+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Those of you who have been subjected to my sermons over the years know that I have a particular bête noir, namely the myth of human progress that took hold of Protestant theology in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries. The horror of the First World War forced a reassessment, and a rediscovery of more sober views of Original Sin and the sovereignty of God. Naturally, this wasn’t the first time such a dreadful disaster forced a reëvaluation along these lines. Perhaps less known to us, but which stood until the last century as the definitive disaster to befall the West, was not a war but a natural disaster–namely the Lisbon earthquake, which took place on All Saints’ Day 1755 and which killed tens of thousands in Portugal and Spain and what is today Morocco.
This disaster led to an increased concern with theodicy, the problem of evil, the question (to put it simply) of why bad things happen to good people. I am not accustomed to quoting Voltaire, since I think, his being a Deist, his “answer” to the question is not entirely satisfactory, even if his most famous meditation on the problem, in the novella Candide, is redolent of the answer to be found in Ecclesiastes: best to tend one’s garden, whatever Dr. Pangloss says. In any event, Voltaire’s statement of the problem is compelling, both in the novella and in his poem on the Lisbon disaster, which I’ll not read in full but whose opening lines should suffice to highlight the problem:
Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts–
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
The world is an evil place and full of suffering. Voltaire and Job pose the essentially same question, albeit arriving at polar opposite conclusions.
In today’s Gospel Jesus asks the question yet again, and his answer, though not of the warm, fuzzy variety does give us a path forward. Here we have Jesus responding to two tragedies which are otherwise not to be found in the historical record–which I contend is not evidence that they didn’t happen, but rather highlights the fact that in a world full of suffering, the victims of all but the most horrific examples of cruelty are sadly soon forgotten. The eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were almost certainly simply bystanders, victims of slapdash construction and “being at the wrong place at the wrong time.” The Galileans slaughtered by Pilate’s men were not only blameless; they were righteous, having been in the midst of offering the appointed sacrifices to God. Jesus’ point is that bad things do happen to good people. There is no neat correlation between faith and prosperity.
Perhaps the Pharisees wanted Jesus to identify some clear reason these victims “should have been punished.” Maybe they were just trying to trip Jesus up. Or maybe they were genuinely struggling with the same question that Job and Voltaire were struggling with, and with which we, too, continue to struggle. We don’t know what the Pharisees’ intentions were. In any event, Jesus didn’t give them the kind of answer they wanted; if we’re honest, he doesn’t give us the answer we want, but he does give us what we need. He doesn’t say “everything happens for a reason”, as if the Gospels were Hallmark Channel movies and Jesus is the charming love interest character. What he says, rather, is “repent.”
Now that seems harsh, but it only is if we have a very narrow view of the nature of repentance, if we think all it is is saying “I’m a rubbish person.” You see, true repentance includes both a turning away and a turning toward. Yes, it includes the recognition of and sorrow for our sins. It also means finding in our God the assurance of forgiveness and a relationship which can lead to growth and abundance. I don’t mean abundance in an earthly sense–whether it be material prosperity or a shield against life’s difficulties. I mean abundance in bearing the fruits of the spirit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.
I think this is why Jesus immediately follows his rejection of the Pharisees’ desire for an easy answer to the problem of evil with the parable of the fig tree.
You can sometimes tell that I choose the art for the bulletin long before writing my sermon. I think that image, which I chose because it’s interesting, shows Jesus as the vineyard owner and some nondescript guy as the gardener. Now, I think that’s all wrong. I don’t know who the vineyard owner is supposed to represent in the parable. Parables can be tricky that way. Maybe he’s supposed to be God the Father, whose love may take the form of wrath (that’s not the primary mode in which our God “whose property is always to have mercy” operates, but it’s not entirely off the table). Or maybe he’s supposed to be the devil, whose chief delight is in cutting down the child of God, severing that child from the roots of God’s beneficence, before he or she has the chance to bring forth good fruit. So, I don’t know who the vineyard owner is supposed to be. I do know that the gardener is Jesus Christ, whose own good spirit tends and fertilizes and waters our souls that we might flourish.
None of this means that we will be spared hardship. The curse of Original Sin, the fallen state of creation, means that even an old, sturdy tree might fall victim to blight or be torn out by a tornado. But the more firmly rooted we are, the more we allow Christ to tend our souls, the better able we will be to whether the storms of life without losing heart, and the more assured we’ll be that when this life is over there is for us an eternal garden in which every good fruit will be preserved by the spiritual gardener, and where we may commune with him unto the ages of ages.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.