Luke 13:2 Meaning Jesus Answered Them

The mind hearing of others who suffered rushes at once to explain it, and its explanation is always the same: they must have deserved it, they must have sinned. This is guilt at its oldest work, reading calamity as proof of a hidden wrong and using another's misfortune to confirm that suffering is punishment justly dealt. It is a way of managing one's own fear, for if pain is earned by sin, then the careful self might yet buy safety by being good.

The question set before such thinking exposes it. The assumption that the fallen were worse than their fellows does not measure anyone's guilt; it reveals the accuser's need to find guilt somewhere, so that a world of suffering can be made to seem fair.

Galilaeans: the seemingly guilty others the mind singles out, the figures onto whom it projects its belief that suffering is deserved

Pubbekatahetuvāda: The view that all you feel comes from past deeds The Buddha turned this explanation of suffering down. News of the killing arrives with its verdict already attached: blood mixed into the sacrifices, so the men must have had it coming. A body goes down from weather, illness, rough handling, or a governor's soldiers, and reading a man's ledger backward off the manner of his death gets the arithmetic wrong.

Kammavipāka: The ripening of deeds How actions bear fruit is one of the four things left unworked out; sit down to calculate it and you get vexation for your trouble. The crowd wants an exchange rate here, so much sin bought so much blood on the altar stones, and with that rate in hand they could price anyone. Deeds ripen like fruit on their own schedule, and nobody standing under the tree can say which one falls next or why.

Paravajjānupassanā: Watching the faults of others Faults get winnowed like chaff when they belong to someone else, while a man hides his own the way a cheat hides a bad throw at dice. A report of slaughter in the temple offers precisely this pleasure: a class of worse sinners to stand outside of, and reassurance bought cheaply with other people's deaths. The question comes straight back at the ones who brought the news.

Saṃvega: The shock that turns a person around Complacency breaks when something lands too close. Blood at the altar stays another man's story only while those Galileans count as a different kind of person, and once that grade collapses the tower at Siloam leans over everyone, including the Galilean asking the question, who is walking toward Jerusalem.

Maraṇassati: Keeping death in mind Worth calling to mind every day, and cheapened into an audit of other people's endings. Worshippers cut down mid offering, eighteen crushed under falling stone: it comes on an ordinary morning, at prayer, with the day's business unsettled. Hold that close and the question changes from who earned such a death to what remains unfinished in you before your own.