It’s an odd incident. Some people had come from Galilee to offer their sacrifices in the temple at Jerusalem, and Pilate the Governor had had these people killed, apparently right at the moment when they were slaughtering their sacrificial animals: “Pilate had mingled their blood with their sacrifices” (Luke 13:1).

We don’t know why Pilate ordered this, and it’s quite possible that the people who told Jesus about it didn’t know either. Perhaps they were telling Jesus – or taunting Jesus? – that it seemed like open season on Galileans, so maybe he would be next. Yet I suppose they were mostly captivated by the irony: in the moment you are making a sacrifice to atone for your sins, God lets you get struck down for your sins.

We often see Jesus making use of generalized situations – a farmer sowing grain, a shepherd searching for a lost sheep, a woman mixing bread dough – and drawing a lesson from that typical everyday occurrence. Here we see something a little different: Jesus drawing a lesson from a specific current event, the murder of specific people by government order. Jesus asked his audience if they thought these particular Galileans must have been particularly evil to have died this way: because they weren’t. And not only that, he said; “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did” (13:3). He then cited another news item, about how a tower had collapsed and eighteen people were killed – people from Jerusalem, by the way – were they particularly wicked, too? Again the answer was No; and again he warned that “unless you repent you will all perish as they did” (13:4-5).

The way Jesus rebuked them fits us pretty well, too. It’s hard to accept that we would merit destruction on the basis of our own wrongness; it’s so much nicer to imagine that we must be all right, because we’re not as bad as somebody else.

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But that won’t work, will it, Lord? You don’t grade on a curve where even though we fail we still pass as long as others fail worse. All we can do is repent for our own transgressions. So we turn to you, in repentance and faith: in your mercy, O Lord, hear our prayers, and heal our souls.

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