A week after the flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas, 120 people are confirmed dead and 173 more are still missing. Rescue efforts have long since transitioned to recovery and clean-up. The story has captivated the attention of both local and nationwide news agencies, as well as social media channels. It seems that no one can speak of the event without using the words “tragic” or “tragedy,” and for good reason. The loss of life and the damage to property and livestock is indeed horrific.
As the flood waters of the Guadalupe River have receded, they have given way to a different, but equally devastating, type of flooding: blame. Questions such as who knew what, when did they know it, and why didn’t they act dominate mainstream and social media. There’s a legitimate need to reassess preparations and strategies for minimizing the impact of this kind of event, but the underlying tone of most of these conversations is not constructive evaluation, but is rather hurt and anger. The intensity of the emotions is understandable, but the degree of vitriol I’ve seen being hurled about is shocking nonetheless.
What makes it worse is that the majority of the people hurling these barbs don’t live in Kerr County and may not have even known it existed a week ago; yet, now, all of a sudden, they seem to have very specific knowledge of what did and did not happen that night, and feel entitled to render their expert opinion on whom should be held accountable. Sadly, that kind of rhetoric tends to elicit equally violent replies which do nothing more than stir an already seething pot and adds fuel to the fire that boils it. I myself struggled to resist the temptation to point out the flaws and inconsistencies in all the arguments, until I realized no one is really looking to have a constructive debate right now — they’re just looking for someone to blame.
Whom to blame seems relatively inconsequential, as pretty much anyone appears to be a fair target. In fact, in just one social media thread, I found at least one person who blamed the leadership of Camp Mystic, the National Weather Service, the sheriff’s office, county leadership, the state legislature, the lieutenant governor, the governor, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the President of the United States for this tragedy. There was even one misguided soul who blamed the parents for foolishly sending their daughters to summer camp, not to mention one in a flood zone. Some tried to hide their anger behind rational-sounding arguments while others made no attempt at all to mask their feelings, such as one woman who declared, “All the families should sue the camp out of existence. And sue the county and the state.” And for everyone who was mad because somebody didn’t do what they thought they should have done, there was someone else who was mad at them for not having their facts straight. I’m telling you: the intensity and violence of the emotion in just that one thread rivaled that of the Guadalupe River at its peak.
Incredibly, the one person I have yet to hear or read anyone blame is God. I mean, if you’re dead set on blaming someone, isn’t He the most obvious target? After all, it’s not like He hasn’t been known to manipulate the elements before, not to mention that He, better than anyone else, knew exactly what dumping 10 inches of rain in the Texas Hill Country overnight would do. Plus, unlike any of the others being fingered, He’s the only one who could have actually prevented the disaster in the first place. If it hadn’t rained that hard that quickly, all debate about cell phones, weather radios, and warning sirens would be moot, and most of America would still be blissfully unaware that Kerr County even exists. I’m not saying He should be, but my only explanation for why God isn’t being openly blamed is that most people don’t believe He exists or is relevant enough to even be worthy of blame, which is sadly a tragedy in its own right.
Despite the intensity of emotions an event such as this flood stirs up inside us, I think we all recognize that pointing fingers and assigning blame doesn’t ultimately achieve anything constructive, and begs the question: how are we supposed to understand and deal with tragedy like this from a biblical perspective?
It may surprise you to learn that Jesus addressed this question directly. Stuck in the middle of a seemingly random series of short stories in the gospel of Luke is a curious exchange recorded in the first nine verses of chapter 13. In this passage, some people bring word to Jesus that Pilate had some Galileans killed while they were offering sacrifices. Since Luke is the only gospel writer to record this event and there are no extra-biblical references to it, we don’t know any more about it than what Luke tells us, which isn’t much. Scholars have speculated about what prompted Pilate to do this, and about whether there is any significance to the victims being identified as Galileans, but the simple truth is we don’t know. It is also unclear why these people reported the event to Jesus. Were they expecting him to take some action? Was it another trap to try to get Him to speak out publicly against Roman authority, or were they just talking about it because that’s what we do when tragedy strikes?
Because Luke doesn’t explain either Pilate’s motivation or the people’s, neither appear to be germane to the point of telling the story. What is relevant is the reaction the people who relayed the news to Jesus had to this tragedy, because that’s what Jesus addresses. Just like those commenting on the Kerr County flood, they were reacting to the tragedy with blame — specifically, they were blaming the Galileans for having done something wrong which had resulted in them bringing this horror upon themselves, having obviously provoked God, Pilate, or both.
Jesus immediately shot that line of thinking down. “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” He then followed up with another example. “Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:2-5)
As random and odd as it seems for Luke to even be relating this story, Jesus’ response is even odder. What in the world does repentance have to do with tragedy? And the parable He gives, which we assume is supposed to clarify what He said, seems to have nothing to do with either tragedy, repentance, or the price of tea in China. So what does this mean, and what is He telling us to do?
