WHEN TRAGEDY STRIKES

How does one make sense of what happened in Haiti?  The poorest nation in the western hemisphere - all ready beset by poverty, corruption, environmental destruction, and unsustainable overpopulation - is now leveled by one of the most powerful earthquakes in the last two hundred years.  The answer is that there is no answer.  The “whys” have to remain a mystery, a blatant challenge to our understanding of God, grace, and the value we put on human life.  In the words of Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, and director of the charity “Samaritan’s Purse”:  Ours’ is not to ask “why” but to just do what we can to help.

During Jesus’ ministry two disasters that were making the rounds in the news were the sudden collapse of a tower in Jerusalem that killed a number of people and the massacre of a group of Galileans who were caught up in a disturbance while they were in the city to offer sacrifices at the Temple and the Roman governor overreacted (Luke 13).  The assumption in that day was that the victims of disasters were somehow deserving of their fate.  This view is held by major eastern religions today in the idea that what happens to an individual is his or hers’ “karma” or just recompense for actions in this or a prior life.  

But Jesus would have none of this.  He pointedly says that people who suffer like this are not necessarily any more or less guilty than anybody else.  But neither does Jesus give a reason why these particular people did suffer.  Instead, he says, “… but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” 

This seems like an odd conclusion.  But taken in context of his other teachings what Jesus seems to be saying is this:  “At best, life for all of us is precarious and uncertain.  It is foolish to assume any of us will live long or prosper (sorry Mr. Spock).  Disaster or death can come upon us at any moment.  For a sense of security and well-being we have to take a long view of things; a view so long it reaches right into the next life in the new heaven and new earth.  The most important function of this life is to be prepared for the next life; hence, ‘repent,’ be constantly ready.  Compared to our brief three score and ten years of this life, eternity is a very long time.  As our culture spirals away from a Christian perspective, as it seems hell-bent on doing, Jesus’ teachings sound pretty irrelevant to the modern ear.  But to those of us who follow him it can make a lot of sense.

Pastor Scott