Questions Without Answers - 3-20-22
Questions Without Answers
Is 55:1-9; Luke 13:1-9
Is 55:1-9
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Luke 13:1-9
At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or 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? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Then he told this parable: “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?’ He 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.’”
Prayer – Lord, we watch the news, get on the internet and it seems that trials and challenges and tragedies are the rule of the day. We wonder why do these things happen; we wonder what that person, group, or company did to deserve the bad things that have occurred. Help us to see your presence in the midst of pain and suffering and tragedy – help us to live with the questions without answers – amen.
This passage is rife with both promise and peril. The promise is to address one of the persistent questions many of our people have: why is there so much suffering in the world? Or, put more theologically, is suffering connected to our behavior? Does God cause suffering? Is suffering or calamity a form on punishment? These are questions usually asked in moments of extreme suffering and loss and they are as poignant as they are important. And this week we have a chance to address them more reflectively than we can when asked in the emergency room or hospice center – that’s the promise of this week’s reading.
Why? – one of the most common questions we ask when we don’t understand the divine economy; one of the most common questions we ask when we don’t understand why bad things happen to us, to good people; one of the questions we ask when we read of of the senseless bombing and violence that Russia is inflicting on the people and country of the Ukraine – why? How was this our fault? Do we deserve these bad things that happen to us? Are they the consequence of, if not punishment for, our behavior? We may ask that question of why in a relatively mundane, even superstitious way, when something relatively minor goes wrong and we wonder, ‘what did I do to deserve that?’ Or we may ask this question without answers in a much more profound, heart-wrenching way when senseless tragedy occurs. I’d be willing almost all of us have sat with someone at the hospital or in the funeral parlor who have wondered not only why, but is this some form of punishment.
As a hospital chaplain I hear this unanswerable question more than the average person. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t hear the why word slide across someone’s lips out into the atmosphere? A question of pain; a question of suffering; a plea from the wilderness; a cry from the cross – why have you forsaken me/us? I have heard countless people desperately try to answer this question without any answers – ‘It was God’s will; God needed another angel; God doesn’t give you more than you can handle; God’s ways are mysterious, we mustn’t question why.’ What makes anyone think that a ‘God-answer’ is going to make the pain of the tragic moment any less? Even if we could offer a logical reason why something tragic has occurred, would it somehow erase the pain and hurt and sorrow of a tragedy? Are our human answers somehow acceptable ways of dealing with the silence of God in the midst of our pain and suffering?
Of course the peril is to imagine that we can answer all those questions! We’ve all heard so many less-then-helpful (and sometimes downright awful!) explanations of suffering, running the gamut from someone saying to explain the death of a child that God needed another angel in the choir to TV preachers saying a particular calamity is God’s punishment for sin. And so we understandably want to avoid repeating those mistakes.
First, suffering is not a form of punishment. If there is anything we can take from Jesus’ sharp retort to his audience – “Do you really think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” – it’s that suffering and calamity are not God’s punishment for sin. Just to make sure the crowd listening gets the point, Jesus goes on to offer a second example of folks killed when a tower fell on them, asking once more, “do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem,” again answering definitively, “No.”
Second, just because suffering is not punishment doesn’t mean that it is disconnected entirely from sin. Pilate’s murderous acts of terror, no different than Putin’s criminal acts or any other of the horrific actions of today’s tyrants that we read about in the news – are sinful. Moreover, what if the wall Jesus references was built by a fraudulent contractor? Sin has consequences, and there are all kinds of bad behaviors that contribute to much of the misery in the world, and the more we can confront that sin the less suffering there will be.
All of which brings us to a third, and very important, thing we can say from this passage: God neither causes nor delights in suffering and calamity. This is where the parable about the fig tree comes in. Now, a quick warning: we tend to read this parable allegorically, assuming that the landowner is God and the gardener Jesus. But nowhere in Luke do we find a picture of an angry, vindictive God that needs to be placated by a friendly Jesus. Rather, Jesus portrays God as a father who scans the horizon day in and day out waiting for his wayward son to come home and as a woman who after sweeping her house all night looking for a lost coin throws a party costing even more than the coin is worth to celebrate that she found it. Luke’s Gospel overflows with the conviction that “there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7).
Given Luke’s consistent picture of God’s reaction to sin, then perhaps the landowner is representative of our own sense of how the world should work. That is, from very early on, we want things to be “fair” and we define “fair” as receiving rewards for doing good and punishment for doing evil. (Except of course, when it comes to our own mistakes and misdeeds – then we want mercy!) So perhaps the gardener is God, the one who consistently raises a contrary voice to suggest that the ultimate answer to sin isn’t punishment – not even in the name of justice – but rather mercy, reconciliation, and new life.
