Some people told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. Jesus said to them in reply, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them–do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” (Luke 13.1-5)
In 1995 after the bombing of Oklahoma City in which tall buildings came crashing to the ground and rubble filled the downtown area where the day before had been busy city blocks, someone took a can of white spray paint and wrote in bold letters on a partial brick wall that was still standing a single word. Visible at a distance, it expressed the ache of the human heart in the face of such senseless tragedy. The word was “Why.”
Whenever we come face to face with immense suffering or inhumane cruelty, our minds stall like a car, stopping us in our tracks, stuck on that most human of questions, “Why.” It seems the one right that God has given us in the face of human suffering–the right to ask the question why. But, as human experience also teaches us, God retains one right for himself, and that is the right not to answer the question.
So, it comes as no surprise, really, when Rabbi Jesus finds himself queried by people who have seen great human suffering and present him with the same question. Why? In this instance, apparently the Roman procurator Pilate had slaughtered innocent Jews in Jerusalem, seemingly in the area of the Temple, a sacred place that should, in their minds, have been a sanctuary, understood in the strict sense of the word, a safe place.
This incident is not recorded in any other place in the gospel accounts, only by Luke, who apparently had a particular knowledge of the event. And, as we see, while the question is presented to Rabbi Jesus, he provides no direct answer while–at the same time–rejecting one answer commonly offered as an explanation–that the people deserved it in some way.
Always the quickest and easiest way to make sense of senselessness, ascribing blame to the one who suffers, insisting that he or she brought it upon themselves, that rush to judge is soundly rejected by Rabbi Jesus, who asks the people, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?” He answers, “By no means.”
Emphasizing his point, he brings up a similar event that apparently was well-known, a tower near the Pool of Siloam that collapsed, killing eighteen people. He asks, “Those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them–do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?” Again, he answers his own question, rejecting the smooth equation that people are punished for their wrongdoing. He says, “By no means.”
Almost a century ago, the American writer Thornton Wilder wrote his book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a book that attempts an explanation for a similar incident that purportedly occurred in Peru when an Inca rope bridge collapsed, sending six people to their deaths in the deep ravine beneath the bridge. A friar witnessed the accident and, moved to find some answer as to why each of these persons had to die, spends the next six years investigating and exploring the details of each person’s life.
It is a profound book as the friar wrestles with the imponderable question of why these six people and not others. Soon enough, a dialectical appears, captured in these words from the book, “Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer’s day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”
After six years of questioning and interviewing, the friar, given the option, “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan,” chooses to believe that there is a plan, although that belief is an act of faith, not provable by any human effort, however great. At the end, he concludes, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
And, not surprisingly, Rabbi Jesus comes to much the same conclusion. After insisting that suffering is not commensurate with wrongdoing, he turns from the question of why and provides an answer to the question of how. How to deal with the suffering of the world. “I tell you,” he says not once, but twice, “If you do not repent you will all perish as they did.” By repent, he means turning away from evil and turning towards love, choosing selflessness over selfishness, choosing the way of God over the way of the world.
In other words, the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. In this world, we all experience suffering. The whys and wherefores are unanswerable. Or, as the contemporary writer and scholar Rabbi Harold Kushner once bluntly put it, “Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.”
So, we can expect suffering, even if we are saints, or perhaps better stated, especially if we are saints. We waste valuable time in trying to find some tit-for-tat correspondence between suffering and sinfulness. It doesn’t exist. What benefits us more is to strive to part ways with a sinful world, seeking to create a new world, a world where we do all in our power to mitigate the suffering that comes randomly into people’s lives.
When we see a hungry person, we give them food, in this way fighting against the suffering that seeks to ruin their lives. When we witness greed all around us, we strive for generosity, in this way sharing our gifts with those who have less, alleviating their suffering. When we see wars and bloodshed and needless suffering, we advocate for peace, beginning with ourselves, seeking a peaceful life where others need not fear us or our retaliations.
The bridge is love. It is the chief lesson of the life of Rabbi Jesus, who experienced suffering inflicted upon him by malevolent forces, but who allowed his suffering to be joined with the suffering of others, forming a community based on compassion, not on an equation of every man for himself. He understood that while the world is a place of suffering, we can do everything possible to remove the pockets and places of suffering within our reach and within our powers.
When more of us begin to see that love is the bridge to a better world, putting that belief into action by turning our lives around, not bringing needless suffering into other people’s lives by our greed, by our wanton desire for more of everything, by our hedonism, then we are on the way to reclaiming and remaking the world, returning it to the course that God put it on, but which we pulled off course by our refusal to do it his way, instead choosing our way .
Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book My Grandfather’s Blessings, offers us a beautiful analogy for how to embrace suffering, transforming it into something beautiful. She writes, “Any oyster is soft, tender and vulnerable. Without the sanctuary of its shell it couldn’t survive. But oysters must open their shells in order to ‘breathe’ water.”
“Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become part of the oyster’s life from then on. Such grains of sand, though microscopic, cause the oyster a great deal of pain. But the oyster does not change its soft nature because of a particle of sand. It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel. It continues to open its shell to the ocean, to breathe in order to live.”
“But it does respond to the suffering in its midst. Over time the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until it has created something of great value in the place where it is most vulnerable to its pain. A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering.”
Again, we can say the bridge is love. Like the oyster, we live in a world in which we must open our shells in order to breathe. And suffering will inevitably come to us as the price we pay for living in the world. The sands will penetrate to our softest core where they cause, not only irritation, but heartache and heartbreak. But in that experience of suffering, we can choose to turn these hard, coarse sands that cause us pain into something entirely different, something meaningful, something valuable.
Through the bridge of love, we transform the suffering within us and outside us, healing those who hurt because we know what it means to hurt, feeding those who have no food because we know what it means to be hungry, offering refuge and relief to those who suffer the wounds of war because we know what it means to be at war. In each instance, we walk across the bridge of love, embracing, welcoming, healing the other who suffers on the other side of the bridge.
It begins with us. As Rabbi Jesus says to us today, “Repent.” In other words, be part of the solution, not part of the problem. When we turn away from evil and do good, we lessen the suffering in the world. But if we stay in our stubborn sinful ways, then the quotient of suffering can only increase, heedless, needless suffering weighing down the world and its inhabitants, all because we refuse to cross over the bridge of love.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 