Boxed Understandings

DAILY BYTE

The story Jesus told in Luke 13.1-13 (and the conversation which precedes it), does not in way deny life’s dissonance and disharmony. Rather it affirms it and then asks hard questions of us in turn. In fact, the whole parable is shaped by a consistent and repetitive pattern of first affirming and then questioning. The first of these can be summarized as:

Life can be difficult to understand and is unpredictable, so why try to fit everything into neat boxes?

That is exactly what those who were questioning Jesus were doing – they were trying to find a neat religious explanation for why people suffered. The Hebrews of the time commonly believed that suffering was the result of your own sin. So if you were desperately poor – it was because of your sin. If you were involved in an unfortunate accident or slaughtered by a megalomaniac – again it was because of your sin. Remember the question asked by the disciples in John 9 – ‘Jesus was this man born blind because of his sin or because of his parent’s sin?’

Both in John 9 and here, Jesus totally rejects this particular boxed understanding. Jesus just acknowledges that life can be tough and difficult to understand at times. But we Christians tend to be threatened by these questions, because the issue of suffering for many seems to be the single greatest obstacle for belief in a loving God. And so we try to come up with neat explanations, and complicated theological concepts in an attempt to explain it all.

Perhaps though, the answer does not lie in answers themselves, but rather in relationship and presence. The story is told of a group of training ministers who were doing a ‘Pastoral Counselling’ course and part of their assessment was a group discussion around some difficult situations. Their examiner would listen to their responses and mark them accordingly.

The first issue they had to discuss was this: A little girl in your church recently and very suddenly lost her mother. She approaches you at coffee after church and asks you, “Will I see my mommy in heaven?”

This launches these young training pastors, all eager to impress their Professor, into a complicated discussion about a variety of things such as the teaching of 1 Corinthians 15, different ideas of the immortality of the soul, and how they could be explained to a 7 year old girl.

However, as the discussion progressed, they began to sense they were not doing very well – their Professor was looking less and less pleased as time wore on. One of them stopped and questioned the Professor, “I sense we have lost ourselves a little. Could you help us? What would you have said to this little girl?”
The wise Professor replied, “Well, if a grieving little girl asked me about the eternal destination of her mother, I think they most important response I could come up with would be to say, ‘It sounds like you really miss your mommy.’”
At this stage the little girl did not need neat theological answers and boxed understandings. No, what she most needed was someone to care for her; someone who was willing to step into her confused suffering, to listen to her, to be with her and to love her.

There are situations out there that are just so gray and hazy, so complex in their pain, that to try to explain them is to do them an injustice. But always, we Jesus followers can love, we can support, we can reach out armed not with absolute certainty and all the right answers, but with loving faith.
And perhaps that is what is most needed.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Almighty God, in his teaching Jesus acknowledges that life is both difficult to understand and unpredictable. We know that nothing in life is absolutely certain except the truth that you are gracious, merciful and kind, and that your loving presence will always, always be there. For this we give thanks and praise. Amen.

FOCUS VERSE

John 9:1-2

As he went along, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

Luke 13:1-2

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?