Our passage this morning refers to two events that were probably familiar to ancient audiences. The grisly mention of Pilate’s mingling the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices appears to refer to a massacre of a group of Galilean pilgrims in Jerusalem. And though we don’t know why Pilate ordered their senseless murders, the deed does tell us about Pilate’s penchant for brutality against the people of Israel. Jesus also refers to a tower in the wall around Jerusalem that apparently collapsed without warning and crushed 18 hapless Jerusalemites.
I can imagine that these two senseless tragedies had been the subject of many conversations around the local watering hole – one an instance of state-sanctioned terror, one a random accident. Both saw people snuffed out with little warning and for no clearly apparent reason. Both kinds of events lead the rest of us to realize how precious and precarious life can be. Jesus implies the victims did nothing wrong, nothing that caused their demise; that we must not equate tragedy with the divine economy. Sin does not make atrocities come. Bad things happen, period. Nor, should we mistake our good fortune as evidence of God’ special blessing.
We must remember that in Jesus’ time, people were pretty certain that disease, bad times, tragedy was directly related to God’s curses while prosperity, wealth, many children were seen as evidence of a faithful life and God’s rewards for being good and decent. The divine economy was based on rewards and punishments – rewards if you were good, punishment if you weren’t. It is perhaps not that surprising that the church has continued to emphasize this divine economy for over two thousand years.
But here in our passage this morning Jesus says, “REPENT!!!” Now I have to admit that I get a little uncomfortable in passages like this when I read the word ‘repent.’ Repent elicits a feeling in me that I have been doing something wrong and I need to get my act together or else, the word makes me feel shame. Yet the ancient word for ‘repent’ does not mean moral uprightness or a 180 degree turnaround – in ancient times repent refers to a changed mind, a new way of seeing things, being persuaded to adopt a different perspective – could my baggage around the word repentance make me miss what Jesus is trying to say to us here? Could Jesus be saying to me, to us, to all of humankind that the divine economy, that justice, has been replaced by something even more powerful – by grace?
Barbara Brown Taylor, professor/author/Episcopal priest shares of her days as a chaplain when she was called to the pediatric unit to sit with a mother who’s 5 yo daughter was in surgery for a brain tumor. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with her friends when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, she could no longer see. At the hospital, a CT scan confirmed that a large tumor was pressing on the little girls’ optic nerve and thus she was in surgery that morning.
On the day of the surgery, Taylor found the mother sitting in the waiting room beside an ashtray full of cigarette butts. The mother smelled as if she had smoked every one of them, although she wasn’t smoking when Taylor walked up. The mother was staring a patch in the carpet in front of her, seeing nothing. As Taylor sat down and told the mother who she was, the mother immediately launched into a confession, “It’s my punishment for smoking these damned cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.” Then she started crying hard – what came out of her lips was even more tragic – “Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m going to kill my own child!” (BBT, Life Giving Fear)
This mom needed a punishing God to explain why her daughter had a senseless tumor in her brain. She couldn’t reconcile a loving God with the tumor in her daughter’s head. If there was something wrong with her daughter, then there had to be a reason. She was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe.
Even those of us who claim to know better react the same way. Tragedy strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our behavior, our relationships, our diets, our beliefs. We hunt for some cause to explain the effect, in hopes that we can stop causing it. What this tells us is that we are less interested in truth than consequences. What we crave, above all, is making sense out of the senseless, understanding in some meaningful way why bad things happen, perhaps having some control over the chaos of our lives.
Could Jesus’ command to repent be a command to let go of this need to understand; could Jesus’ command to repent be a command to release this sense of divine economy where rewards and punishments are based on what we do or don’t do; could Jesus be instructing us to worry less about justice and focus more on trusting that God is with us in the midst of tragedies, calamities and senseless moments? Could Jesus be telling us that a world based on rewards and punishments is not what it is all about? Could Jesus be telling us that repentance is not about getting back on God’s good so you can avoid pain and suffering in your life? Could Jesus be telling us that God doesn’t judge if we are good enough?
Can we live with questions without answers? As much as we want an answer to the question of why did this happen; as much as we want an answer to why do bad things happen to good people; as much as we want an answer to why did someone we love die, or why did a daughter get a brain tumor, God doesn’t explain or reveal a grand design. Even if God answered the unanswerable questions, countless families still had an empty chair in the kitchen when they sat down to eat. Instead of giving us answers, God comes to us in those tragic and senseless moments – God reveals God’s self – at least for a moment – and hopefully for just a moment that is enough to get us through to the next moment. Perhaps the divine economy is not about either/or – consequences; rather it is about the grace to get through the moment and that is what it is all about. Perhaps that is what it means to live the questions without answers – perhaps . . . amen.