In our gospel reading for today, Jesus hears a news report about some Galileans who were brutally killed by governor Pontius Pilate, inside the temple at Jerusalem, while they were in the act of offering sacrifices to God. This is a disturbing report for the crowds around Jesus, because of all places and of all activities, shouldn’t we be able to count on God’s protection while worshiping in the temple? Those Galileans must have had it coming to them – they must have had many chances to TRULY turn back to God, and instead, put up a false picture of repentance with their hypocritical sin offerings. But Jesus disagrees, and tells the people a story about missed chances....
The referee blows his whistle....again. He calls out your number to the scorekeepers table, and they respond with an upraised hand. That's your fifth foul. You had five chances to show you can play basketball within the rules of the game, and in the referee's opinion, you have failed. The game for you....is over.
And basketball is one of our more lenient activities, at least you get five chances! You only get THREE swings in baseball, and in many activities, you get ONE chance. Departmental exams, our upcoming music festival, Olympic sports like figure skating, first impressions of Mark Carney at his first meeting with Donald Trump - all the preparation will come down to one performance, one interview, one chance. And to us, this is fair – everyone gets their one chance. If you land on your backside on the ice while the world is watching…well, you had your chance. If you blew it, that's your tragedy, sucks to be you.
And when it really hurts, is when we bring God into the tragedy, like the people who were questioning Jesus in the gospel reading today. “Do you think that they were worse sinners than all the others, just because they were victims of a tragedy?” What about the thousands of Ukrainians in the hundreds of churches, were they worse sinners because their church was destroyed by Russian firepower? What about people who have been struck down by Alzheimers, or cancer, or heart attack, were they worse sinners than all the others? We are tempted to say to these people, “God could have protected you from all of this if you had just been obedient to him – you had your chance.” Because we also want to be able to say, “God IS protecting me because I AM obedient.” And this works for us right up to the point where we experience tragedy in our own lives – then, on top of everything else we are feeling, we are forced into feeling that we deserve what God has dealt us – we should have been more obedient - we had our chance.