Thursday 17 November 2016

Towers and Sacrifices

'Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish'
Luke 13.3+5

As part of the year long discipleship course I run, we are doing the challenge of reading through the New Testament during the time of the course.

Today we hit Luke 13.1-9, which is a really striking passage about suffering, death and fruitfulness. It is a particularly good passage for making clear that there isn't a straightforward link between sin and suffering. Whilst suffering as a whole is a consequence of our fundamental rebellion against God, the link between our individual suffering and sin is much more complex. 

Jesus makes that explicit here. It wasn't that the Galileans who were executed and whose bodies were desecrated, deserved that end because they had committed some heinous sin which the other Galileans hadn't. Jesus explicitly denies this. His point is that the suffering that leads to death is to act as a warning that our days are numbered; we have only so long to be fruitful, before we too will be cut down and it will be too late (the point of the fig tree parable). But what does it mean to be fruitful - it is to repent. That is our challenge - have we repented, are we sharing the gospel with those who lives are a ticking clock?

As a side note, it is interesting that Jesus doesn't then set out an explanation for suffering (how we might wish he had), but he does set out what we should learn from it. It appears that Jesus is not so concerned that we should grow in understanding of why things happen, but that we should learn how to live in the light of those sufferings. This is the difference between understanding and wisdom 

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