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Faith

Getting what you deserve

It is often comforting to look at other people’s misfortune and say, “They are only getting what they deserve.” People who drive dangerously deserve to have an accident. People who are careless with their money deserve to lose it. People who are lazy deserve to be poor. People who cannot control their temper deserve to end up in prison. When we see people suffering, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that they must be suffering as a consequence of something wrong they have done.

Jesus interrupts our smug reveries with his own interpretation of the link between punishment and blameworthiness in Luke chapter 13. He tells us that some Galileans who had been slaughtered by the Romans were no worse than anyone else, and some people who had been killed when a tower collapsed were no worse offenders than anyone else. Suffering is often completely unrelated to any blameworthy conduct on the part of the sufferer.

What Jesus does say, though, is: “But if you don’t repent you will all die the same way.” That does not mean that we will be slaughtered by the Romans or that a tower will fall on us, but sometime, somehow, our bodies are going to die. Either we will die in our sins, or we will continue on in everlasting life when our bodies die. Either way, it is not a question of getting what you deserve. It is simply a question of choosing to repent.