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those 18 on whom the tower in Saloam fell and killed them. Do you think that they were worse offenders than all others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, I titled the sermon this morning. It’s called How to Watch the News with a Good Conscience. That’s why we are here in church, so that the Lord can give us a good conscience. And we know what the conscience is doing. At least we know the general outlines that our conscience is called to. The most important thing that our conscience is supposed to be doing is telling us when we’re doing the right or the wrong thing. Our conscience is like this little judge that’s watching out the things that we’re doing and saying and thinking, and saying, “That’s wrong” or “That’s right,” “that’s helpful” or “that’s not.” It shows us our own guilt. That’s why God gave us a conscience. And our conscience is, to one degree or another, good at that. What our conscience is almost always good at is pointing out when other people sin against us. Even when we’re not sensitive to our own sins, we’re particularly sensitive to the sins of other people. We might not notice when we talk bad about other people, but boy, we sure notice when someone talks bad about us.
But there’s a third thing that our conscience also registers that we don’t often think about, and that is that our conscience recognizes when other people sin against other people, or when there’s something generally wrong in the world. Our conscience registers the rightness or the wrongness of the context in which we live. We had this a couple of weeks ago in Isaiah when he said, “I’m a man of unclean lips, and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” That’s that second part, the recognition that we live in the midst of an unclean world, of a fallen world, of a corrupt world, of an evil world, and that there’s wicked things that are happening all around us. And that is brought to us with our own eyes. I mean, we can walk around and see it.
But, you know, I don’t know if you’ve thought much about this. I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago that if I was just to judge the general condition of the world by what I’d see, I wouldn’t think it’s that bad. I mean, except for the traffic on I-35, I mostly see nice things. I mean, even as a pastor, and I’m visiting the hospital and going to see people in their deathbeds, and you get to see the downside of life, but you also get to see a lot of joy as well.
But when you turn on the news, and here’s what we have to engage with, because it’s what Jesus is doing in the gospel lesson, when they’re bringing this news of this tragedy of what happened in the temple, and Jesus himself brings up the tragedy of the tower. When we turn on the news, we probably hear one of two things. We hear about tragedy or we hear about politics. And maybe it’s not that different, right? The thing that happened, and here’s what’s interesting about it. As opposed to seeing something bad with your own eyes, where you can try to go and help and fix it, when you’re being shown something evil on the TV, or when you’re listening to something terrible that happened on the radio, or reading about it in the newspaper, or even hearing about it from a friend, there’s nothing that you can do about it. You can’t go and fix it. You can’t jump in and change it. That’s what you want to do.
I remember I was thinking about it this morning, Carrie and I, and our family were in Aurora when there was the shooting at the theater. And I remember thinking about that when it happened. I thought the first thing that people would do is they would say, “Why did this happen? How can God let this happen? What’s going on? How can such evil exist in the world?” But that’s not actually the first thing that people did. The first thing that everybody did was go to the blood bank to donate blood. Because everyone thinks, “Well, what can I do about it? What can I do to help? How can I jump in? How can I be engaged? How can I help with this?” But what if you can’t help? What if there are just things that are wrong in the world and you can’t stop them and you can’t help the people who are suffering from it? You just know about the tragedy. Now, that affects our conscience in a particular way. It’s a kind of a, I don’t know, it’s like a fuzz or a grumble. It’s like a radio station that’s slightly out of tune that’s in the conscience, that’s just constantly there, and it’s telling us that something is wrong in the world. And we want to reflect on that in such a way that we can make it make sense.
