READING THE HEADLINES

“Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” —Luke 13:2–5

At times, we might imagine that Jesus lived and taught amid the clean storybook pictures that many of us grew up with. But Jesus was not ignorant of the headlines of His day—or unaware of the fears and urgent theological questions they raised.

Like much of history, the times in which Jesus lived were dangerous and difficult. “Life was slow, hard and short.”* We probably do not appreciate how much of Jesus’ teaching and ministry was responding to the tragic news of that day.

However, in these verses, Jesus directly addressed the questions raised by some in the crowd about recent Roman violence against Galilean worshipers—and he added another recent headline to make His point. Like the arguments in the story of Job, the underlying questions are: Why do bad things happen to good people? Is faithfulness a guarantee of blessing and safety? Is tragedy a consequence, judgment, or merely random? Jesus rejected the formula of “Individual evil equals tragedy” and asserted the apparent senseless and random nature of much of the evil in our world. But He also urged repentance in the face of life’s fragility and unpredictability. In lives awash with news and headlines shouting one tragedy after another, we are to respond with compassion, not judgment, aware that we could be affected by the same random, commonplace, and horrific evils that happen to others. Our eternal perspective is most important, but it does not detach us from our call to empathy, service, and healing.

* Kayle de Waal, Hearing the Way (Warburton, Victoria, Australia: Signs Publishing, 2019), 22.