LK 13: 1-9 

Laterally Luke…Lent 2…Revised 2019

Today, Jesus is at His most enigmatic! (Oxford: riddle, obscure speech.) Might this be a good starting point for exploring the passage as a whole? Both sections of the text are equally enigmatic. Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ may help those who enjoy music. Those who prefer thrillers may respond more to the Enigma Code & its cracking that helped end WW2! 

Perhaps the Greatest Enigma of all is that God can be Divine & Human at the same time in the Person of Jesus on earth, & now, by Holy Spirit living out Jesus in us! Christians of various stripes believe in & worship a God who is such an Enigma.

Does Jesus intend His references to Pilate massacring innocent Galileans, & then, telling of those killed by a falling tower in Siloam to be understood as portents of His own death as an Innocent? Does He want us to ponder the enigma that He’s soon going to become the most wholly innocent of all innocents? On our behalf? 

The question of innocence won’t go away for those who know about Pilate killing the Galileans. Everyone in this first case is someone’s husband, father, son, or grandson (on the assumption it was a massacre of males). Herod’s massacre of the young male innocents at Bethlehem comes into the picture here, too. Nor will this pondering the death of innocents go away for those who know about that tower in Siloam collapsing & killing 18 people. In the case of the tower, it’s more likely women, men, & why not children, too, are caught up. Each of them has a name & a face; known to those in their family & community. Just as you & I & all those in our congregations know people we regard as innocents in some way. More, we are all known to God as His children, whoever else we happen to be!

There's not a congregation to whom we preach, that won’t have within it somebody who's been hurt when something bad's happened to them, or happened to someone close to them. We may not have identified them, but it’s important to preach that God has! I suggest it’s also important to preach that it’s OK to lament the ‘injustice’ of all these wrongs on the way to ‘growing in God’. ‘Injustice’, though, comes with the territory of being human. It’s no good blaming God, though, even for ‘allowing bad things to happen to good people’. We’ll find nothing to prop up our humanity, or God, in that direction!

             

Brian

Afterthought: Threatening people with 'the axe' doesn't translate well into Gospel, does it? But investing more of ourself in each other, nurturing more intensely, does. It fits exactly with Jesus' other imageries of shepherding, sowing, viticulture, etc. And, I suspect, helps us on the way to resolving the enigmas above.