Now, this takes us right to the text, because in Luke chapter 13, Jesus is with the disciples and heading towards Jerusalem. And someone comes into the crowd and says, “Hey, did you hear what happened in Jerusalem? Pilate mixed the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifice.” Right? Now, we don’t know anything else about this event except for what it says in the scriptures. You can’t read about it in any of the other histories. You can’t find any mention of it in Josephus. I mean, amongst all of Pontius Pilate’s wicked acts, it’s not mentioned there. But the best we can figure is that there were some Jews from Galilee who had come down into Jerusalem and they were offering a sacrifice, maybe a mourning sacrifice or a sin offering, or maybe they were celebrating one of the feasts. And as they were doing it, Pilate identified them as criminals, or at least worthy of death, so he sent his soldiers, his executioners, into the temple grounds and actually slaughtered them while they were offering their sacrifices so that their blood is mixed with the sacrifice.
We don’t know if that’s what happened, but that’s about as good as we can figure from the news report that comes to Jesus from these people. And they’re sitting there, these people, the crowds in Jerusalem, the disciples, all of them. And Jesus knows that they’re trying to figure out, “Why did this wicked thing happen?” I mean, it’s really ugly. It’s like a church shooting, I guess. It’s like they’re going to church, and they’re going to offer their sacrifices, and while they’re in the middle of those pious acts, someone comes with a sword and ends their life. And they say, “Why did this happen to them? What did they do to be afflicted so bad?” Now, Jesus knows that’s what they’re thinking, and so he brings it up, and he makes it explicit. He said, “Do you think that those who were killed were worse than everyone else in Jerusalem?” And before they can even say, “Well, yeah, that’s what we were thinking,” Jesus says, “No, that’s not the case.”
And then Jesus brings up another story, another tragedy that happened. There was a tower that must have been by the pool of Saloam there on the southeast side of Jerusalem. And maybe even in the construction or after it was finished, it collapsed. And the result of this collapse was that 18 people died. And Jesus had heard about it. And he asked them, he says, “Hey, those 18 people who were killed by the collapsing tower of Saloam, were they worse than everybody else in Jerusalem who didn’t die?” No, I tell you.
Now, this is the first thing that Jesus is teaching us: how not to watch the news. We should not watch the news trying to figure out why those bad things happen to those bad people. I remember the best example I could think of this morning was when, oh, I forgot already the name of the hurricane that hit New Orleans, Katrina. When Hurricane Katrina, the early church had to tell me as well, and that’s apparently how long my memory is, one and a half hours. Yeah. So when the hurricane hit Katrina, there were the preachers who were saying, “Well, that’s because New Orleans is so wicked that God is punishing them.” Well, okay, there are a couple of things that are wrong with that. The first is that we already knew that New Orleans was wicked before the hurricane hit. And the second thing is that you get to think that if the hurricane doesn’t hit you, that you are not wicked. That’s just not the way it works.
In fact, Jesus says that’s not the way you’re supposed to receive this news. Why has God let you know about that? Why did God let the disciples know about these Galileans who were murdered? Why did God let them know about the tower that had killed 18 people? And why does God let you know about all of the terrible things that are happening in the world — about the wars that are happening in Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza, and all these other fires and disasters and the people who are dying from one way or another and all this stuff? Why does the Lord let you know that? Why doesn’t he keep it from you? Is it so you can say that the people who are suffering are worse sinners? Or so that you can excuse yourself because that tragedy hasn’t struck home, so you must be okay? The answer from Jesus is no, that’s not why. But then he tells us why.
He tells us why we know these things. Responding to both the disaster in the temple and the collapsing tower, he says to all the disciples and to you and me, he says, “Unless you repent, you will likewise perish.” The reason why we know about tragedy, why the Lord lets us hear these things, is because he desires us to repent. In fact, he commands us to repent. What does that mean? What’s repentance? We normally think of repentance. I think we hear it preached as to change your ways, but that’s the fruit of repentance. Repentance is contrition in faith. Repentance is when the Holy Spirit takes the law of God and presses it right into your heart so that you know that you are a sinner that deserves God’s anger and wrath. Like we confess, “I’ve deserved your temporal and eternal punishment.” This is the first part of repentance, this contrition that knows that I don’t deserve anything from the Lord — that my blood should be mixed with the sacrifice, that the tower should collapse on me, that I don’t deserve a single day, a single minute of my own life, that every single breath and heartbeat is a gift from God’s grace, and much more than that, that he should send us straight into his eternal punishment in hell, but that he doesn’t.
