Lent 3, Year C

Everything Happens for a Reason, and Other Lies I’ve Loved is the title of a book

by Kate Bowler, a Canadian who is a professor at Duke Divinity School. She has just

written a book in which she has researched the prevalence of “the Prosperity Gospel,”

sometimes called the “Health and Wealth” gospel, in some segments of American

religion. She has a wonderful life and a wonderful family; she and her husband have a

toddler they adore. She exercises and eats her vegetables. She is 35 years old. She gets

diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. The book, which I recommend, traces her

journey, which is sometimes very sad and other times very funny, with insight and

theological reflection. She explores the often glib, simplistic, and highly problematic

attempts to explain or justify suffering like hers.

There are so many versions of Jesus in which he gets prettied up to make him and

his message more appealing, especially in the face of suffering. Many, but not all, of the

people who do that prettying up are well-meaning. But it’s not the pretty Jesus that

Professor Bowler is interested in; it’s the real Jesus, and it’s the real Jesus that we get in

today’s gospel passage.

People come to Jesus and tell him that Pilate has slain some Galileans while they

were in the very act of making their sacrifices: as Luke puts it, the Galileans whose blood

Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. Various scholars speculate about their motives

for bringing this up, whether it’s curiosity about his response, whether it’s a trap to get

him to say something that will get him in trouble, whether it’s something else. But Jesus

does not go for the idea that if something bad happens to you, it must be because God is

punishing you for doing something bad, and if something good happens, it must be

because God is rewarding you for doing something good. Instead, he confronts and

challenges that idea directly: “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.” And then he takes it one step further. He brings

up deaths that are not caused by a human being’s act of free will, but by a tower falling

on some people but not others. That’s the sort of thing that seems even more likely to be

caused by God. But Jesus brings it up in order to sweep aside that way of thinking, and

says, “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.”

The trouble with the view of the world in which if good things happen to you it

must be because you are good, and if bad things happen to you it must be because you are

bad, is not only because it adds insult to injury for those who suffer. The other trouble is

that for the people to whom good things happen it’s easy to think we are better than other

people, that we are superior somehow, that we have earned these good gifts, that we have

more of God’s favour or we are God’s favourites. And that attitude is the exact opposite

of what real Jesus is here to teach us. What real Jesus is here to teach us is that the good

gifts in our lives are exactly that: gifts. They’re not things we’ve earned by our deeds or

our righteousness or our spiritual purity or even by our faith. God doesn’t owe us any of

those things. And we’ve all got stuff to repent for, every one of us.

Those of us who haven’t been slain while we’re worshipping, those of us who

haven’t had a tower fall on us, aren’t people who are sinless; we are simply people who

have a little more time to repent for what we’ve done in the past, and a little more time to

do better in the future. That’s the connection between Jesus’ comments about the people

who’ve been slain or killed by a falling tower, and the parable he tells of the fig tree

that’s not bearing fruit. The fig tree could be killed immediately, but for reasons that

have nothing to do with its good deeds, it gets to live a little longer in hopes that the extra

time will provide an opportunity for it to do better.

One commentator, Gregor Sneddon, writes about this passage in an essay entitled

“Holy Manure!” He says, “Terrible things happen in this world. There is suffering.

Humanity commits evil. Bad things happen to good people. Death, sin, decay, and

disease still reign, but because of [the resurrection on the] third day, they are not

victorious. The heart of the matter is our choosing to yield to the divine gift which

vanquishes the tomb, not how God tinkers with creation and rescues his favourites. A

wise elder, Murat Yagan, once said, ‘you cannot pray for more grace, He has already

given you everything He could possibly give, including his life—pray for your capacity

to receive it.’ To receive the gift of life, we need to turn and ask for it: that is repentance.”

Sneddon goes on, “The work of repentance is not for God, as if to placate his

wounded pride; rather, repentance reforms us. Repentance creates the space, the posture,

the humility to hear the invitation and cultivate the will to yield to that surrender. Sadly,

sometimes it is the stench of our own “manure” that moves us to hear…The humiliation

of the discovery of our own motivations that are not as holy as we once thought. The loss

of our convictions, righteousness or presumptions or, sometimes tragically, the loss of

something held dear moves us toward that great consent. The “manure of life” becomes

the holy food of regeneration. Repentance is not about our purity; rather, we bring our

broken lives to God, to pass through the eye of the needle, the threshold of faith, the

cross.”

St. Augustine commented that manure is a sign of humility. That has a double

resonance here, in reminding us of the humility of God who takes on mortal flesh with all

its humility, and who suffers the humiliation of betrayal, public flogging, nakedness,

suffering, and public execution. It is also a reminder of our own humility, that we too are

full of manure and can use all the help we can get.

It is from the grace given to us in the humility of Christ, and it is in the

acknowledgment of our own humility, that we can take the opportunity to repent, to

receive the gift of grace not because we’ve done something to earn it or deserve it, but

because God is a generous and merciful and loving God.