"At that time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, 'Do you think because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did." (Luke 13:1-3)
Sometimes there is no greater anxiety than the possibility that we might have been wrong... and sometimes there is no greater grace than the realization that we were.
The anxiety keeps us from staring down our potential wrong-ness, but the grace is the reason it is worth facing it.
This is one of those times.
In this scene from Luke's Gospel, which many of us heard in worship this Sunday, a group of people come to Jesus with a bit of news... and a preconceived interpretation of its meaning. They have come looking for Jesus not only to indulge in this juicy gossip with them, but then of course also to affirm and reinforce their understanding of what it means. And spoiler alert: Jesus will have to tell them that they are wrong--and it turns out it is deeply good news that they are.
These folks bring the report that there were some people from Galilee whom the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had killed while they were in the act of public worship offering sacrifices, presumably in the Jerusalem Temple. This is what the euphemistic phrase about their "blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices" gets at. Contemporary historians don't know much about this particular event, and ancient historians like Josephus don't give us any more to go on, but the situation seems obvious enough. Here are folks from Galilee who had come down to Jerusalem, one might guess at the time of an annual religious festival/holiday, and the Roman governor decides they are suspicious troublemakers and has his soldiers execute them in cold blood right there as they were offering their own sacrifices.
Complicating the scene is that the territory of Galilee, where these victims were from, wasn't Pontius Pilate's jurisdiction, but Jerusalem, where these extrajudicial killings took place, was. It is clear from the handful of details the crowd has that these people had no trial (if they had been convicted in a trial or tribunal, they wouldn't have been released to go offer sacrifices after all). Rather, Pilate merely deemed them a threat, and then on the authority of the empire, he decided to have his soldiers (who functioned as military-police) execute these Galileans. Ancient historians of the time tell us that some people saw Galileans as especially "seditious" (that's Josephus' word for it back in the first century), and so it would have been easy for Pilate to just make a decree that these particular Galileans were troublemakers and threatened Roman order, so they had to be gotten rid of without anything that we might call due process. Pretty horrifying stuff, right? But, by the same token, this is pretty much the standard operating procedure for authoritarian regimes throughout history: execution without trial, the "disappearing" of those deemed enemies of the state, and the expedited killing of the usual suspects before anybody asks too many questions.
So, with all of that loaded into this headline, Jesus can tell that the people who have come to him asking for his "take" already have made up their minds. He knows--since this is the conventional wisdom of the day--that these Galileans must have had it coming. Sure, they had no trial to prove their guilt or innocence, and sure a notoriously brutal and authoritarian regime had just made these Galileans disappear by killing them without a day in court to defend themselves, but if such a terrible thing had happened, they must have deserved it... right? Underneath that assumption is likely the belief that these Galileans must have been guilty because the powers of the day said they were. If the Roman governor said they were dangerous brigands, seditious conspirators, or domestic terrorists, they must have been, right? If Rome said you were a criminal or an enemy, you must be! And of course, an awful lot of us human beings in an awful lot of human history all just nod our heads to that thinking. "If they weren't criminals, they wouldn't have been arrested!" Right? It seems just so obvious we don't even think to question it. The authorities have to stop the "bad guys," and if they apprehend someone and execute them or otherwise make them disappear, well, the ones who disappeared must have been "bad guys" too. And that must mean they deserved their punishment, and God must have given divine approval, too. That's just how things are... we are told.
This is exactly the thing Jesus says "no" to, and this is precisely the bad theology he has come to dismantle. Jesus doesn't accept the unspoken assumption of the folks who have come to him with the news about these killings. He calls it out. "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?" he asks, before providing his own loud and clear, "No!" That's not how it works! This action by Pilate does not come with God's endorsement, and the killing of these Galileans is not proof of their guilt or their dangerousness. It only means that Pilate saw them as a threat to his version of "law and order," but that has nothing to do with what God's kind of justice said about them. Jesus starts pulling at the thread that had been holding together an entire mindset that said, "When terrible things happen, it must be with God's tacit approval, and therefore these Galileans must really have been dangerous troublemakers or violent brigands." Jesus forces us to question that whole way of seeing the world, and in particular, he compels us to question whether someone really is a dangerous threat just because the powers of the day say they are.
