Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10: 1-13; Luke 13:1-9

“No, but unless you repent you will all perish as they did.”

-- Luke 13: 3 & 5

Both of our readings today are interpretations. Paul interprets the Bible and Jesus interprets current events. This should reassure those of us who think that sermons should only be interpretations of scripture, and that interpretations of current events should be left to politics, economics or gossip. Paul reads the account of the Exodus from Egypt, told in the book of Exodus from chapter 13 through chapter 17, and interprets it as a series of moral warnings to the Corinthians. The ancestors experienced the leading of the pillar of cloud and fire, the passing through the Red Sea, the food from heaven and the miraculous water from the rock, but “in spite of this, most of them failed to please God and their corpses littered the desert. These things all happened as warnings for us, not to have wicked lusts for forbidden things as they had.” Thus Paul reads the Exodus story as a warning to his Christian contemporaries against wrongful desire. 

This is Paul’s main message, but there is another feature of his text that I want to emphasize, the insistence that all the ancestors, without exception, experienced these things. “…all our fathers were guided by the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses, all ate the same spiritual food, all drank the same spiritual drink, since all drank from the spiritual rock.” “All” is used six times in five lines, every time a new point is made, in order to nail down the point that in these matters no one is exempt, no one excluded, either by God or by him or herself. There is no sitting this one out, no exemption, no exception.

Now turn to Jesus’ saying and what do we find? “Unless you repent you will all perish as they did.” So our theme for today is “All of us.”

            Why is it necessary for Jesus to make this point? Think about it; do we not, every one, regard ourselves as exceptional and exempt from the criticism we level against others? Do we not, every one, occupy a point of view apart from and immune to the evil we so readily attribute to others? I think this automatic  self-justification and self-exoneration is integral to the human condition, an unconscious dynamic in social life, known most famously as the device of the scapegoat.

So Jesus asks those around him, “Do you think that the Galileans Pilate murdered in the very act of their bearing sacrifice to the temple were greater sinners than all other Galileans?” or “Do you think that the eighteen people the tower in Siloam fell on and killed were ‘…more guilty that all other people living in Jerusalem?’” Rhetorical questions to be sure, the implied answer being, “Of course not!“ and the explanation being that we are all equally guilty, all worthy of summary obliteration, all equally beloved of God and equally under God’s judgment, and certainly not morally superior to those who experience misfortune. This truth, of our equality and solidarity in the sin of humanity and the grace of God, is the bedrock of our faith. We are all sinners and we are all offered divine grace to cover our sin and recover our selves.

Let us, at this point, enrich our meditation by doing what Jesus did and turning our eyes to current events. Were Jesus here today I think he would ask us about the Madrid bombings. Are the 200 victims of the Madrid railroad bombings more guilty and worthy of death than the rest of us? Or are the victims of HIV/AIDS greater sinners than the rest of us? When AIDS was first identified and thought to be an affliction unique to gay people there was no shortage of Christian preachers to identify it as a divine judgment on sexual perversion. I daresay that opinion is still strongly represented now that we know the disease to afflict all sexual orientations. Now it is a judgment on promiscuity.

I think Jesus would have drawn our attention to Madrid, and HIV/AIDS, and possibly also to the film, The Passion of the Christ, which is certainly a major current event in our culture. Perhaps he would ask, “Do you think that the Jews are responsible above all others for the torture and murder of Jesus? Or the Romans?” And I expect he would say, “No, but unless you all repent you will all perish.” The emphasis would be on the “all.” I have seen the film and experienced it as an historic event in my own life.  I have nothing to say beyond that, because its impact on me lies too deep for words. Its impact on our culture, however, is drowning in an ocean of words from the chattering classes. I do not wish to add a drop to that ocean.

One matter, however, cannot go unremarked from the Christian pulpit and that is the claim that the film depicts and recommends anti-Semitism. I do not have an opinion on that; I understand why some Jews take the film that way given the history of the Jewish people with the Christian Church. I am ashamed of that history too. Nevertheless, I believe that to hold that the Jews had no responsibility at all for the death of Jesus is a mirror image of the Christian bigot’s claim that they alone are responsible for it, and we Gentiles are absolutely innocent. That is, any group, especially one involved in the unfolding of an event, cannot by the nature of human history, and by our present Gospel context, claim to be innocent by identifying others as especially guilty. All must repent if all are not to perish. We are one in violence as we are one in grace. Neither the Gentile USA, not the Jewish Israel can claim to be innocent of violence today, and in the context of the Passion that means that the Jewish priests and the pagan Romans all, together and representative of the human race, inflict the rage of violence upon God. There is no ground for one group to exonerate itself by laying the blame on the other.

Let me speak only as a Christian about Christian things. It is a shameful, cruel and immoral thing to have made the Jews uniquely responsible for the death of Christ. We are all in this together in so far as we are human beings. In the situation of Jesus’ death it was clearly power, - political, religious, ethnic and pathological power - that killed him, and the distinctions of religion and ethnicity were and remain irrelevant. I understand that one of the hands holding the spike as it was hammered into his holy hand was that of Mel Gibson himself, so as to say, “I too am part of this monstrous betrayal of the love of God. I do not stand aside and say those others are greater sinners than I.” We must all repent if we are not to perish.

Please do not take these few words as my definitive opinion of the film, or my judgment of the presence or absence of anti-Semitism in it. I emphatically want to stay out of the aesthetic and the moral debate; the film is too profound an experience for me to chatter about it. I simply want to use it here as an example of a current event about which Jesus might have commented as he commented on the murder of the Galileans or the accidental death of the 18 Jerusalemites. We are all, Jews and Gentiles together, in this predicament and so we should all be equally ashamed and repentant before God and one another. We Christians have an additional amount of repentance we owe to the Jews for our central part in their historical suffering, so let us get on with it, and stay out of arguments in which we try to justify ourselves. We have all sinned and are all in need of repentance, and we Christians owe a special debt of repentance to the Jews.

Amen.