Luke 13:1-9 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
The Third Sunday in Lent Sunday, March 23, 2025 “Bear Fruit of Repentance”
It was not my proudest moment. In fact, I was fairly embarrassed throughout the week. I had a day of skiing that I very much enjoyed, but because I was in a rush and did not take care of adequate sun protection, I ended up with a sunburn on my face. Not only that, because I was wearing a knit hat, I had a line running directly across my forehead to make it even more apparent that there was red on the bottom and lighter, healthier skin above. My kids said I looked like the robber from the movie “Home Alone” whose head was hit by a hot iron, leaving a red mark the shape of the appliance on his face. Every time I looked in the mirror, I realized that I was walking around advertising to people how foolish I had been. There are far worse things that could have happened; I am not trying to complain about what happened to me. I am not trying to get back at my children for making fun of me or trying to gain sympathy from anyone. I mention this incident, though, because sometimes life works like that. A bad thing—in my case some tender red skin and a bit of embarrassment—comes about because of something that I do or don’t do. If I had just taken the little extra time and effort to put some sunscreen on my face once or twice during the day, I could have avoided all of that. Some things are like that, but not everything. Our car broke down on a Wednesday evening after a worship service. As far as I can tell, that didn’t happen because one of us wasn’t paying attention in church. It wasn’t because we didn’t pray that day for a safe ride home. We hadn’t been abusing the vehicle, so that wasn’t it either. Sometimes the bad things happen even when you don’t see a reason or a cause. That’s the reality that Jesus was teaching and speaking about in our verses from Luke 13. He had people in the crowd listening to him who brought up an apparently recent tragedy. The tragedy was the unusual death of several Galileans. These men were making sacrifices in the temple when Pontius Pilate had them killed. Their blood and the blood of their sacrifices were spilled together there in the temple. It was a high-profile, unusual situation. It was in the place of worship for the entire people group. It felt like it might have special significance. That seems to be the reason that people brought it up to Jesus. They were looking for the cause of this terrible effect. Jesus himself brought up another tragedy. There was a tower that collapsed in Jerusalem. When it fell, it killed eighteen people. Another sudden and shocking turn of events. There may have been others very nearby who were just fine. They were just outside of the tower’s fall, but these eighteen were not so fortunate. It sounded like the same sort of situation as the temple issue. It was curious and made people wonder about what caused it. Jesus briefly but clearly in both cases explained that there was a very different lesson to be learned. It wasn’t a matter of cause and effect. People should not look at those incidents and try to figure out the specific sin that caused them. That was natural for people in that society. I have heard people suggest that maybe our society isn’t so much like that, but I find that we can be. I find that when someone sees a tragedy, there is a bit of relief that it wasn’t us. There’s maybe some thankfulness, especially if it was a close call. And there can be a little bit of a notion that I didn’t have something bad happen to me because I am a pretty good person. We start to sort of think of our whole life as rewards and punishments for what we have done or not done. Jesus says tragedy is not about cause and effect. It should be about warning. We should see what happens and repent. Those things should be reminders for us that we are sinners who live in a sinful world. Jesus says “repent or perish.” He’s really pointing out that all of us have done things that deserve punishment. If our lives operated strictly on reward and punishment, cause and effect, then we would have a lot of tragedy coming our way. We actually deserve to perish. We deserve worse than what we see