Luke 13:1-9
What to concentrate on this week? Why bad things happen to good people or the grace that waits to redeem it all? In many ways they go together: God is in the business of grace but we'd prefer God to be in the business of sorting out bad things.
But these two stories seem to say: God isn't about sorting out randomly tragic acts. These things happen and God doesn't cause them or stop them. God is the grace-giving one, the waiting one, willing to offer another chance to restore our relationships so that they grow fruitful once more ie justice, peace, restorative relationships.
It comes back to God being all about the relationship and not the intervention into random acts of disaster. If God did do the latter then God would be constantly stopping hurricanes, and road accidents, and famines etc. Clearly that's not what happens.
God instead seems to be in the relationship, not so much in the symptoms of life (bad things, disasters etc) but the cause of life, not the tragedy but the deeper connection we have with each other that doesn't cause or prevent tragedies but sees us through them.
That might sound a bit twee. It is certainly not meant to explain away tragedies when they strike. It just seems a bit more hopefully that God is the one who can restore, redeem, renew rather than fix things which is what happens if God intervenes to stop tragedies. But that is easy for me to say when I've no one directly involved in a tragedy.
Anyway: difficult one this week: Hymns, Music, Creative way of reading the passage?
Recent Comments