When bad things happen to good people
A sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce
on the Third Sunday of Lent, 7th March 2010
Whenever a particularly appalling tragedy or natural disaster takes place somewhere in the world, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty that God-related questions will be following somewhere close behind.
The reason being, of course, that such terrible events as the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, to select but two recent examples, can challenge very profoundly any sense that human beings have of there being a deep-seated order and purpose in life – not only because of the sheer scale of such catastrophes, but because of the wanton and indiscriminate destruction and suffering that they bring in their wake. When we hear of events in which young and old; good and bad; churchgoer and atheist alike are all wiped out in an instant, without discrimination or differentiation, the perennial questions present themselves yet again: why did God allow such a colossal tragedy to occur in the first place? Why was this person allowed to escape, when that person was not? And most commonly, and most worryingly of all, what did the victims do to deserve what happened to them?
Such questions are, of course, far from new, as we can see from today’s gospel reading. Because the same question was being asked of Jesus himself, in the wake of a particularly appalling and wanton act of human savagery in his own day: the murder by the Roman Governor, Pilate, of a number of Galileans, whose death was the more shocking and appalling to their fellow countrymen because it was in the context of their own religious observance: they were sacrificing to God at the time of their killing, and so their own blood was mingled with that of their sacrificial animals. In other words, they were being dutiful, obedient Jews at the time of their murder – so why didn’t God protect them? The people around Jesus were, it appears, speculating that the victims must, surely, have been more sinful than other Galileans for God to have allowed this to happen to them.
Jesus is clearly very annoyed at what he is hearing, which is why his retort to those who around him is so sharp. And it is he himself who draws a parallel with a second, rather different event: the collapse of a tower at Siloam, which fell killing eighteen people. So, one tragedy was the direct result of wanton human barbarism; the other was a tragic accident. Are the people around him really suggesting that the victims of these terrible events perished because they were sinful?
One of my favourite sayings from the American writer and humorist H.L. Mencken, who was extraordinarily perceptive, as well as being a great wit, is the following: ‘For every difficult and complex question there is an answer that is simple, easily understood, and wrong.’
And that is never more true than in the kinds of answers that even intelligent and educated human beings sometimes come up with in their attempts to get to grips with these kinds of appalling event. In the wake of the earthquake that rocked Haiti in January, some Christian fundamentalists in America declared that this must be God’s punishment on Haiti for embracing voodoo: an answer that is simple, easily understood, and wrong. (After all, if you really believe that, then presumably Chile has just suffered the fifth worst earthquake in recorded history for being staunchly Roman Catholic. In which case, watch out Italy and most of mainland Europe …)
Such speculation is of course, dangerous nonsense – as Jesus himself points out – because as he says in relation to the murder of those religiously observant Jews, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No I tell you. 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 more than that, in characteristic fashion, the thing that Jesus is most annoyed about is not that the people around him have come up with the wrong answer: rather, it is because they are presuming to speculate and pass judgement upon the behaviour and the fate of other people as if that kind of thing would never, of course, happen to them.
There is nothing more dangerous, in spiritual terms, than for an individual, or a group of people, to observe a tragedy experienced by other human beings, and, from the smug safety of those who know that they have themselves been spared, voice the opinion that: ‘of course, they must have had it coming; I wonder what they did to deserve that?’ – while basking in the confidence of their own self-righteousness. It is that that Jesus is objecting to most powerfully. Because if they really believe that God behaves in that kind of way towards sinners, then it is they themselves who ought to feel very, very afraid. Because, of course, the greatest peril of the smugly self-righteous is that they lose sight of their own sinfulness and folly – and once that happens, they really are in danger.
Hence his retort, which Jesus couches in characteristically provocative terms:
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 as they did.
The idea that God singles out the sinful to be the victims of human tragedy or natural disaster as punishment, might give certain other human beings the misguided satisfaction of believing that they are seeing wrongdoers getting their just deserts, but unfortunately for them that ain’t the way God works, as Jesus himself points out. And indeed, how could it be so? What kind of loving parent would feel the need to destroy his own child as a means of punishment, even if that child had done wrong? So can we really believe that of God?
And going beyond that, the God of Jesus Christ is emphatically not a God who takes pleasure in punishing the innocent and the guilty alike indiscriminately, rather like a particularly tyrannical kind of headmaster, who delights in punishing the entire school, in response to a misdemeanour by one individual within it. What kind of a God would that be?
The God whom we encounter in and through Jesus Christ is not a God who hurls down buildings to crush people inside them. Rather, ours is a God who is there in the darkness beside them as the rubble falls. Ours is a God who knows what it is to be the innocent victim of the worst of human cruelty and barbarity; because ours is a God who embraced the horror and desolation of Calvary with us and for us. Ours is a God who reaches out his arms to the lost, the desolate and the bereaved; who weeps with the lost and the broken.
And ours is a God who reserves his greatest wrath for the smug self-satisfaction of those who believe that they are doing very nicely thank you, as they observe with interest, rather than compassion, the tragedies in the lives of those around them. If anything it is the complacent, rather than the sinful who have most to fear.
Bad things happen to good people all the time. Not because they deserve it: that would be the kind of answer that is simple, easily understood, and wrong; nor is it because ours is a God who takes pleasure in dishing out punishment indiscriminately simply because he can: that, too, would be an answer that is simple, easily understood and wrong.
No, bad things happen to good people because the forces of nature are powerful forces; because the human capacity for cruelty is a terrible one; and because the deeper our capacity for love, the greater our capacity to feel loss. Suffering is a part of human life, not because God takes delight in seeing us suffer, but because part of the glory and the wonder and the tragedy of human life is that we are weak and frail creatures, who cannot always cope very easily with the freedoms that are ours to enjoy. The challenge for us is to acknowledge our weakness and our frailty, and our need of God and, rather like the fig tree in the parable that Jesus tells in our gospel today, to do our very best to ensure that we bear such fruit as we can, while we can. And to know that when we do fall, as we all do from time to time, that we are loved, and accepted, and forgiven – endlessly; infinitely; and profligately. For such is the nature of the boundless love of God.
From our first reading this morning from the prophet Isaiah:
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.
Amen