March 20, 2022 – Third Sunday of Lent – Luke 13:1-9
First Trinity Lutheran Church, Indianapolis, IN

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The blame game is as old as creation. God asks Adam and Eve why they ate of the forbidden tree. Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. When we do wrong, we often want to shift the blame off of ourselves. The more guilt we feel, the more desperately we look for a scapegoat. Now, in some ways it really is a game. Kids do it all the time, right? It can be hilarious.

But sometimes blaming is deadly serious. For example, there’s a lot of Russian misinformation about their invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church preached a sermon where he blamed the invasion on gay pride parades. By the way, have you noticed how “the gays” seem to get blamed a lot? I guess that’s why we have earthquakes and hurricanes, as far as certain famous preachers are concerned. Anyway, Kirill’s excuse is that Ukraine was cracking down on the Donbas region for suppressing pride parades, among other things, so Russia had a “moral obligation” to come to their defense. Blame games. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.

Now, this is important for understanding our gospel reading. Jesus is talking with some Galileans about why bad things happen to good people. Which as far as I’m concerned is the core question of the whole bible. Because if God is so loving, why is there such evil in the world? And they say to Jesus, “hey, did you hear about those folks whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices?” Now, we know about folks like Pilate and Herod. It’s easy to say, well, they’re monsters. That’s what they do. They kill. And it may be true, but is that a satisfying answer? We want to know where God is in this. Especially if these folks were lynched while trying to perform the ritual sacrifices commanded by God. So of course they want a word from Jesus.

Except Jesus doesn’t give it. At least, not in the way we expect. He says nothing about Pilate. Instead, he says, “Do you think they were worse sinners than the rest of Jerusalem? Or the eighteen who were killed when the Tower of Siloam collapsed? Were they worse offenders?” Now, hold up there, Jesus! Pilate’s the real monster here. Why are you changing the subject? I mean, when we talk about the Holocaust, we don’t question the righteousness of Jewish victims. We talk about the real problem. Hitler. But here’s the thing. Back in the day, a lot of folks really believed that God drove everything quid pro quo. Blessings for righteousness, else divine retribution. Like the great flood. Every exile. Slaughter by other armies. They believed every disaster was God’s punishment for their disobedence. And it makes sense. Deuteronomy says, “The LORD will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.” If you take that at face value, then why else would God’s chosen people suffer? And punishment was always proportional to sin. So if this really is how God operates, then these folks must have been pretty bad. Not just because they were murdered (an eye for an eye), but because their sacrifice would have been so profane that God put a stop to it once and for all.

Does that sound like God to us? Probably not. Except what does Jesus say? “Unless you repent, you’ll perish just as they did.” Wow. It sure sounds like Jesus is just blaming victims. So we have to hang onto what else we’ve heard Jesus say. “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?” Who would dare to think that those victims were any worse sinners than anyone else, when we’re all made of the same stuff? So Jesus isn’t disputing that Pilate’s a murderer, but he IS condemning their assumption that the victims somehow deserved it. “Repent, or you will perish just like them. Blamed for eternity.”

Yet, don’t we constantly make that same judgment call when folks are violated? We ask a lot of questions. What were you wearing? What did you say? What did you drink? Don’t you know what kind of neighborhood that is? Of course, we’re not saying they deserved it, but saying they could have avoided it isn’t really any better. Not just because it further victimizes them, but we also put ourselves in God’s place. Except, there’s an even deeper problem. We don’t like being dependent upon God for anything. We don’t trust God to protect us. But if we can blame victims, we can take matters into our own hands. Knowledge feels like power. We can do something. We can be better than them. At least until we get that medical diagnosis or natural disaster, or we’re the perpetrator’s next victim, God forbid. That doesn’t make evil go away, but now it’s just someone else’s problem. And after a while, we stop caring about them, because we think we’re safe, no thanks to God.

How do you trust a God like that? I mean, God didn’t even protect God’s own son. They arrested Jesus, crucified him, and killed him, just like countless other Galileans that Pilate killed. But this time was different. Jesus didn’t stay dead. He was raised in glory. “For God so loved the world as to give the only begotten son. Not to condemn the world but to save it.” To prove that evil will not have the last word in this tired world. There’s one thing stronger – Jesus’ love. And Jesus loves you and me so much that he refuses to let anything come between him and us, not even death. And certainly not our blame or mistrust. Jesus knows what it means to be human, to fear, to question whether God’s promises are true. The instant he binds us to his own body, he immediately cries out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” So that we know he would never forsake us.

Even still, the way of the cross is hard. So Jesus tells us the parable of the fig tree. Three years and the fig tree is still barren. The owner tells the gardener to chop it down. It’s wasting soil. But the gardener says, “let me dig around it and put manure on it and see if it bears fruit next year.” Now, if you know anything about a fig tree, it takes 3 or 4 years to bear fruit in the first place. But that’s not really the point. The point is that the gardener abides with this barren tree, and gets his hands dirty in the dirt and manure. I mean, God knows suffering is hard. But we know how to suffer. It’s the loneliness that destroys us. So Jesus abides with us. He gets down into our dirt and manure and abides with us there, because he knows we can’t see the end. And he gives us the kind of faith that drives us to get down into the dirt and manure with others. We can blame Jesus for that. Jesus never promised it wouldn’t be messy and hard, but he promises that we’ll never go through it alone.

Though the question remains. Why does God let such bad things happen to good people? Jesus doesn’t say. But he wouldn’t tend the tree if he wasn’t sure it would bear fruit. Tragedies still happen. But it’s always a surprise to see perfect strangers come together, to console, to attend to profound loss, to make a way where there is no way. And it’s funny how we suddenly forget about all the politics and disagreements that kept us at each other’s throats. Our barren trees give fruit. And we can blame God for that. Thanks be to God.