“God’s Will: Tragedy or Triumphant”
March 23, 2025
Luke 13: 1–9
At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them — do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’
Then he told this parable: ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’
It is hard to let God be God. We long to explain things only God can know.
A fellow pastor tells about an encounter with a mother whose child was in crisis and she was attempting to explain things beyond her ability.
While serving as a hospital chaplain this pastor received a call to sit with a mother while her five-year-old daughter was in surgery. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, she could no longer see. At the hospital, a CT scan showed that a large tumor was pressing on the girl’s optic nerve. Surgery was scheduled for just days later.
On the day of the surgery, the mother sat alone in the waiting room. She was staring at a patch of carpet in front of her, with her eyebrows raised in that half-hypnotized look. The chaplain arrived and sat down beside her. Some minutes passed before she looked up and after some small talk, she told just how awful her daughter’s health crisis was for her. She even explained why it had happened.
“It’s my punishment,” she said. “It is my punishment for smoking those horrid cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so God made my baby sick.” Then she started crying so hard that what she said next came out like a siren: “Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I am going to kill my own child!”
Even seasoned pastors find such words hard to hear. At this point, a wise pastor knows to forego reflective listening and instead offer a remedial understanding of God. So, he replied: “I don’t believe in a God like that. The God I know wouldn’t do something like that.”
However, this response to the mother’s thinking that her daughter’s tumor was due to God’s anger over smoking messed with the woman’s basic ability to understand God. However miserable it made her to think her smoking led to God putting a tumor in her daughter’s brain, she preferred a punishing God to an absent or capricious one. While the Pastor could understand a loving God despite tragedy and crisis like a young girl with a brain tumor, at that moment the mother could not. In her thinking, there had to be a God-given reason her daughter had a tumor. She was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe.
Have you thought in this way? Have you heard people attribute health crises, tragedies, even death to God? It is common when a crisis arises that we go looking for causes. We scrutinize our actions or inactions — we go hunting for some cause to explain the effect in hopes that we can stop causing it. What we crave in these experiences, above all, is control over the chaos and the suffering in life.
From generation to generation, people have sought to make sense of things that make no sense. We look causes for suffering and tragedy OR we blame God. We say things about God or put words into God’s mouth that are our own, not God’s.
Some years ago, William Sloan Coffin was the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City. After his son Alex died in a car accident, Coffin shared a sermon on cause and effect thinking. Alex drowned after he lost control of his car during a terrible
storm and it careened into Boston Harbor. The following Sunday, Rev. Coffin spoke about his son’s death. He thanked all the people for their expressions of sympathy, for the food brought to their home. But he also raged; he raged about well-meaning folks who had hinted that Alex’s death was God’s will. “I knew the anger would do me good,” he said.
Then he went on: “Do you think it was God’s will that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper…that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had a couple of beers too many? Do you think it was God’s will that there were no streetlights along that stretch of the road and no guard rail along Boston Harbor? The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, ‘It is the will of God’ or that ‘God wanted him or her more.’”
Coffin continued: “Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”
It is hard to let God be God. We long to make sense of senseless tragedies and search for reasons even when there are none. Or when bad things happen, we pin blame on God. Sometime people think terrible events are prompted by extraordinary sinfulness. People constantly ask why God sends (or at least permits) terrible things to happen. People often blame God for tragedy.
Jesus anticipated these kinds of questions and this kind of thinking in today’s Bible reading. Two terrible tragedies happened in Jerusalem. In the first one Pilate, the Roman governor, had killed some Galileans, they were people who protested the Romans empire’s taxes. They were killed while making sacrifices in the temple. In the second incident, a tower fell near the pool of Siloam killing 18 people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The first was an intentionally evil act, the second purely accidental. Yet, how can such things be explained?
This is the quandary Jesus poses to a crowd of people. He asks the questions that were on people’s minds. Were the Galileans worse sinners than other Galileans? Were the people killed by the tower worse offenders than others who came to wash in that pool? Did these people do something that made them deserving of punishment? Or was God’s will such that these awful things were intended as a way to send a message?
Jesus answers his own question by saying this: “No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Jesus’ words make our head spin! He seems to be contradicting himself.
Jesus is saying this: do not look for cause and effect explanations. Were those who died worse sinners? “No,” he says, “but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Jesus is telling them to turn their attention toward their own lives — do not speculate about others.
What about our lives? We can spend so much energy trying to explain things — so much time fretting over other people’s lives that we forget to pay attention to the reality of our own sin and need to turn toward God for mercy. Thus, Jesus says in so many words, “Let these senseless deaths awaken you. Repent.”
You see, in answer to questions about cause and effect, why bad things happen to people — Jesus isn’t interested in our pursuit of answers. Jesus makes it clear that there is no rational explanation for these tragedies. He does not say, “It was God’s will.” The Galileans killed by Pilate were victims of an evil governor’s whims. The people killed by the falling tower — it could have been anyone who happened to be standing there.
So what does Jesus want to teach us through this story? Instead of providing answers to inexplicable suffering, tragedy and death, Jesus says — do not let these trials and challenges stop you from following Me and believing and trusting in a faithful, loving God.
“Repent” is the word Jesus uses which involves a turning to God; repentance is a radical change in direction from a life lived for self, to a life lived under the mercy of God, and God’s free and gracious acceptance of us.
“Turn, change, go in the direction of God. Instead of looking for answers that cannot be found, put your energy into faithfully following me,” Jesus says.
Depending on what you want from God, this declaration by Jesus to repent, to turn, to quit worrying about why bad things happen — why tumors grow in our bodies and cars off rain slicked roads may not sound like good news. I doubt that it would have sounded like good news to the mother in that hospital waiting room. But for those of us who know how Jesus’ life on this earth turned out; for those of us who have come to trust that God’s will is for good, this is good news enough.
In the fear of the world’s crises, in response to the chaos that comes into our lives, what we can do is turn our faces to the cross — and align our lives with God’s mercy and God’s will which we know chiefly in Jesus — the savior of the world.
