When Bad Things Happen Because Someone is Good

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I preached on Luke 13:1-9 at The Commonwealth on March 23, 2025.

Erin preached on the same story at East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

Check out her post to see how our different personalities filter the same text!

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Why do bad things happen to good people?

This seemed to be the question on Jesus’ mind when he heard the news that Pilate had just massacred a group of Galilean Jews inside the Temple in Jerusalem. 

It would surprise no one that Pilate did this. As the governor of the occupying Roman empire, Pilate was known for provoking the Jewish people. He placed Roman religious banners in Jerusalem knowing that their religion is monotheistic and forbids images. He raided the Jewish Temple’s treasury to pay for building projects. He sold the role of chief priest to the highest bidder. And he massacred a group of Samaritans who were excavating relics of Moses. So slaughtering a group of worshipers from Galilee was not out of character for Pilate. 

But did God make him do it?

“Do you think the ones who died were worse than anyone else?” Jesus asked the crowd. Or what about the eighteen people who died when the Tower of Siloam collapsed. “Did they deserve it?” 

It’s worth nothing that nobody actually asked Jesus whether these deaths were divine punishments. The question was his. And not without reason. The idea that God punishes Israel for their sins with disasters and wars is a common one in the Hebrew scriptures. It’s such a popular idea that many televangelists even apply it to the United States. Anytime there is a hurricane you can bet money that some dude is gonna get on TV and say it’s because we don’t display the Ten Commandments in classrooms or whatever. 

Jesus said to the crowd and to the Jerry Falwells of our own time: No, these people didn’t deserve to be murdered or to die in an accident. But, he says, you should repent anyway because you just never know when your time’s up. There’s no divine plan that makes towers collapse or soldiers kill people. Or gives someone cancer. But these things happen. Tomorrow is not promised. So it’s best to be at peace with God and your neighbors. 

It’s clear to me that Jesus didn’t believe that God used accidents and violence to punish people. Which makes the parable about the fig tree a little tricky to understand. Because one of the most enduring interpretations of this parable seems to imply the opposite meaning.

In this telling, the fig tree represents Israel, which despite many opportunities has failed to produce the fruit that God is waiting for. The landowner represents God, whose patience has run out and who is ready to chop Israel down. And the gardener represents Jesus, who begs God to give them one last chance, while at the same time agreeing to chop them down if they don’t shape up quickly enough. 

If you’re thinking, that seems a tad anti-Semitic you are not wrong. Fortunately, we can solve that problem by recovering the Jewishness of Jesus’ parable. And also find an interpretation that agrees with what Jesus said about divine judgment. 

So first things first, we get to back up and learn some things about ancient Jewish farming! Trust me, you are going to love this. You are probably going to love this. So hold on to your hats. 

Fruit trees are really important in the Jewish tradition. There are four new year celebrations in the tradition and one of them, Tu B’Shvat, is just for trees. I read that on that day, Jewish mystics used to go out and literally hug trees. It is celebrated to this day by planting new trees.

Also fruit trees have protected legal status in the Bible. Even the fruit trees of Israel’s enemies are protected. This is true. In Deuteronomy there are rules for warfare. And one of them is about trees:

“When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city?”

I love the sarcasm in the last line that’s like, what are the trees supposed to do? Retreat?

But what’s most important for us to understand this parable is the Jewish principle called orlah which requires people to let trees mature before harvesting their fruit. The rules are found in Leviticus which says not to eat fruit for the first three years after a tree is planted. Remember that number from the parable? In the fourth year, the harvest is set aside and offered to God. It’s not until the fifth year that the fruit can be eaten.

These kinds of rules are typical of Jewish economic law which often set limits on productivity and accumulation. Every week, the workers get to rest on the Sabbath. Every seven years, the land gets to rest during a fallow year. Every fifty years, property is returned to the original owners at the Jubilee. The corners of the fields must be left unharvested so that hungry people can glean from them. And so on.

