Our need to change

Luke 13: 1 – 8

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 18 April, 2004

DURING THE WEEK, a young man’s body was found in the bathroom of a Missenden Road flat. He had apparently slipped in the shower, struck his head on the floor, and died.
  The body had lain there for about two weeks.

  The story is that this young man, who lived alone in the flat, was planning a trip to Ireland and England. The night before he was due to leave, he had had dinner with some friends and had left his key with one of them.
  When people travel, they often find life gets very busy on their arrival, and they don't immediately make contact with their friends, so no one worried much when they didn’t hear from the man for several days.
  After a while, his friends contacted someone overseas whom the man was going to contact, and that person had heard nothing.
  So messages passed back and forth, someone asked the man’s relatives where he was, and, finally, the message reached Australia that he hadn’t arrived in the UK.

  His Australian friends grew worried. The friend who had the spare key went to see what had happened. And that was when the discovery was made.
  It seems that the man was getting ready to leave when the accident occurred. He may, in fact, have died within minutes of falling.

  I thought about this man, and I thought about the fact that he was preparing for a journey, but he wasn’t preparing for the journey he actually took.
  It’s as though someone planned to go to Bali and ended up in Tierra del Fuego instead. The tropical shirts and the extra swimming gear would be of very little use down at the southern–most tip of South America.

  The passage we read in Luke’s gospel is about people who met disaster when they had other plans. They never got to doing the things they thought they would do, but they faced entirely different situations instead.
  Two situations are mentioned. One is about a group of Jews from Galilee.
  It was at Passover time, and Passover was a time when people’s feelings about the Romans began to boil over.
  For Jews, Passover was a political celebration. It was about the Israelites leaving captivity in Egypt and becoming a free nation in their own land. Every Passover under Roman rule screamed to the Jews that this was wrong.
  Passover became a rallying symbol for Jewish terrorists as they tried to make the Romans leave.
  These Galileans were in the same mould. A conflict arose between the Romans and a group of Galileans. With Passover and its meaning in mind, they opposed the Romans, and Pilate had them slaughtered. They came to worship; they ended up dead.

  The other situation was close to home.
  The Galileans were visitors to Jerusalem. But the builders of the Siloam Tower were local men. You would remember that there was a pool at Siloam, where Jesus healed the crippled man.
  Part of the new tower collapsed and 18 men were killed. They planned to earn some money and to make their city greater. Instead, some fell to their deaths and some were crushed by the falling debris.
  They came to build; they ended up dead.
  It was like the man in Newtown. He planned to travel back home; he ended up dead.

  As we go through life, we have to face tragedies.
  Do you remember the old red rattler train carriages with the manually operated doors? Do you remember riding on trains so crowded that some of the passengers had to hold the bars tightly because they couldn't even close the doors behind them? I've done that.

  And I remember when one of my brother’s school mates was skylarking on a train, hanging full arm’s length out the door. He didn’t see the stanchion beside the line between Clyde and Granville. I've done funerals of kids killed on trains, even since the automatic doors went in. It happens.

  I remember reading with shock that one of my school mates had graduated from University. He had a good future ahead in science. He had the personality: he was a junior boffin.
  I wasn't shocked that he had graduated. I was shocked that that night he had gone down to Maroubra, sat on the sand and drunk some wine with his mates to celebrate the graduation, and then gone in swimming.
  He didn't come out. His mates raised the alarm, and his body was found the next day.

  Crises come in all shapes and sizes.

  One of my workmates has had more than her share of sadness. Her father died when she was in her teens. When she was about 27 her stepfather died of complications from prostate cancer.
  Her mother has since become friendly with another chap — and he has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, too. My friend is still only 31.

  We can ask the same questions people asked in Jesus’ day. Did that man who died in his bathroom do something specially wicked to deserve being taken out by God in such a dramatic manner? Did the boy killed on the train commit such horrible sins that God could not tolerate him alive any more? Did all those men in my friend’s life deserve their sicknesses and their cancers more than anyone else did? Did my friend in some way 'draw down the wrath of the gods' upon himself by studying science?

  If you put the question that way, you can see how nonsensical it is.

  But people still ask it. Were those slaughtered Galileans wicked people who deserved to die in such a way? Were the men killed when the tower collapsed such terrible sinners that they didn‘t deserve even to have the sun shine on them?
  Jesus doesn’t even consider it a question worthy of argument. He just makes a plain statement. No, they didn’t specially deserve to have their lives cut short. Bad things happen to good people and to the ordinarily bad as well as to the spectacular sinners. There is no clear pattern to it.

  Don't think the Galileans were the worst sinners in Galilee because they met such a sticky end. Don’t imagine the tower–builders were the worst in Jerusalem because such a disaster befell them. These are not rational interpretations of the facts of life in our world.

  Why do we love to rush to the conclusion that such disasters somehow demonstrate that people receive what they deserve?

  I know that we would probably never say out loud, “Those people who were washed off a ferry in Bangladesh or The Philippines — they must have deserved it somehow.” We wouldn’t say it, because we know this story from Luke’s gospel, and we know that it is wrong to assume that people died because they were specially evil.

  But what about Muslims dying in earthquakes in Turkey or Iran?

