The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
March 18, 2001

The Bad News According to Jesus Christ
Luke 13:1-9

I like to pick a hymn to sing before the Gospel that prepares us for the Gospel reading we are about to hear. If possible, the song should point, in some way, to the reading. Our Gospel reading gives us The Bad News According to Jesus Christ. So what song would be appropriate? I wanted us to sing was the song of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wiz. That late 1970s remake of the Wizard of Oz into an urban song and dance show is a favorite of mine. Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West belts out a song about Bad News. She tells her workers and her henchmen, the flying monkeys, “If your gonna bring me something, make it something I can use, but don’t know body bring me no bad news.” Then the backup singers kick in with “No bad news. No bad news.” And the witch belts out again, “If your gonna bring me something, make it something I can use, but don’t nobody bring me no bad news.”

Who wants bad news? None of us does. The way we soften bad news, is with the old saying, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news….” We want some good news to make it easier to take the bad news. However, that’s not how we usually get our news. There is always plenty of bad news to go around. We get one depressing story after another, and the bad news seems to be getting worse all the time. First, we can barely comprehend something like the school shooting in Columbine, Colorado. Then we get more shootings and more shootings, until the news of the recent school shootings in Santee, California seemed almost inevitable.

Small town local newspapers are known to be like sundials, they only work in the sunny hours and so are filled with good news. But, even our local Tribune and Georgian too often has to report bad news. There are murders, like the death in the line of duty of Camden Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Jenkins, or the all-too-frequent reports of child molestation. Even here Camden County, we deal with what feels like more than our fair share of bad news. It makes you wonder what the Gospel, the Good News, has to do with our day to day lives. If God is all powerful and God is good, then why do we have all this bad news?

Well the Good News for the day today is bad news. Jesus deals with the news just the way we all get it, “I’ve got some bad news, and some bad news.”

Here’s the way it went. Jesus was teaching about the need to repent, to turn away from your sins, and be ready for God’s Kingdom. Right in the middle of his teaching, some people in the crowd speak up and tell Jesus about a group of people from Galilee killed by Pilate at the Temple. Pilate mingled their blood with the sacrifices offered at the Temple. It was a bloody sacrilege offered by the very Roman ruler who would later condemn Jesus to death. Why would this group, of all people, be killed? They were at the Temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices to atone for their sins. We have to assume that they were their in order to, Get right with God. Instead, they get on the wrong side of the Roman leadership and end up violently put to death. It’s a murder in the very House of God. How can this happen. Jesus asks the ones who bring up this particularly bad news whether they think that the Galileans were more sinful than all the other people in the Galilee were. Why would Jesus do this?

The common explanation about why bad things happen to good people was that the people bad things happened to were not good. The idea was that the loving God rewarded good people and punished the bad ones. Therefore, the people who were killed by Pilate must have had it coming. Otherwise, the all-powerful, all-good God on high would have prevented the murder in his own house. Right?

Wrong. Jesus rejects that notion completely. He goes their example one better by adding to it another case taken from the current events of his day. He asks if the people listening to him think that the 18 who were killed when the Tower of Siloam fell were the worst sinners in Jerusalem. No, he tells the crowd, once again rejecting the connection between our own sins and the bad things that happen to us. Jesus opens up the possibility that bad things happen to good people. This is something he did throughout his ministry. He didn’t treat lepers and other outcasts of society as people who should be cast out. Jesus constantly ministered to the people no one else cared about. He showed that the leprosy they had, the other problems they suffered with did not mean that they were beyond God’s love and care.

So why do bad things happen to good people? Or, for that matter, why do good things happen to bad people? Why isn’t life fair?

Life isn’t fair in many instances because we humans make it unfair. We take our free will and make bad choices that hurt ourselves or others. If I put my hand in a fire, I will get burned. That’s the way the world works. Actions have consequences. For example, if I get drunk and go for a drive, any trouble I get in does not happen because God is punishing me. The bad things that happen are the result of my choice, my wrong choice. There is a lot of evil introduced to the world through our sins and the sins of others. God gave us free will. We have a choice about how we live our lives, what we do each day. These choices have consequences.

