Saturday, 10/26/13
With no football games to discuss in their time, Our Lord’s Apostles
mostly jabbered on about terrible things happening around them. Like, a band of
Jewish rebels from Galilee had conducted a raid on the Romans, then, they thought
they had found a safe refuge in the inner part of the temple where Romans were
forbidden to enter; but Pilate, ignoring his promise to honor temple sanctuary,
sent his swordsmen in to cut down the Galileans as they made their offering at
the altar.
Another conversation topic with the Apostles was about a tower
under construction by the spring of Siloam. It had suddenly collapsed, taking
eighteen workmen with it.
The general view of the Apostles was that God sent down death
on the Galilean rebels and on the tower construction people. They believed God had punished those men for their sins.
Having heard enough of that talk, Jesus interrupted, saying,
“Do you think because these Galileans suffered in this way that they were
greater sinners than other Galileans? Or those eighteen people who were killed
when the tower fell on them --- do you think they were more guilty than
everyone else?” He went on to say we will all perish if we do not repent.
Those words of Jesus are telling us that God does not send
us bad fortune to punish us, or good fortune to reward us. God does not
interrupt the world’s natural flow of cause-and-effects to reward or punish us.
The Letter of James touches on God’s “hands off “ policy
where it says, “No one experiencing temptation should say, ‘I am being tempted
by God. . . He himself tempts no
one.’” St. James went on to say that
only “all good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from
the Father of lights.”
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