WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s one of the age old theological questions.... For the crowd who come to Jesus they see a simple equation: suffering must mean that the people involved were sinners: towers don’t fall on innocent people; innocent worshippers don’t get slaughtered - it must be a punishment for their sin, right? But Jesus refuses to see things in the way they do.

We have a tendency to blame God for anything and everything we can’t understand or don’t like. For example the author Thomas Hardy was a “paradoxical atheist” - he didn’t believe that God existed... and blamed him for not existing...!

The question the crowd were really airing, and wanting Jesus to confirm, was about the simplistic link between sin and punishment. All sin leads to visible, measurable punishment, and also that all suffering is directly a result of sin - that’s right, isn’t it Jesus?

Jesus responds cleverly by refusing to collude with this simplistic picture of God as an angry headmaster who simply and mechanically hurls out thunderbolts to hapless humanity - and turns it round to the crowd, warning them that God requires repentance from them too... God has huge patience with us - just as the fig tree is given every chance to bear fruit, but God does require righteousness of us.

God doesn’t want us to settle for an image of him which is cheap, vindictive or petty. The call to repentance carries a word of grace - the promise of forgiveness. Sin has consequences - not necessarily direct and obvious ones like a tower falling on top of somebody because they were a sinner, but our actions have consequences.

Those consequences are not always obvious or immediate. Communities can slowly dissolve through lack of trust; a conscience can be slowly blunted by continual lying or deceit; the ozone layer is slowly depleted through thoughtless exploitation of resources... And our souls and relationship with God are slowly worn down and tarnished by our sin - so the call to repentance comes loud and clear from Jesus.

There may be a link between suffering and sin, but it is not simple or direct by any stretch of the imagination. And the gospel of the second chance - the fig tree that had every opportunity offered to it - should comfort those of us who are struggling in our discipleship: it’s a Lenten reminder to check our lives for those places where we need to repent and turn back to God, to make sure that we are in right relationships with God and with our neighbours, that we are working with God for the coming of his royal rule.

Fr Andrew Perry
Rector, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea