Unless You Repent, You Too Will Perish
(By Fr. Dexter Brereton)
. . . . . do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent . . . . . .
you will all perish as they did!”I was once approached by one of this country’s major charismatic leaders on the occasion of yet another disaster in Haiti, several years ago. “Do you suppose,” she began “That all this misery and misfortune that they are undergoing in Haiti is because of all that Voodoo and the false gods that they worship?” There is always the tendency in life to give pat, easy explanations for the sufferings of others, especially by way of ‘blaming the victim.’ The logic is that you reap what you sew, therefore, the people in Haiti must have been in some way guilty or deserving of their misfortune. In much of the Caribbean, women know only too well, that they are likely to get little public sympathy in cases of rape, especially if it is believed that the victim was overtly ‘sexual’ or ‘sexy’ in any way. “She look for she ting!” (She was looking for it) we Trinis would say, as if to satisfy ourselves that all was well in the moral universe as another sinner had gotten her just desserts. Logic like this only serves to hide the moral bankruptcy of the accusers and their fundamentalist way of thinking.
Jesus was struggling with this very problem in today’s Gospel reading. The victims of the massacre by Pontius Pilate and of the collapse of the Tower at Siloam would have been understood to have been overtaken by the punishment due to some offence they had committed. For Jesus’ hearers, to speak in such a manner was to create a dividing line separating innocence and guilt. The implicit assumption of course is that those left alive to shake their heads at these disasters were firmly on the side of the innocent, while these unfortunate victims were on the side of the ‘guilty’ and perished as a result of their sins. Jesus the Lord questions this way of looking at the world and of so easily removing ourselves from guilt due to sin. As scripture says elsewhere “all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3: 23).
Today, many of us reading this story would recognize this drama as having been played out in Trinidad and Tobago recently in the murder of a Japanese pan player. In remarks not long after her body was discovered, a public official allegedly lamented the vice and vulgarity which had crept into the Carnival celebrations unfortunately linking the victim’s death with sinful behavior. What was worse was that the resulting furore served only to obfuscate the REAL issues affecting women and other citizens (such as violence against women and impunity for crime). Perhaps Jesus would ask all of us: Do you suppose that Ms. Nagakiya who suffered like that was a greater sinner than any Trinidadian? She was not I tell you. No; but unless you repent you will all perish as she did. On this the third Sunday of Lent, the word of God invites us to close the door to self-righteousness and open the pathway to repentance and renewal.
Dear Lord,
We repent of our self-righteousness. We look around us at the mountain of victims of crime and often smear their character by implying that they had ‘looked for it.’ We pray that we may see ourselves too as sinners invited to repent with sincerity. We pray also for countries that self-righteously accuse others of violence against women and children, while at the same time concealing and refusing to admit their own violence against poor people and citizens belonging to minorities. We pray that in this Lenten period we may follow you with open and sincere hearts. Amen.
