“Why do bad things happen to good people?” Some of us here are old enough to remember that as the title of a popular 1980s best-seller. Long before then however, as today’s gospel [Luke 13:1-9] suggests, this was a perennial problem and an endlessly asked question.
Since even Jesus in today’s Gospel avoided answering the questions directly, neither will I be so presumptuous as to attempt an answer here. Jesus’ refusal to speculate why bad things happen to good people in life – or, for that matter, why good things happen to bad people – appears almost as enigmatic and mysterious as God’s answer to Moses’ somewhat impertinent insistence on asking God’s name [Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15]. God reveals himself not through philosophical and moral speculations about what is going on in the world but by otherwise unforeseen personal initiatives. Maybe I Am merely means that God exists, as opposed to false gods who do not, and was God’s way of telling Moses that some things about God that are just mysterious, as if God were saying, “I am who I am and that’s all you need to know.” Maybe that’s why the real Moses (in contrast to the famous 1950s movie’s Moses) refrained from asking God the obvious question, why it has taken God so long to react to his people’s suffering in Egypt and hear their cry of complaint.
On the other hand, God is obviously showing personal interest in his people’s problems. Moses may not have asked, but he may still have wondered why they had to have those problems. Well may we wonder as well. Likewise, those anonymous some people who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices may well have wondered why good Galilean pilgrims on pilgrimage in Jerusalem had been killed by Roman soldiers. And why, for that matter, had 18 innocent people been accidentally killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them?
The last example reminds me of Thornton Wilder’s famous 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which revolves around seeking some connection among the apparently random victims of a bridge’s collapse – in the hope of explaining why they, in particular, died instead of someone else.
Of course, no one needs to read a novel to find plenty of comparable examples in real life, which is full of natural disasters and as many multiple tragedies and injustices of human making. All these things inevitably inspire people to wonder. Could it possibly be that we, whose lives have so far been spared, who are lucky to live lives of affluence and abundance, are somehow more worthy or deserving or virtuous than those who haven’t been so lucky? The question itself seems absurd and maybe morally repugnant. The very universality and randomness of so much human suffering would seem to rebut the logic of any explanation, even if our all-too-human desire to impose some order and logic on the apparently arbitrary randomness of so much of what happens causes us to engage in such speculations in the first place.
As if to pre-empt any such speculation, Jesus just rejected it out of hand, telling us, in effect, don’t go there. Focus instead, he seems to be saying, on where we do have agency, particuarly on our universal need for conversion and repentance. By becoming one with us in the burning bush, by becoming one of us in Jesus, God has, so to speak, agreed to meet us where we are at. But where we are at, Jesus warns us, may not be such a good place after all. Hence his parable – simultaneously so comforting and so threatening – of the unproductive fig tree.
Now most people would probably agree that the whole point of cultivating a fig tree is to produce figs. A fruit-less fig tree hardly warrants the work involved in cultivating it year after year. If there were ever an obvious application for the slogan “three strikes and you’re out,” this would seem to be it. After all, how likely would it be that, after three fruitless years, yet another year’s effort might make the tree bloom at last? Not much!
Yet the gardener in Jesus’ parable is willing to give it one more try. Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future.
To us, impatient people that we are, the thing to do with an unproductive tree would be to stop wasting soil and effort and just cut it down. But God patiently postpones cutting us down. He gives us extra, even lavish attention, cultivating and fertilizing us, revealing himself to us more and more clearly, and more and more fully, through Moses and others, finally sending us his Son as his final and fullest revelation of himself, his final and fullest expression of his patience and mercy, the one piece of really good news in our otherwise dismal history.
As this saga of God’s long-lasting mercy toward the human race reveals so dramatically, amid the world’s cacophony of otherwise bad news and in spite of all that is wrong with the world, God has been opening up new perspectives and opportunities and has been incredibly patient to us in spite of everything. The challenge, however, is that, while God’s patience and mercy may be infinite, we are not. The world may be in a mess, but meanwhile we have to avail ourselves of God’s limitless patience and mercy in the inevitably limited time each of us has.
Lent is our annual reminder, our annual wake-up call, challenging us to bear fruit in spite of everything else that seems so wrong right now, to put God’s patience and mercy to good use – right here right now.
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