Jesus' (non)Answer to Suffering

March 3, 2013

3 Lent, Year C

Luke 13:1-9

 

I wanted to preach about Moses and the burning bush this morning.  It’s one of my favorite stories.  The willingness of Moses to turn away from his path, the discovery of God who is present in the most unlikely places.  But it seemed that it wasn’t meant to be.  I couldn’t get past my discomfort with the Gospel reading for this morning, so knew that was where I needed to wrestle. 

            In Luke’s Gospel, we hear Jesus addressing the question of theodicy.  You may not know that word, but if you’ve ever had something awful happen to you or someone you love, you’ve probably been deep in its vortex.  When you wondered how a God who is supposedly good and loving could let something like this happen.  Or when you wondered why a God who is supposedly all-powerful couldn’t stop something like this from happening.   Or when the whole experience drove you to such anger or disappointment in God that you stopped wondering at all.

            That is theodicy.  Trying to reconcile what we believe and hope about God’s goodness and justice with the all-too-observable facts of evil and suffering in the world.

            I’ve been there, and my guess is that everyone in this room has been or will be.  We look at the condition of humanity, the pain, the suffering, the meanness, the evil, the injustice, and our faith is exposed to its core.  And our soul demands “Why, God?” or accuses “How could you, God?” or cries “Where are you, God?”

            In biblical times, there was an assumption that disasters and suffering were punishment from God for sin, whether individual sin or corporate, current or ancestral.  Other than Jerry Falwell and a few others like him, most of us wouldn’t put it quite like that today.  But I think we still share the ancient tendency to want a universe of reliable rewards and punishments.  We prefer to think that cause and effect are connected and predictable, and that pain and suffering can be explained and isolated.  It helps us to feel safer, to feel like we can tame the chaos around us.  It might even help dull the pain we feel.

            The problem is that it doesn’t actually seem to work that way.  It doesn’t work that way in Syria or the Congo.  And it doesn’t work that way in Newtown, Connecticut or in the old D.C. General Hospital or across Route 1.

            In our story this morning, people are coming up to Jesus telling him about some Galileans who were violently killed by the Roman Empire while bringing their sacrifices to the temple.  And talking about the people randomly killed by the falling tower of Siloam.  I think they wanted Jesus to reassure them that these atrocities couldn’t happen to them; that they happened for a reason to those people.  Or at least to explain why God would let these things happen.

            But Jesus gives an emphatic No to their whole premise.  These people that died were no worse than anyone else.  No worse than any of you.  This could have happened to any of you.  Even worse, something like this may very well happen to any one of you.  At any moment.

            It seemed like such an opportunity for a pastoral moment.  But that’s not where Jesus went with it.  And maybe that makes sense, given that, as all of us who have been in that vortex of suffering know, there are unlikely to be any words that can help when you’re in the thick of it. 

            And so Jesus didn’t say, “Don’t worry.  They’ve gone to a better place.”  And Jesus didn’t say, “It must have been their time.”  Or, “It must have been God’s will.”  Or, “The reason will become clear in time.”  Or, “God wanted them in heaven.”

            Religious platitudes aren’t the answer.  Jesus doesn’t give an answer.  He knows that there are no simple answers to such complex questions.  There is no quick fix for such deep trouble.  No band-aid for that kind of pain.

            And so, as much as we might like him to, Jesus doesn’t promise them that there is a way for the people gathered around him to avoid suffering and death.  Pain and death happen.  They are always close.  And they can catch us by surprise.    And so Jesus directs them away from the unending, and ultimately unsatisfying, vortex of theodicy and instead challenges them to repent.

            It seems counter-intuitive.  After all, Jesus has just told them that these awful things didn’t happen because of sin.  So why is he talking about repenting? 

            Maybe because we’ve been misunderstanding repentance all along.  Like the people of Jesus’ day, maybe we’ve been associating it with threats of fire and brimstone, with fear and guilt and hair shirts.  Something that we do because we are sinful worms unworthy of God’s love.  When I hear the word “repent”, I think of John the Baptist in the desert eating locusts; I think about unquenchable fires and gnashing of teeth. 