History, of course, is sadly replete with examples of times when people were labeled dangerous, subversive, or "enemies of the state" and therefore the powers of the day decreed they could round folks up without trial or charge, detain them in camps, or make them disappear altogether. And even worse, there have been too many times when people claiming to speak for God have nodded their heads in complicit approval as it happened. Jesus throws a monkey-wrench into all of it. But we can't pretend that the internment of the Japanese in the United States during World War II wasn't cut out of the same cloth as what Pilate did, or the enforcement of the Fugitive Slaw Law that criminalized both those who escaped slavery and any who helped them get to freedom, even if they were in states where slavery was illegal. The Third Reich did the same to anybody it labeled "degenerate" or "undesirable," and the brutal regimes of El Salvador during Bishop Oscar Romero's life or the totalitarianism of Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge did it during their regimes as well. The terrifying thing is just how easily people go along with the decree that someone is dangerous and therefore expendable, just on the say so of someone with a podium and an official seal. And all too easily, we as people of faith just nod our heads in the implicit agreement that "if they weren't guilty, they wouldn't have been arrested."
How quickly we forget that those very same words were spoken of Jesus, too. "If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you," the Respectable Religious Leaders say to Pontius Pilate in John's telling of the trial of Jesus. Jesus, too, knows what it is like to be branded a troublemaker and gotten rid of, not because he was found guilty of something, but because too often the Powers of the Day are only interested in what is expedient, efficient, and helps tighten their grip on control. Jesus is willing, when the time comes, to stare down that kind of false conviction and terrible brutality, but he makes it clear that this is not of God. When he responds to the reports about the Galileans killed by Pilate, he forces us to see that not every action taken by an empire or regime is automatically just, much less endorsed by God. He forces us to see that those Galileans killed by Pilate were not being punished by God but were victims of a truly wicked empire that didn't care about doing justice but justified itself in wiping out anyone it saw as a threat. And in doing that Jesus also enables us to see that even those who have been branded as "expendable" by the empire of the day are not ignorable in God's sight. God weeps when such atrocities are committed. God says "No" to that kind of brutality. And God says that even if the powers of the day have labeled someone as an "enemy," that does not mean they have earned God's wrath to zap them or wipe them out. As Jesus insists repeatedly, even those who are truly enemies of God are met with God's grace rather than lightning bolts out of the blue.
All too often in our history, we have just assumed that the ones labeled by the authorities as dangerous threats were deserving of divine wrath, rather than questioning whether they have been victims of aggressive empires and authoritarians. Jesus forces us to see those who have been vilified as perhaps the victims rather than the perpetrators of wickedness, and he forces us to see that God's care and concern cross the boundaries set up by the likes of Pontius Pilate to separate those "dangerous threats" from the rest of us. If we are going to take Jesus seriously, it will mean re-examining an awful lot of what we assumed was true about the world, and about which voices we should listen to as authoritative in our lives. But it will be worth it, as scary as it might be to admit how wrong we have been, because when Jesus shows us the truth, he also shows us a love that includes those who have been "disappeared" from history by one regime or another. Jesus insists that they are not forgotten by God, and we cannot forget about them, either. Jesus insists that God's love reaches even to include those who vanished while we looked the other way because the powers of the day had deemed them a threat. And as difficult as it is to face our failure to speak up for the likes of those folks, like the Galileans in this story, it is deeply good to know that God is not fooled, and God does not condemn them even when the empire does.
Maybe today we will find the courage to speak up, to look around at those who are on the verge of disappearing, and to echo Jesus' "No" that refuses to bless their disappearance if it happens.
Lord Jesus, make us courageous enough to love even those we are afraid to speak up for, even against the likes of Pontius Pilate or the powers of the day.
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