She came into my office once years ago; I don’t remember why, but I do remember what. She wanted to tell me the story of her life, and it wasn’t a happy story to tell. From beginning to present, her life was a tale of misery—miserable childhood, dysfunctional parents, failed relationships, dead end jobs—there was not one incident of joy. But she knew who exactly was to blame for this dismal life—God. God hated her, of that she was certain. I don’t remember that there was any particular reason for this hatred. I do remember that she knew her Bible. She could quote chapter and verse, and for every verse or story I could mention that expressed God’s love and mercy, she had another to tell of his anger and hate. If the Scripture had any words of forgiveness, salvation or mercy, they weren’t found in her translation.
This visitor to my office isn’t the first or the only one to hear in scripture exclusively words of condemnation. You can find preachers on Youtube (although I won’t link to them) who will tell you that God hates you. More precisely, God hates most of you, except for a few, where Jesus has persuaded his Father to begrudgingly love you, a bit, as long as you behave. But if you fall off that narrow way—who knows what might happen?
I bring this up because it seems to me that Jesus is disturbingly close to preaching this sort of message in today’s Gospel story. In the story some people bring to his attention a couple of local tragedies—one where Pilate (the local tyrant) killed some people who had simply gone to worship God, and another where a tower fell on folks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was this God’s judgment? To his credit, Jesus says no. But then he goes on to add that judgment is indeed at hand, and his hearers may fare even worse. Then for good measure he tells a parable about God’s patience running out.
Is that the message Jesus was sent to tell us—that God’s patience is running out and we are all in trouble?
It certainly isn’t the message we get in our other reading. Here we see Moses encountering God for the first time. God has a job for Moses, one that will occupy his entire life. It seems that God has heard the cries of his suffering people who are slaves in Egypt. Notice that it isn’t the wickedness, sin or cruelty of the Egyptians that has gotten God’s attention. Understand also that this is not the suffering of God’s pious, innocent people. Spoiler alert—when Moses gets involved he is going to find that the people of Israel are not innocent. They are ungrateful, constant complainers, cowardly, and most importantly—unfaithful. They will be enough to try the patience of both God and Moses, but right now they are suffering, and God wants to save them. In fact, God wants to do more than save them.
God has a plan. He will take these people, his ungrateful, faithless people and change them. It may take a generation, maybe even longer, but he will take them out of slavery and into a new identity. These people will become the people of faith, holy people of law and God’s covenant. They will become courageous, they will become faithful—they will be completely new.
Perhaps when Jesus heard this question about God’s presence in these tragedies it was this story he was remembering, this story of a God with a plan much bigger than just dropping towers on the heads of his misbehaving people. As he warns the people around him to repent, maybe it isn’t just some random call, but something much bigger—a call to repent of the particular sin of blasphemy—speaking lies about God. More specifically, it is the second commandment that they are breaking—the one about idolatry. They have substituted the worship of the one, true God, the God so great that he has no name because human language cannot contain him, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—this God, the one with the salvation plan—they have given up on him in order to worship a small, petty bean-counter God. It is the small God who is arbitrarily dropping towers on people as a random sign of divine displeasure, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Why is it that we so often worship the bean-counter God? Why do we claim to see God’s hand at work in each disaster? A tower falls, a hurricane strikes—people die, and we immediately rush to explain how God’s judgment was involved. Where is God when the tower stands, when the government works, when people have what they need? Well, of course, we don’t need God for those things, that we can handle ourselves. Chaos and destruction—must be God’s hand at work somewhere.
This is why we need the Good News. That God is on our side, that life is a gift and blessing—we could never believe that unless we were shown. So that’s exactly what Jesus does. Each action, each miracle proclaims a message of healing and abundance. Not once does Jesus act to destroy; but still, his message is too much to believe. So he offers one last demonstration of power. In his death, Jesus embraces the surrender that brings victory. In this last miracle of death that overcomes death Jesus makes his point. The Good News is that life matters. It matters because it is God’s gift to us, a gift meant for eternity.
Yet that is not the whole story here. Still we have in Jesus’ words a message of judgment. Can that be part of the Good News?
Of course, it must. Judgment means that our actions and choices matter. There are standards, right and wrong, and God does care. It means that God has a plan. But judgment isn’t always what we think it is. The judgment Jesus brings is on those old ways of worship and faith that have served their purpose. The old system which dictated God’s worship to be done in certain ways, in certain places, by certain people is at an end. Henceforth, as Jesus’ Kingdom message spreads, God’s presence is with all his creation.
Maybe this judgment is being repeated in our own day—as the institutions of religion are crumbling around us, and we are challenged to explain what we believe, maybe it is Jesus’ Gospel we hear again, drawing us from theological systems that we have used to explain and control God’s word, dictating where God is present and whom God loves—could it be that our message is too small to contain the God of our salvation?
If that’s the case, then it is indeed time to repent. Not that we need to repent from just any random wrong-doing—there is a particular call offered here. Our repentance needs to be from those ways, particular and unique to each of us, which keep us from being part of the Kingdom.
It may be that we do not believe that forgiveness is really meant for us—somehow we are the exception to that Good News. Perhaps we are refusing to respond to the call to be different, knowing that we are called to ways of service and compassion, but instead still living as if the old ways of hoarding and division will somehow bring us life. Maybe we just refuse to have hope, closing our eyes to the reality of God’s blessings in our world.
However you imagine yourself to be outside the Good News of God’s love, the message today is : stop it! As Jesus says so many times elsewhere in the Gospel—the Kingdom is at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News