This is contrition to know that. And in faith, the second part of repentance, is to know that Christ has carried our sins, forgiven our sins, and promised us eternal life. So that when we see tragedy, we should say, “This should be mine, but the Lord has spared me even from eternal death and is bringing me to eternal life.”
Now, there’s very specific application in the text to the people of Jerusalem. We see that in the parable that he tells right away. He told him a story about a fig tree. There was a man who had a vineyard, and in the middle of the vineyard, he had a fig tree, and for three years, the fig tree was there, and it didn’t have any fruit on it. And so the owner of the vineyard says, “Cut it down.” But the gardener says, “Well, let’s give it one more year. I’ll dig around it. I’ll put some manure on it, some fertilizer, and we’ll see if it bears fruit this next year. And if it doesn’t bear fruit this year, then next year we’ll cut it down.”
Now, what is that talking about? Jesus was baptized about three years before this parable. And the fig tree is the people of Israel, and the vineyard owner is God the Father who says, “Let’s cut it down,” but Jesus is the gardener who says, “Let’s give it one more year because I have some special work to do. I’ve got to suffer, I’ve got to die on the cross, I’ve got to be raised from the dead. Let’s check back on the fig tree after I’ve done these things. Let’s see if the people here are repentant and believing in me after my death and my resurrection. And if they’re not, then we can cut it down.”
And that’s eventually what happens. In the year 70 AD, when the Romans come through Jerusalem and not one stone is left upon the other. In fact, if you want to think about it in this way, the Galileans whose blood is mixed with the sacrifice and the collapsing of the tower in Saloam are like little mini tragedies of what will come when the Romans come into Jerusalem. And there’s the abomination of desolation, they offer an unclean sacrifice on the temple, they murder all the priests in the temple, and it’s not just the tower of Saloam that’s collapsed, but every single building in Jerusalem is tossed over.
In other words, Jesus is saying, “This is just a little microcosm of what’s on the way unless you repent.” Now that’s the specific application. But there’s also a general application for us. And this has to do with this business of a clean conscience. When we see all these tragic things happening around the world, it bothers us, it troubles us. And especially when we can’t do anything about it. But we have to go back to this question: why has God shown me these things? Why does God let me hear about the car crashes or the court cases or the political speech, or the crime, or the tragic event, or why does God show those things to me? Let me see them. Is it so that I can get angry? Or is it so that I can worry? Or so that I can wring my hands constantly and lose all hope? No? So I can blame the people that the tragedy happened to or the people that caused the tragedy? Or I can feel good about myself because the tragedy didn’t come to my home? No. The Lord has shown us all these things so that we can love and serve and pray, and most importantly, so that we can repent.
In fact, it’s quite nice that if you listen to the news that comes on the top of the hour or you watch the 10 o’clock news, you turn it on and you can say, “The Lord is going to teach me repentance,” that we know that all of our lives are in the Lord’s hands, that the Lord is the one who gives and takes away, that the Lord is our defender and our sustainer, that the Lord sometimes sends trouble to us, not to punish us for our sins, but to chastise us towards righteousness and hope and peace. And that the Lord will carry us through this life and through all the troubles of this life and through death until he brings us at last to the joy of life eternal.
Because God loves you, because your sins are forgiven, because He’s opened eternal life to you, and he wants you to have this comfort in your conscience — that he’s called you by name, that he’s adopted you into his family, that he’s lived and died and risen again for your salvation. So may God grant us this Holy Spirit and sanctify us in this particular way, that we would be good stewards of the bad news that we hear, and that the Holy Spirit would use that to grant us his gift of repentance. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.