Our Gospel today is difficult – there are two parts to the reading; today we focus on the first.
This passage is often titled ‘Repent or Perish’. This is to condense the message to a stark binary, often for dramatic effect, seeking to present a choice. This choice is then often expanded to a choice between Christ and hell, between eternal life and eternal damnation. But none of this is in the text before us.
And when we pause and attend to this holy scripture, much more is revealed, much that unveils the glorious truth of the Gospel and much that can be with us in our Lenten journey.
First, we need some context, because even the opening line is a bit opaque: Jesus is told “about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”
What this is referring to is a recent sacrilegious tragedy in Gailee. Jewish priests, while they were offering sacrifices of animals to God, were murdered by soldiers in the command of Pilate. Thus, their blood, blood of consecrated humans is mingled with the blood of animals for the sacrifice.
Jesus then refers to an accident in Jerusalem where a tower, connected to the Pool of Siloam, which was used for ritual purification, collapsed killing 18 people.
In both accounts people are killed while practicing their religion, performing sacred and holy acts. In the first case it is through conscious, deliberate human evil – they are murdered. In the second case, it is through an accident. But in both cases, while they are close to God, they suffer and are killed.
We are reminded of events in our own time, reminded of the terrorist attack on the Christchurch mosques, just over six years ago, where 51 people were murdered as they worshipped. We are reminded of the accidental stampede that killed 30 people on pilgrimage at Prayagraj in India, just this January.
And, of course, we naturally try to make sense, understand and find meaning in such horror and tragedy. …
Now Jesus, upon hearing the account of the murdered priests, makes it clear that they did not die because they were great sinners. God does not work that way. ‘No’, Jesus says, though the Greek it is more intense, “by no means, not at all”, NO WAY – God is not like this.
God is not a vengeful deity, weighing up our sins in a ledger, looking for ways to punish us. God loves and cherishes all people, all life – each death is a tragedy, an aching loss that will, through Christ, be healed when we, our beloved dead and all things are restored in Divine love.
In his strident response, Jesus is doing something else besides correcting our views of God – he is speaking against his own tradition and the common-sense wisdom of the day. He is not staying silent in the face of harmful religious teachings, as so many of those around him did, encouraged by their tradition, as we too are sometimes encouraged to silence by our church traditions.
Jesus’ second example, of the collapse of the Tower of Siloam, extends his understanding of suffering to accidents. Accidental death, says Jesus, can never be ascribed to God. Accidents are no more the will of God than murder is. And again, today we have created a church culture where we often hear people describing accidents, illness and deaths as ‘God’s will’.
“No way!”, says Jesus as he speaks against this tradition, and we are also encouraged to speak against it.
The example of the Tower of Siloam, connected to the pool of purification, is also important because it was used by common people, not just priests.
There is no difference between the people and priests. All die, either by action or accident, but not as a result of their sinning or offending.
Jesus now links this universality of death to our spiritual unfoldment. We know from the end of chapter 12, that Jesus here is speaking to the crowd as a group of people, not as individuals, as he is speaking to us now as the Body of Christ.
No, I tell you (plural); but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.
Jesus does not say what we, the Body of Christ, need to repent from. This is because repentance is not concerned with changing our outward lives. Repentance from the Greek means to ‘think differently.’ Jesus is not interested in changes in our behaviour, but the change in our hearts.
Upon hearing of the death of the priests, engaged in outward sacrifices, Jesus, from nowhere introduces and reminds his listeners of the outward action of purification by the people at the Pool. Both priests and people are engaged in outer signs and not in the inner transformation that God invites us to.
Unless we turn our inner heart, our inner minds, around, we are still reliant on outer things. We are still focused on doing things to be ‘good’, doing things because our upbringing, the church or a sermon tells us to.
And if we do things because of this motivation, because of this outer motivation not an inner change, then yes, we will perish - we will lose our lives, because we are not actually living our lives, but living a life we think we should be living.
We lose our life not a result of any judgement from God – as Jesus states we perish just as the priests and the people in the tower, just as they did – and how did they die? Not because of any sin or offence.
As we are reminded in Lent, we will all, one day die physically. But also, while alive, we may die a living death when we do not enter the eternal stream of love offered by God. We die when we seek to maintain the ‘I’ of identity, the single ‘you’, while Jesus calls us to be one with each other – the plural ‘you’ – and one with God. If we do not turn our hearts and connect with that eternal stream, enter its flow, become part of it, then yes, we are separate from it, separate from the fullness of life.
Our repentance, our turning back to God, to Her ever-flowing stream of love is however, continuous – we enter, we retreat, we enter again, over and over. This is natural, this is life. This is Lent.
And of crucial significance is that our Gospel today does not point to eternal damnation. It simply says that if we cut ourselves off from the stream of love, we will not have life. It does not refer to eternity at all.
And we know our God is a loving God, a Living God who constantly calls us to turn and enter Her stream of love, no matter how many times we refuse. She will, as our reading from Isaiah states, “abundantly pardon” and continue to invite us. The Hebrew word for “abundantly” is related to words that mean, to grow large and increase, to be fruitful and multiply. It has the sense of continuous expansion.
And so, we can rest assured that no matter how many times we retreat from the stream of God’s love, She will always be there one more time ready to lead us back,
In the Name of Christ. Amen.