  Have you never thought to yourself, “If they followed the true and living God, he would protect them from such catastrophes.”? I’m sure that, even in your compassion for suffering men and women, the thought must have crossed your mind once or twice.
   But the principle taught by Jesus still stands. They are no more and no less guilty than you and I; they are no more and no less deserving of judgment than you and I.
  Jesus goes right to the heart of the problem with his next sentence:

Unless you repent, you too will all perish.

  When you or I think that someone else might have deserved punishment, when we say, “That is why catastrophe met those wicked people!” Our logic is this:
  “They died because they are specially wicked. I am not specially wicked. Therefore, I shall not die as they did.”
  Jesus flatly denies that logic. He says, in effect, that the logic of this situation is,
  “They were not specially wicked, yet they died. I am not specially wicked either. So I, too, will die as they did.”

  What does that say to you and to me? Doesn’t it confirm what theologians often tell us, that all death is, in one sense, God’s punishment on sin? Doesn’t it tell us that the 3–year–old who drowns in his backyard pool, has died because God punishes sin? Doesn’t it tell us that the 35–year–old who falls over in the shower and fractures his skull has died because God punishes sin? And doesn’t it tell us that the 105 year old who quietly slips away one night in the midst of a sweet dream has died because God punishes sin?

  No three year old has yet unleashed a war nor done much worse than refuse his dinner; most 35–year–olds are guilty of the same sins as you and I are; and the 105–year–old is no less a sinner than I am.

  As we read in Hebrews,

...man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.”

Elsewhere we read,

The soul that sins shall die.

  There is no escaping the conclusion: death is a result of sin, judgment follows death.

  The presence of sin in the world brings death about.
  You know that from your own experience. People die daily because other people drive without regard to the rules of the road or the safety of others. People die because someone decided to skimp on materials in a building. People die because they overdose on drugs, placing an impermanent pleasure above obedience to the living God

  There are myriad examples of people dying because of sin.

  But there is an entire further layer. Even death from natural causes is a result of sin.
  This is the regular conclusion of the Bible.

  At first, our bodies renew themselves remarkably efficiently. But this ability to renew and repair becomes less effective each year. Damage gets patched instead of fixed. Some cells go on a repair spree when there is no damage, resulting in every kind of tumour from a simple lump which reaches a size and never goes further, through to cancers which gradually absorb everything the body takes into itself. Some vital cells die and are unreplaced, or become hardened and inflexible. Some even attack the very body they live in and were created to protect.
  And so comes death at last, when the body can no longer look after its own vital needs.

  The Bible tells us that this process would not occur, had sin not entered the world.

  But what Jesus implies is that there is a death worse than the end of life, a death to God. Without repentance, we remain dead to God and are earmarked for judgment and the outpouring of God’s judgmental anger.

  As Paul also wrote in Ephesians 2,

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to walk when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature, and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.

  I can’t say, “I am a good person, you can’t judge me, God.” I have to admit that my best, my noblest actions and thoughts are constantly tainted with selfishness, that I do good to others to look good, to feel good and to persuade God that I am good. And that desire to fool God, myself, and my world into thinking I am someone deserving of God’s approval is enough in itself to guarantee that God’s wrath will fall on me. It doesn’t matter that there might be an element of true altruism in there, or that I might, in the total mix, have one or two good motives.

  It is the same self–centredness which drives the ordinary sinner like me and the extraordinary sinners, the Pol Pots, the Hitlers, the... well, I won't get too political, but far too many in recent times have exploited any and every human tragedy for personal and political gain. That, too, is wicked.

  And God’s judgment must fall on all humankind equally. My sneaky little anti–God thoughts and deeds are as sinful as the bold and grand anti–God ways of the people our entire world knows will face judgment.

  And Jesus says,

...unless you repent you, too, will all perish.

  If we desire to flee from the coming wrath, we must repent.
  As the old children’s chorus reminds us,

I’m listening in
I’m listening in
To what God says about my sin.
The way of life he makes so plain:
Repent, believe, be born again!

  We may not die like some who fail to last out their allotted three score and ten years, but we will die and eventually face judgment.
  How we come through that depends entirely on what we decide today.

  Paul writes to the Romans,

Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ...

  If we are in Christ by faith in him, we are justified. That means that, at the Judgment, God will say, “Because Peter Green has trusted in my son, Jesus and is covered by the blood shed on Calvary, he has no case to answer before this Court. Let him go free!”

  And I know, even today, that that is what the judgment against me will be. I am already justified. God has already thrown out the case against me. I have peace with him, because I am already protected by the shed blood of Jesus on Calvary. God no longer pursues me to pour out his anger against my sin, but he looks at me and sees a son, because I am being remade into the image of his unique Son, Jesus, the Lord.

  You can have such assurance for yourself.

  Jesus calls for repentance: a decision to admit sin, and to turn to God. Couple that with faith in Jesus and all he has done for you on the cross, and you have life in him forever more, a life which death itself can never destroy.

  I challenge you today: quit looking at others and thinking you are safe because you are better than they are. Face yourself and who you are, who you have become. Face yourself as you are, repent, and trust in Jesus as your Lord and Saviour — and you will find life.

  May it be so; AMEN
 

© Peter R. Green 2004. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)

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