Third Sunday of Lent C - Sermon

Psychologists call it the "Just World" phenomena.

The Third Sunday of Lent C

Transcribed from a Sermon

Given on March 7, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Arroyo Grande, California

In the mid to late 1960s when I was in graduate school, there was a news report that came out. It was an interview with a member of a jury. This member of the jury said, "Well, she was dressed in a short mini skirt, and a tight green top, and didn't wear any underwear.  She was asking for something to happen."  And that is why the man who had taken her in the parking lot of a restaurant, at knifepoint, kidnapped her and raped her, was acquitted - because she was "asking for it" as they would say. I was studying social psychology and a social psychologist at another university was fascinated by this story. Along with of course being somewhat appalled, he wanted to know what it is that people do in their minds to end up blaming the victim. 

He did some studies.  In one of them there was a woman behind a one-way mirror, and the subjects of the experiment were watching this woman who was supposedly taking a psychological test of some sort. Half of them saw her shocked with an electric shock when she made a mistake, and for the other half, she wasn't shocked, she was just told that she did the wrong thing.  Well sure enough the ones who saw that woman shocked thought that she was less attractive, less intelligent, and less competent than the ones who had just seen her taking the test.  There's something in us that has to have things balanced out. Melvin Learner called it the "Just World" hypothesis. There's some way in which we want the world to be just. You see it in all our fiction and all the movies.  In the end the good guys win, the bad guys get hurt. 

If you came out of a movie and the good guy died a horrible death and the bad guy was celebrating, you'd feel disappointed I think. And we have our fairy tales, and we have our stories, and in all of them the good win, the bad lose.  But that's not the way life is.  We look around us at the world and it seems so arbitrary of who does well and who gets hurt.  So how do we put it together?  One of the ways people react is by putting down the victim.  We saw that after Haiti and that horrible earthquake there. There was a televangelist who came out and said the reason that happened is because generations ago they worshipped Satan.  Do you remember that?  That same person after Katrina said that it was because of the immorality that happened in New Orleans, not realizing that the main neighborhood where the "immorality" took place was the one part of New Orleans that wasn't destroyed. 

We have a tendency to want to justify things, and I've heard it recently.  I was talking to someone about homelessness, and how there are so many people that are on the edge of homelessness, who if somebody loses a job or gets ill, or the balloon payment comes through, and all of the sudden they don't have a home, they have nothing.  This person responded, "Well, when they were taking out the mortgage they should have thought of those things."  Maybe, but nobody expected that the value of houses was going to crash the way it has.  Many of us may be right on that edge ourselves, but there's something about us that wants it to all come out fair.  You see it in scripture.  There is the wonderful Book of Job, in which we are told at the beginning that Job was a righteous man, and yet the worst possible things you can imagine happened to him, including having his three "friends" come and tell him "You must have done something wrong. This wouldn't have been happening to you if you hadn't done something wrong.  Get over it, acknowledge what you've done, and then God can be nice to you again."  The whole point of the Book of Job is that's not the way it works.  That's not the way it works, and that's what Jesus is saying in this Gospel reading.  Some people tell him about this horrible thing where the Galileans were offering him sacrifices and Pilate came and killed them all.  There's some reason to believe they might have been planning a revolt, or participated in a revolt, but that we wont go in to. Jesus' comment is, "Do you think they were worse sinners than everyone else in Galilee?  And do you think that these ones who had this building fall on them were worse sinners than everybody else in Jerusalem?”  He's not saying that they were innocent.  Notice he doesn't say they're innocent victims.  What he's just saying is they're no worse than all the rest of us. 

So how do we make sense of this?  There are two ways to respond to injustice, two ways to respond to the fact that things don't work out.  One is to find a way that the victim deserved it, and sometimes that gets to be pretty complex.  We have in India and other parts of Asia the idea of reincarnation, so even if you've been good in this lifetime, if something bad happens to you, you did something in another lifetime, or if you're born in to extreme poverty, that's because you deserved it from something from the past.  It's a nice way to keep justice, and not have to do anything about injustice. But the other response to when things don't seem just is to put forth the effort to change them.  When people are suffering and they don’t deserve to be suffering, because no one deserves to be suffering, we can get out there and try and change it.  We can try and help the homeless, and feed the hungry, and care for those in need.  We can speak up when society isn't fair. 

Those are the two choices.  Which do you think Christ would want us to do?  He certainly doesn't want us to justify injustice, but he isn't saying that the world is fair. And he isn't saying that God follows a kind of justice that we can understand. Sometimes Christians try to get around this injustice thing by saying, "Well, he'll get his after he dies, and the one who's hurt will end up having better things happen in heaven, and it will all balance out in eternity."  Jesus doesn't say that.  Jesus never promises the disciples if they're good, things will go fine for them.  He tells them to take up their cross.  He tells them they're going to suffer.  He tells them it's going to be hard, and it was.

Then after saying that he has this interesting little parable about the fig tree.  Odd little parable. There was a fig tree that was planted, and after three years there was no fruit. It usually takes about three years for a fig tree to produce fruit. So the owner of the vineyard says, "Cut it down.  We can do something better with this piece of land."  And the gardener says, "Give it another year.  Don't get rid of it yet."  Now most of the early interpretations of this parable have involved that the fig tree represented Israel, and it wasn't bearing fruit, and God was going to cut it down and bring in some other country to do that, but I'm going to stay away from that allegorical interpretation, and think about, and focus on, the vine dresser's mercy.  The vine dresser's says, "Don't do it now.  Give it another chance.  Have mercy on it."  Because in God's justice and in God's power, there's no reason any one of us doesn't "deserve" something.  None of us are perfect.  None of us have born the fruit that God has wanted us to bear.  We have done things we shouldn't do and we haven't done things we should have done. We haven't brought about justice, and we've hurt other people.  We say it every Sunday when we confess our sins and we all know it's true.  When we start thinking about a just world, we have a danger of pride, of somehow thinking we're better than somebody else, and that will keep us safe, but it doesn't work that way.  What we do have, we can't keep ourselves safe.  We can't be sure that bad things aren't going to happen to us, but what we do have, and what Paul said when he talks about bad things that have happened to the people of Israel, and so he says, "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone."  So if you're having a tough time, yeah, it's tough, it's hard, and it happens.  God is faithful, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so you may be able to endure it. 

It's kind of a tough message.  It's a message that bad things are going to happen, hard things are going to happen.  Our life is not going to be easy, and if you look back at the Christians and the faithful, and the saints, they didn't have it easy.  Quite the contrary.  But what we are told is that we don't face it alone, that Christ's mercy, Christ's love will help us get through it, that although none of us deserve anything, God's love has sent Christ to show us mercy, to walk with us in our sorrow, to be with us in our pain, to help us in our confusion, and to have mercy upon us, a mercy that we don't deserve, but is our great, and wonderful, and abounding hope.