Fragility

Luke 13: 1-9

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

February 28, 2016

We human beings are actually quite fragile. This fragility, the thought that our lives can come unraveled very quickly, can make us anxious, and so we go into denial, try to shore up the illusion that we are immune from the tragedies that others face.

We do this in various ways. More toys, more money, more honors and distinctions, more frenzied activity can calm our anxiety, give an illusion of security. For a moment.

And we can find ways to distance ourselves from those people who remind us of our own fragility. Keep immigrants who are fleeing the violence and poverty of their countries from crossing our borders. Keep the frail elderly and the handicapped in institutions, out of sight. Lock up black and brown people in prison and immigration detention centers. Keep the homeless out of our neighborhoods.

Because such people remind us of how fragile our lot as human beings really is. We’d rather not see them or listen to them or have to think about them.

We tell ourselves things like, “I’ll never be homeless. I’m not like those folks in the encampments down on Division Street. I work hard to keep my job and my health. Heck, I’ve even got a college degree. I’m not like them. Their fate will never be mine.” This self-talk calms our anxiety. For a moment. 

At least until we realize that the majority of those same homeless people once had homes like like the rest of us, some have Ph.D.’s, some were once physicians and attorneys, professional people whose lives suddenly whirled out of control through no fault of their own. Suddenly it dawns on us: We’re not as different from them as we thought. It might not be as obvious, but all of our lives, like theirs, are fragile.

It’s hard to accept our own fragility, to remember, as we said on the first day of Lent, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. We’d like to hide from that fact, go into denial.

There's a religious version of this way of thinking, as seen in today's gospel, a way of shielding ourselves from our inherent vulnerability. 

A crowd tells Jesus about an incident of state terror that Pilate, the Roman Governor, had inflicted on a group of Galilean Jews. They had come to the temple to offer sacrifice. These sacrifices involved the killing of animals. Pilate sent in troops and murdered the Galileans, mingling their blood with the blood of the sacrificed animals. 

If the sacrificed animals were part of a ritual for the atonement of sins, the Galileans were murdered as they were repenting. This makes the crowd think that perhaps their sins were so great that it had something to do with their being slaughtered. They must have been the worst of sinners. God would not accept their sacrifice, but through the agency of Pilate sacrificed them instead. In the background of this tragedy lies a God who seeks out and punishes sinners.

It’s a common logic, almost hard-wired into the human mind: Step out of line, and you will be punished. 

This logic is also an attempt of shielding ourselves from tragedy. “This could never happen to me. I’m a good person. God would not punish me like he did them.” This way of thinking distances us from tragedy and our own fragility, from thinking, “That could have been me.”

Jesus resists this talk of a punishing God, this effort to run from our own fragility, but before he does this, he extends it. “What about physical evil, the accidents that happen? You’ve heard about the tower that fell in Jerusalem that killed eighteen people. Was the hand of God in this, the hand of a God who sees sinners and punishes them?”

To this theology of a punishing God, Jesus gives an adamant “No”. He doesn’t elaborate, nor does he try to make a case for why bad things happen to good people. He just seems to say, “Stop that way of thinking right now!”

And then he goes on to say that if they do not repent, they will likewise perish. Suddenly the focus shifts from tragic victims in the external world, to their own fate. And their own fate doesn’t depend on the caprice of Pilate of the poor mortaring of bricklayers. Their fate is in their own hands, in their own hearts. 

They have to repent, change their mind, or they will perish. It’s suddenly no longer a matter of abstract theology, but of personal decision, a choice not to waste “the one wild and precious life” you’ve been blessed with.

Speculating about why bad things happen is a misplaced emphasis, a waste of time. Focus instead, Jesus seems to be saying, on what God is inviting you to do now, how God is calling you to live fully, to do God’s will on earth. Shift your focus. Change your mind. Repent.

But to do this means embracing our own fragility, not fleeing from it. It means no longer shielding ourselves from those “others” who remind us of life’s inherent fragility, the very ones Jesus sought out and loved to hang out with. This is why one theologian refers to Jesus as “the Compassion of God”.

In fact, the whole story of Jesus is about embracing human fragility. The early Christians wrote a song about this, words we’ll hear on Good Friday. Let me slightly paraphrase that ancient song:

His state was divine,
yet he did not cling to his equality with God
but emptied himself
to assume the condition of a slave,
and became [fragile] as we are;
and being as we are,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death,
death on a cross.

For us, who sometimes do everything we can to flee our own fragility and that of others, it’s hard to grasp that we are liberated by someone who became powerless, that we are being strengthened by someone who became fragile and weak, that we find new hope in someone who divested himself of all honors and distinctions, that we find a leader in someone who became a slave, that we receive life from someone who experienced the most horrifying form of death, death on a cross. Hard to grasp that following Jesus means entering into human fragility, not fleeing from it.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, stumbled across this realization one day. He writes:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being human, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.

Lent is a time that we, as followers of Jesus, come, like Jesus, like Merton, to embrace our own fragility and that of others.

These are days to cherish these fragile and precious lives we’ve been given. Precisely because they are fragile, we can’t take them for granted, must cherish every moment -- the food we eat, the people we love, the beauty of the earth, the work we do. 

And this recognition that we will not always be in this life as we are now, leads us to stop sweating the small stuff, leads us back to what really matters. 

Often, when a person is approaching that most fragile moment in their life, the moment of death, they are blessed with a profound clarity about what is most important. As the common wisdom goes, in that final moment no one regrets that they didn’t spend more time at the office. The recognition of our own fragility leads us back to what matters most, the people, the work, the values we cherish most.

And finally, this recognition deepens our compassion. Rather than shielding ourselves from those whose brokenness and fragility is most apparent, we begin to see them as truly our brothers and sisters, kin, let their stories touch us, maybe even become friends. Their fragility may, for the moment, be more apparent than ours, but we’re not as different from them as we’d like to pretend.