suffering will skip over me.

We are not so different from Jesus’ audience who want a reason for suffering that will make it controllable. But Jesus will not let us cling to that contract. ‘No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’

Bad things don’t happen to people because they’re worse sinners than everyone else. Towers fall down. Tyrants murder innocent people. You can’t dodge suffering or death by following the right diet or exercise regime or belief system. God doesn’t wreak havoc as a result of domestic or foreign policy; he doesn’t send suffering as a punishment; and Jesus doesn’t do karma. We live in a fallen world, a world in need of redemption, where suffering often doesn’t make sense.

We live in a world of terrible freedom, which includes the freedom to go wrong. Our lives are fragile. We are not always in control. And that’s where Jesus aims his answer: not at the heads that are trying to put a tidy theological explanation onto suffering, but at the hearts that are made afraid by it. This is the world we live in, says Jesus. You can do your best to inoculate yourself against suffering, or you can recognize the vulnerability and fragility of your life and live in the world as he did. One way will save your life and the other way will lose it, and the way round that goes might not be the way you think it does.

Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did. Why is that hard to hear as good news? I blame all the years of Christians using repentance as a threat: the gun to your head that says choose God or you’ll die. Is that what Jesus is doing?

I don’t think it is. When you read the gospels, repentance is a beautiful thing. It’s the prodigal son running headlong into the waiting, welcoming arms of his father. It’s Zacchaeus who turns his life around simply because Jesus invites himself round for tea. It’s the woman the religious men wanted to stone for her adultery who walks with head held high into the new freedom and future Jesus opens up for her. It’s the shepherd rejoicing in having found the lost sheep and that sheep’s restoration to the flock.

It’s a turning towards God, towards the light. It’s a turning with all our fragile humanity, knowing that sometimes we turn and turn and turn again. It’s the seven days sober chip. It’s the hand extended in friendship or forgiveness over a chasm of hurt. It’s the work of repairing what’s broken. It’s waking up each day with your face towards the light and living each day in that light, no matter the distractions or darkness that would pull you off course. 

Jesus is not offering a way out of suffering. Repentance doesn’t bring with it a guarantee of a comfortable life – quite the opposite, in fact, because it will make your life more like Jesus’ life. What Jesus is saying is that in this world where towers fall down and tyrants murder innocent people, choose life. Choose to live in a way that the fruits of that turning are visible: in kindness and justice and compassion and protest and humility and truth and goodness. Don’t put that off, believing you have all the time in the world. Because we don’t.

This turning, this living of our lives in and alongside Jesus, helps us to live by a different contract. Not the one that says if only we’re good enough we will be spared suffering, but one that says that in everything that happens to us God is present with us, opening up a way, even through our worst pain and suffering, to life.

God in Jesus stands alongside the mocked, the beaten, the abused, the wounded, the victim. This is the answer God offers for suffering: not a theological treatise nor a helicopter out of it, but a life embracing it and subject to it. In his own self Jesus is a Galilean whose blood Pilate will mingle with the Passover sacrifice. He doesn’t avoid suffering and death. But in them he opens the door to life, to a new creation where mourning and crying and pain are no more.

In Christ’s light, life is always more vulnerable but also more valuable than we often think. And this makes possible a different way of living, even in a world where towers fall down and children get bombed because a tyrant deems it expedient. This way of life enables us to see the gold in those the world regards as dross. To see the hurting places in our lives as holy ground. To look on the world in all its suffering and to see God’s love and desire for it, and to be drawn into his purposes, to become those through whom the new creation takes hold now.

Jesus won’t leave us in our comfortable untruths. We can carry on in our pretence that if only we’re good enough, or do the right things, we can avoid suffering. Or we can roll up our sleeves, let down the barriers we’ve built to protect ourselves, and follow him into life. That’s the choice. And the time for decision is now.