Perhaps God could go around taking away all the consequences of our actions. What if I could put my hand into a fire and God would protect it from burns? In a world like that, I could go out and get drunk quite confident that God would protect me on the drive home, keeping me and everyone in my path safe. In a world where God makes everything I do work out fine, no matter what choice I make, it wouldn’t hurt me or others. But if God were to remove all the consequences of our actions, then our choices wouldn’t be a real choice. No matter what we did life would work out just the same. That’s not free will.

Then there are the so-called acts of God, which we sometimes bring on ourselves. Standing in a field during a lightning storm can get you killed, but I’m not sure it would be fair to blame that death on an act of God. However, I cannot take all of the suffering in the world and explain it away. There are many forms of suffering that I cannot explain at all. How can I explain away birth defects? Is the all-knowing God conveniently elsewhere when a child is born crippled or blind? Where is this good God when a child is dying of cancer? Where is God when we suffer?

The answer is that God is with us. God is with us in our pain and suffering as well as in our joys. The bold claim of Christianity is that we have God with us. Our with-us God came and lived among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It was then and remains God’s boldest experiment. People could have rejected God completely and never given it another thought. That’s almost what happened. At the time he died, Jesus had been abandoned by his disciples, those closest to him in his ministry, to die a lonely, shameful death. Jesus could have changed the rules and come down off the cross. But, God had humbled himself to become human and God would not change the rules when the world dished out the worst it had to offer. If being a human who spoke out for love and justice got a human a shameful death on a cross, then God made flesh in Jesus would die on a cross. God would not give up on loving us no matter how much that love cost.

So when bad things happen to good people (or to bad people), God is there. God is with us in the right choices we make, rejoicing and with us in the wrong choices we make suffering with us. God gave us free will and so introduced the possibility of suffering in this world. Then God entered our world, with all of its joys and sorrows and suffered as one of us, not just to see how humans live, but to show us how much God cares for us.

Therefore, Jesus rejected the notion that the people killed by Pilate were killed for their sins. Jesus also rejected the idea that the people crushed when the Tower of Siloam fell were evil. Bad things happen to good people and to bad people. Jesus warned his hearers that they should repent and return to God while they still could. If they did not repent and return to God, they could die as those killed by Pilate or the Tower falling had died and would be unprepared. Jesus taught that in the unfair, uncertain world we live in, we should return to the certainty of God. The with-us God who will help us endure and overcome the adversity we face.

Then Jesus went on to bring his point home with a parable. He told of a man who owned a fig tree for three years. After three years of taking care of the tree, without getting any fruit, the man was ready to cut down the fig tree. The Gardner told the man to give the fig tree another try. The Gardner’s plan was to give the tree even more care, by digging around it and putting manure on it. The Gardner wanted to give the fig tree even more care and attention before deciding to cut it down.

The Gardner is God and we are the fig trees. God cares for us in hopes that we will bear good fruit. But even when we disappoint God for years, God is willing to try again and give us more loving care.

This season of Lent is a time set aside for examining our lives and returning to God. The time for repentance and renewal is now. Examine your life. Decide what is fundamental for you. What is important. Are you on track in your own spiritual journey? Or have you stalled or gotten of course. Now is the time to reflect. Are you bearing fruit? Does your life look like a Christian life to those around you? Are you getting farther along in your spiritual journey? Are you closer to God or farther from God than you were last year this time? Now is the time to reflect and renew your commitment.

We don’t have to like bad news. But in this fallen world, there will always be more bad news than we care to hear. Today’s Gospel gives a way to make sense out of some of the bad news we hear. Today’s Gospel gives us the Bad News According to Jesus Christ. And according to Jesus, the bad news is not the whole story. The bad news is not the final answer. The final answer is God’s love.

Amen.