But the landowner in this parable has not caught God’s vision for a gentle, faithful, economic community. Instead, he seems more inspired by the freewheeling, move fast and break things, spirit of free-market capitalism. Driven by his desire for immediate profit, he has been impatiently demanding fruit from this poor tree since year one and now he’s ready to chop it down in year three - a full two years before he’s allowed to have the fruit anyway. And he’s going to cut God out of God’s share of the harvest. 

The gardener, on the other hand, has kept the faith. He knows that what the landowner is asking him to do violates orlah. But he’s a crafty gardener. And so rather than call the landowner out, he bargains with him for one more year. If the gardener is right, he’ll have a sacred harvest to offer to God. And then the landowner can start profiting the next year. If he’s wrong, the tree will die anyway. 

The parable ends there. Jesus doesn’t tell us what happens to the tree, the gardener, or the landowner. What he has done is contrast two ways of being in the world. The landowner’s way is ruthless and faithless. The gardener’s way is patient and faithful. But because the story is open-ended, either way may end in violence for the tree. 

Catastrophe is not necessarily the result of faithlessness. But faithfulness does not necessarily escape catastrophe, either. 

In this passage, Jesus wanted to correct the religious people who think that God is an angry judge in the sky. But there was another reason why Jesus was so invested in why bad things happen. At this point in the story, Jesus was becoming more and more aware that something really, really bad was going to happen to him. The closer he got to Jerusalem the more that tension increased. And the news that Pilate killed the Galileans in the Temple had just cranked that tension up even higher.

You might wonder why Pilate would want to kill Galileans specifically. Especially because Galilee seems like such a rural, peaceful place. The gospels show us, as Jesus traveled through the area, the sea, the fishing boats, the wheat fields, the little villages. It feels a little bit like Hobbiton, to be honest. Like you wouldn’t be surprised to see Samwise Gamgee harvesting some taters. 

Galilee was all these things but it was also a hotbed of insurrection. That region produced a series of revolutionary leaders who had gathered large crowds of supporters, only to be put down by the Roman legions. One of these, Judas of Galilee, (not the apostle) is even mentioned in the New Testament. When Jesus was a child, Judas organized resistance to taxation and may have been the one who launched the violent resistance that lasted for decades. However, the Romans eventually captured and executed Judas and his sons, like so many other would-be revolutionaries. And, perhaps, like they had done to the Galileans who had gathered in the temple to worship. To say that someone was from Galilee was to imply that they had revolutionary tendencies. And the empire would not tolerate revolutionary tendencies. 

Now, I can’t help but notice that Jesus himself was a Galilean with a large following and some opinions about the empire. And so the massacre at the Temple feels like a foreshadowing of what was to come. A confrontation with the empire seemed inevitable. And in fact when Jesus later came face to face with Pilate, the governor asked him, “Are you from Galilee?” before having him executed by crucifixion, a punishment reserved only for rebels and slaves, even though he had broken no laws. And in fact he had instead given people hope, inspiration, healing, and free food. 

Bad things sometimes happen not because you did something wrong, but because you did something right. Bad things are sometimes the result of doing the right thing. This is one truth that is revealed by the Cross. Jesus wasn’t punished because he did something wrong, or because we did. He was punished because he did the right things and the government didn’t like it. And that’s a truth that has rolled on through history, through Dietrich Bonhoeffer, through Dorothy Day, through Martin Luther King, Jr, and through Harvey Milk. 

Righteousness does not always result in reward. But through his teachings and his choices, Jesus showed us how to do it anyway. 

I’ll give the final words to Jessica Price, a Jewish theologian who teaches about the Jewishness of Jesus’ parables:

Will you be saved from suffering if you live this way? No, but you will be saved from destruction. You will remain who you are, and you will know kindness and love, you will share meals with your kin and the profit of any among you will be the profit of all of you.

They live not as Romans, impatient to profit and to demonstrate the power they have over others, but as Jews, responsible for each other. The kingdom of heaven exists amidst destruction and oppression; a fig tree buds tenderly, promising the coming of summer, even under a blackened sky.

Amen.