And so, frankly, I’d rather not think about it.  All this talk about repenting and perishing makes me very uncomfortable and doesn’t fit in well at all with what I believe about God.  Which is exactly where I found myself when confronted with this piece of Luke’s Gospel – uncomfortable and defensive.  And that’s why I knew I needed to think about it.  God is tricky that way, sometimes, using my discomfort with something to nudge me to look at it again.

            But what if repentance isn’t a way of atoning for our sins so as to avoiding suffering or a call to get mired in feeling bad about our unworthiness, but instead is a way of living faithfully in this world in which suffering is an unexplainable but unavoidable part of our experience.

            Then Jesus isn’t giving in to their illusion that they can control their exposure to pain and suffering by groveling with God, but instead is turning their vulnerability to pain and suffering into an opportunity for them to get closer to God.

            Our word repentance comes from the Greek word “metanoia,” which literally means a change of course.  A 180 degree turn to follow another path.  Jesus is challenging the people not to waste their time worrying about what may come, or standing still paralyzed by fear.  But instead to turn whole-heartedly to God, opening our hearts and minds, our desires and imaginations to God.  And we will find God there, even in the vortex.

            What if we start from that premise when we read our parable for this morning:

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.  So he said to the gardener, “See here!  For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none.  Cut it down!  Why should it be wasting the soil?”  The gardener replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

That old fearsome understanding of repentance might have made God take the role of owner of the vineyard.  Someone who stands back and judges us, requiring good fruit from us and if we don’t produce it, threatens us with punishment.  That old fearsome understanding of repentance would cast us as unfruitful fig trees, incapable of producing good fruit, hopeless and worthy of nothing better than being given up on and chopped down.  But that’s only our terrified imaginations at work.  That isn’t who God is, and that isn’t who we are.

The new, metanoia understanding of repentance casts God as someone we don’t expect – not the owner, but the gardener, the tender, the steward.  The one who is up-close and personal fighting for the fig tree.  The one who begs the owner to open his heart.  The one who is ready and willing to get his hands dirty helping the tree become fruitful.  The one who patiently and gently calls the owner to mercy and the fig tree to blossoming.  That is the God I believe in.  The God I want to turn to and change for.  The God that I know is present with us in the vortex, even when we are too angry or too disappointed or to terrified to know or care.

            And that new, metanoia understanding of repentance gives us all kinds of possibilities for turning and change in the parable:

We might be the fig tree, finding ourselves feeling stuck or stagnant but by our very nature created by God’s love and capable of so much fruit. 

We might be the owner, needing a new way to see hope or provide mercy in a situation in front of us that doesn’t seem particularly promising. 

We might be co-gardeners, searching for new ways to help bring people and events in our life to fruition.

            There’s no ending to the parable.  We don’t know what will happen with the fig tree.  We don’t know if the gardener will have success in his efforts to improve the conditions for the tree.  We don’t know whether the owner will be too impatient to give the tree another year.  Even if the owner is willing to wait, we don’t know whether he’ll be quick to cut the tree down if no growth is visible the next year or if maybe by then he will have become more patient and merciful.

            And of course, we don’t know what happens next in our story either.  That was part of what Jesus was pointing out in his refusal to give easy answers to the examples of suffering and pain the people threw at him.  All we have is right now.  We are part of the great mystery.  That openness and uncertainty can be scary, but it can also be a reason for hope and an occasion for grace.  An opportunity to look at life and see what needs to change and start on it.  How are we sharing our love, our joys, our treasure with others?  How are we forgiving and living as forgiven?  How are we making lives that are more than just passing time?  How are we looking beyond ourselves to offer help and hope to others?  How are we sharing in the unfolding of God’s kingdom? 

            Being willing to turn from the path we’re on, finding God present in unlikely places.  Maybe I got to give my burning bush sermon after all.  Amen.