Luke 13:1

This verse opens a passage where people bring Jesus disturbing news: Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who ruled Judea with brutal authority, had executed a group of Galileans — people from the same northern region as Jesus — while they were in the act of offering religious sacrifices at the temple. Mixing their blood with their sacrifices was a deliberately sacrilegious act of violence. In the thinking of many people at the time, tragedy and suffering were understood as divine punishment — the worse your fate, the worse your sin must have been. The people relaying this story to Jesus likely expected him to weigh in on whether those Galileans deserved what happened. His response refuses to play that game at all.

Lord, I confess I'd rather explain someone else's suffering than examine my own life. Forgive me for the times I've judged quietly while excusing myself in the same breath. Give me honest eyes for my own heart, and give me mercy for people in pain instead of a quiet verdict. Amen.

It's the kind of story that lands in your feed on a Tuesday morning — violence, injustice, lives cut short in a moment that was supposed to be sacred. And the impulse to make meaning of it, to quietly sort victims into categories of deserving and not-quite-deserving, is not a first-century problem. We do this constantly and mostly without noticing. We read about a tragedy and locate the detail that makes the victim slightly different from us — a choice they made, a place they went, a way they lived — and we file it away. It makes chaos feel ordered. It makes the world feel like it runs the way it should. Jesus won't do it. He doesn't rank the Galileans' sin, doesn't offer a framework to explain the violence, doesn't give the crowd the answer they came for. What he does instead is more uncomfortable: he redirects the whole question back at the people asking. "Unless you repent," he says in the next breath, "you too will all perish." Not as a threat, but as a serious reorientation — the tragedy of others is not a verdict on their guilt; it's an invitation to examine your own life while you still have it. That's harder to sit with than an explanation. But it might be the truer thing.