The Hillcrest Medical System over the years offered an annual clergy appreciate day, on which credentialed clergy would be invited to hear a guest speaker and enjoy a delicious lunch. One year the speaker was noted rabbi and author Harold Kushner. I arrived early and entered the auditorium, To my surprise and delight, Rabbi Kushner walked up to my table, introduced himself, and we had a great conversation prior to the day's program. Mostly we talked about his latest book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which was the product of Kushner's soul-searching about the meaning of the untimely death of his son from a rare disease. Could this mean, as ancient Jewish scholars surmised, that the boy or his parents or grandparents had sinned and this was God's payback? No way. Kushner realized that God made a free universe in which bad things will occur; that the question was not to sort out how to assign blame, but to ask where God is in such a crisis. God is right there with us to share in our pain and to help us deal and heal.
Jesus addresses the same fundamental question of whether God is an amoral micromanager in today's reading [Lk 13: 1-9]. He speaks of two events, Oddly, neither is attested anywhere in the records of secular scholars. The first is a slaughter of Galileans during their worship, a massacre attributed to Pontius Pilate. Contrary to some conciliatory material in the New Testament, the fact is that Pilate was a monster, pure and simple. The story is perfectly consistent with what we know of him. The second event was the suddeb collapse of a tower at Siloam resulting in the death of several bystanders. Jesus asks whether the victims of these tragedies were worse people than anyone else; his answer: no. Bad things happen to good people.
This is a point that self-serving religious leaders try to ignore to their advantage. Back during high school we had to read The Bridge over San Luis Rey. Therein a priest tries to attribute deaths from failure of the bridge to the moral inadequacies of the victims. That didn't play, and it still doesn't. I remember being horrifed when televangelists tried to blame the Twin Towers collapse on sinfulness among those working there and to blame Katrina deaths on New Orleans' tolerance for gay people. What a bunch of hogwash! God loves all his children, but bad things happen to good people.
The end point of Jesus' engagement was to say that none of us has a clue how much time remains. Life hangs by a thread. Like the fig tree Jesus references, we need to produce while we can, while our clock is still running. If we find that we have not been productive while planted in the bad soil of materialism, consumerism, and greed, we may be allowed extra time to be transplanted into the rich soil of the Gospel. What is important is that we bear fruit.
Consider Moses in our Hebrew bible reading today [Exodus 3: 1-15]. He became a murderer on the run and now he starts a new life in Midian in a soil of comfort and security. After God comes after Moses in the burning bush experience, Moses comes up with no less than five different excuses as to why he cannot answer the call. But God isn't buying Moses's excuses, And he doesn't buy ours. We must discern and respond, realizing that we never know how much time we have left.
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