Ex.3:1-17 Ps. 103:1-11
1 Cor. 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9
We cannot help but think about innocent suffering today as we watch the news of bombs being purposely dropped on civilians, on hospitals, school, and theatres in Ukraine.
We can’t help but inwardly or outwardly asking be why? Why Putin? Why Russia? Or Why God? You are all powerful, you are all loving; that is how we define you. If you are all powerful you can prevent innocent suffering. If you are all-loving then you certainly have the heart to prevent innocent suffering. Innocent suffering persists; does that mean that you and I have to give up one of the definitions of God as being all loving and all powerful?
The people in the time of Jesus were speculating about the cause of some untimely deaths, even deaths which had the desecration of the victims remains. Their blood was mixed with some of the sacrifices for Pontius Pilate. Other people had died when a tower fell upon them.
Jesus brought these up, but they obviously caused moral outrage and questions about how and why such deaths could happen in God’s world. Most of the time, in order to save our understanding of God so as not to offend God, people often say, “We don’t know why, but they must be happening to punish people for their misdeeds.” In order to save our definitions of God as all loving and all powerful, we switch the blame to fallen angels, serpents and people in the created order. So, there has to be some causal blame built into the system.
How was the all-powerful God doing for Moses and Israel? Do you remember all those promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob about being a great nation? What happened to the promise? Jacob’s sons and their families had come to be made slaves in Egypt. And Moses had fled Egypt and got married to a Midianite and settled in for domestic life, and when he had given up any aspiration of leadership or calling, God appeared to him in the burning bush and called the doubting Moses, by revealing to him his Name, his holy name, the name that Jews refuse to pronounce.
His name is translated as I am that I am. Why say “I am” twice? Because God is a God of Time and in Time. God was then, God is now and God will in the future. And that means everything else that was and is, will be kept and remembered for ever. In short, God is a perpetually becoming, creating God. Each moment of time a new ring is added to totality and God always encompasses the outer ring, because as St. Paul wrote, “We live and move and have our being in God.”
God as creating God and always becoming means that God is pure freedom in Time. And it turns out that this God of pure freedom, shows the greatest divine weakness. And what is the divine weakness? God sharing true and proportionate freedom with everyone and everything in creation, and then not interfering with that freedom. To interfere would be to make moral significance null and void. You might think that this compromises God’s greatness and perfection. And yes, it does because God always has a better competitor, but just one. And who is the better competitor of God? It is the Divine Self in a future state. Yes, in the world of time, creativity and freedom, everyone and everything surpasses itself in a future state, even the Divine Self. When God continually surpasses the Divine Self in becoming, it means our freedom makes a real and genuine contribution to outcomes. It means our freedom is real and not predestined.
So that means there is genuine freedom for lots of marvelous things to happen, lots of horrifying things, and everything in between.
The conditions of freedom create probable conditions of what Paul called testing, temptations, and even ordeals. To live in time, is to live the conditions of temptation/mistimings of events, motives, systems so as to create conflicts and even harm. Paul said that with and in temptation there is a way of escape. And what is the way of escape? It is more time, more chances. Time is always its own escape from the past to be different.
And this is what Jesus was asking, a continuous better and different future of each of us surpassing ourselves in excellence in our future.
Jesus was saying, you can speculate about the causes of the deaths of others and about bad luck that happens but the effective response to anything is repentance. Surpass yourself in excellence in each moment.
What does repentance have to do with the cause of death? Well, no one is going to die perfect; but the perfect way to die is in the state of repentance. Repentance is having the wisdom to know what we can change and what we can’t.
And what can repentance make us in our future after we have died? Forgive me for using the Gospel metaphor, but repentance can make our afterlives in this world good compost for a better world after we are gone. If we have left this world with the witness of repentance, then we will be good compost for the world which survives to be fertilized to fruitfulness.
So, the Gospel for us is that God’s power is seen in the freedom which is shared with all in time. This means that we are living the conditions of temptation, tests, and ordeals; it also means more time is always the escape. And the escape is to repent. And repentance is the life recommended by Jesus, and it is the perfect state to die in. And if we live the repentant life, we will be good compost to give the future a better chance to survive in better ways. Amen
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