There are some events so large that we always remember where we were when we first heard the news—the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Reagan shooting, the Challenger explosion, those planes crashing into the buildings, and the initial reports of Hurricane Katrina. Eight years ago this week, I was driving home from my grandfather's funeral when I heard the news about a place called
Columbine High School. And, now the horrible violence at Virginia Tech. How could something so terrible happen at your alma mater or the campus where we've enjoyed tailgating and football on Saturday afternoons? There have been times this week when I've had to tune out or tune off the endless commentary on the news, but we wish that somehow God would break in over the airwaves and speak to us about this numbing tragedy. We come to church every Sunday needing a word from God, and we desperately sense that need this morning. Heaven doesn't have its own news hour or an internet blog we can turn to, but I believe that we can learn something about God's perspective on 4-16-07 by turning to a story from the Gospel of Luke that tells us about a day when Jesus took his newspaper to work.
Jesus Discusses Two Tragic Events
In Luke 13, we see first of all that Jesus discusses two tragic events—two tragedies on the minds of his original audience as much as Virginia Tech is on our minds this morning. Notice that Jesus is first of all informed of a senseless slaughter—the soldiers of Pontius Pilate had brutally executed a group of Galileans who had come to worship the Lord and to present sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple. The event is recent enough that the crowd has to inform Jesus what has happened, but unfortunately we can't establish the details of this specific event from extra-biblical sources. When he had first arrived in Palestine, Pilate had his troops bring Roman standards with the image of the emperor into the holy city of Jerusalem. Since the emperor was worshipped as God, the Jews protested this blasphemy and even bared their necks when the Roman soldiers went into the crowds with swords drawn to put down the disturbance. Pilate thought better of starting a riot and removed the images. This time, there was no resolution, and the disagreement had turned into a bloodbath. What could be more senseless than innocent people being murdered while presenting their offerings to the Lord?
In verse 4, Jesus turns from the slaughter and reminds the crowd of an unfortunate accident—a tower had collapsed at the pool of Siloam in the southeast section of Jerusalem, and 18 people had lost their lives. Hezekiah had carved this pool out of the rock some seven centuries earlier to provide a water source inside the city walls when the Assyrians had prepared to besiege the city. The Romans had improved the existing water works, and the structure that had collapsed may have been an observation tower or scaffolding for construction work on the aqueducts. It's interesting that Jesus puts these two events together—one directly attributable to human wickedness and the other to 18 people being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
