HERE is one other Gospel passage unique to Luke. Sometimes, the context of such passages helps us, as we discover clues to meaning in what has just been narrated, or what follows afterwards. This approach won’t necessarily work well for Luke 13.1-9, since it is an element of the center section of the entire Gospel (chapters 9-19), and lots of commentators treat that section as a set of varied stories and sayings, mixed in because they don’t obviously belong anywhere else.
If we accept this view of chapters 9-19, we cannot expect theological coherence or historical sequence to disclose a single message: a Gospel “take-home” to last us through the week ahead. Perhaps this also explains why lectionary compilers didn’t scruple to set Luke 13.1-9 (Lent 3) after Luke 13.31-35 (Lent 2), and why they make a single lection out of 1 encounter, reflecting on human responsibility and divine theodicy, set beside a story a couple of fig tree that committed the heinous offence of not bearing fruit.
I even have previously referred here to a Hebrew word meaning “Aha!”, which has overtones of gloating (Faith, 14 February). There isn’t any textual support for where my imagination takes me with this Gospel, but still I find yourself wondering: did those unnamed people “who told him concerning the Galileans” inform Jesus so as to warn him? Or were they genuinely curious for his opinion on a theological conundrum about suffering (the bloodshed) or holiness (a polluted altar)? Or did they tell him because they were attempting to catch him out, thus triggering (in my mind, though not within the gospel) an “Aha”?
One English word expresses much more clearly the gloating feeling that accompanies catching someone out in some wrongdoing or pretence: “Gotcha!” For me, these verses call that word to mind, because they make me consider how interviewers ask inquiries to get an interviewee to reply in a specific way.
Imagine some journalist or politician, manipulating a member of the UK Government into denouncing Donald Trump, to make an eye catching headline: “Gotcha!” Might the results be disastrous for, say, Ukrainian civilians, or Canadian industry, or another goal the US President could be inclined to attack? Would the speaker even care?
There is nothing within the text to suggest that the people warning Jesus were either manipulative or malicious of their intentions, or that he put himself in danger by his response. But, by the way in which through which he responds, Jesus shows that he takes it as a possibility to challenge the favored assumption that underlies their query.
This mysterious calamity is mentioned by no other ancient witness. One comprehensible response to it could be that those that suffered at Pilate’s hands deserved to accomplish that. Similarly, some in modern Britain might assume that would-be migrants to the UK are selecting to place themselves in harm’s way, and should suffer in consequence.
The first interchange began with a calamity inflicted by a single individual, Pontius Pilate. Then Jesus made reference to a second calamity, of a distinct kind, through which no human agent was apparently at fault. Just now, I suggested informing, theologising, and entrapping, as three plausible reasons that those people told Jesus concerning the suffering of some Galileans. Readers must make their very own judgement on which is the almost definitely. Jesus’s own example — the collapsed tower — seems to have been chosen for contrast quite than corroboration. Apparently, the Lord didn’t see destiny or divine purpose at work in that event.
But Jesus didn’t live in an era of planning consents, structural surveys, health and safety laws, or anti-terrorism measures akin to Prevent. Since the Grenfell Tower disaster — and, before that, 9/11 — our view has modified for the foreseeable future. How to interpret meaning in deaths caused through the collapse of towers not tends mechanically towards accident, likelihood, or misfortune. Now, unsurprisingly, incompetence, greed, and callous disregard for human life, or perhaps oppression and exploitation, and even blind, obsessive hatred, should be factored in to the judgements that we must make about cause and effect.
However tempting it’s to look this passage for a unified message, it makes higher sense to take it as a representative sample of the countless encounters and interactions of Jesus’s itinerant ministry, all of which possess the one gospel coherence and unity that actually matter: that of the very fact — and consequences — of divine love for errant humanity.