I think the place to start is to understand the nature of blame. One of the reasons we blame others is to deflect legitimate responsibility from ourselves to someone else. You know how this works: you hit a baseball through a neighbor’s window, but tell the neighbor your kid brother did it. But that doesn’t seem to be a likely explanation for the finger-pointing that accompanies tragedy. In fact, even in tragedies where there is a clear and undisputed culprit, such as in the Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde shootings, there still appears to be an insatiable need to blame someone else. It even happened in Jesus’ day. That Pilate was the one responsible for the slaughter of the Galileans was obviously a well-known and established fact, yet people were directing blame at the victims. What’s more is that in none of these situations was anyone accusing the ones assigning blame of being even remotely responsible for the tragic event, yet their instinctive response was to off-load on someone else.
Some psychologists view blame as a coping mechanism people use to avoid experiencing negative emotions, such as guilt and shame. Obviously, the horror, anger, or grief triggered by a tragedy would also fit into that category. I don’t agree with that understanding because blame is reactionary. People still feel the hurt — in fact, it’s the very thing that prompts them to shift blame. While most who view blame as a defense mechanism would say it’s inappropriate and ineffective, the problem with describing it that way still positions the blamer as a victim, subtly justifing it no matter how wrong it is proclaimed to be. In a twisted way, by deflecting and deferring proper resolution of the pain by trying to make it someone else’s responsibility, blame actually boomarangs back and reinforces the idea that the blamer has been harmed, which is one of the reasons it tends to escalate so quickly.
That brings us to what I believe is really at the core of all blame, regardless of the precipitating event or who’s responsible for it: control, or more specifically, our lack of it. If I am legitimately guilty of doing something wrong, I blame others to try to control the consequences. Up until the point in time in which I commit the bad act, I have control, but once I make that choice, I immediately lose control of the consequences of that action. Tragedies are generally worse in that regard, because they are things that aren’t supposed to happen. People aren’t supposed to walk into schools and movie theaters and kill others who don’t know them and have never wronged them. Pre-teen and teenage girls aren’t supposed to die at summer camp. Folks aren’t supposed to get mowed down while worshiping. We wish we could have done something to prevent the horror, but we couldn’t. We weren’t there. We didn’t know. We think that aching in the pit of our stomach is simply the pain and grief of loss, but it is also the hollow horror of helplessness.
So we feel compelled to believe that someone should have and could have done something to prevent the horrible outcome, because the thought of there being powers and entities over which we have no control is even more horrific than the event we just witnessed. Even if we ourselves couldn’t stop it, blaming someone else preserves the illusion of control because we’re convinced that if someone had done what we think should have been done, things would have turned out differently.
Blame is always a very personal issue. Although we rarely process it consciously this way, essentially what blame says is, “I’m feeling this hurt that I could not prevent, and the way I choose to deal with my inability to control that is to make someone else responsible to deal with it, so I can legitimize the fact that I can’t.” At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether my justification is rational or not, or who the target of my blame is — as long as it’s not me.
So what does any of that have to do with repentance, and why did Jesus say repentance is how we should respond to tragedy? Repentance means “to change one’s mind,” usually with regards to sin. There is definitely an element of that in Luke 13. When Jesus says, “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,” He isn’t saying that if you don’t turn away from your sin, God’s going to sic Pilate on you or drop a tower on your head. What He is saying is that if you don’t repent your demise will be just as tragic as the deaths in those other scenarios. The tragedy in your case would be that you had the opportunity to turn from your sin and accept God’s gracious gift of salvation, but you didn’t.
However, the explanatory parable Jesus tells lets us know there’s more to what He’s saying than just a call to salvation. Trust me on this: I don’t recommend that you read a bunch of commentaries to try to understand what this parable is about because what you’ll find is all kinds of confusing speculation around who the owner and the vineyard-keeper are, who or what the fig tree and the vineyard represent, and why there’s a fig tree in a vineyard, not to mention what the significance of the three years, the digging and fertilizing, and the cutting down is. In my opinion, none of those things matter. As we will see, this parable is actually a very simple analogy with a very simple point that addresses our tendency to blame and the underlying problem with control that motivates it.
You see, the fallacy Jesus was addressing then is the same one we have now. We believe that good things happen to good people and that bad things happen to bad people. On top of that, we also establish our own standards and definitions of what “good” and “bad” are. When confronted with the reality that things frequently don’t work out that way, we attempt to correct the apparent injustice by assigning blame.
If you think I’m stretching things, take another look at our examples. The people Jesus was talking to had concluded that those who had died tragically at Pilate’s hand must have done something horrible to deserve it. Not only that, the unsaid but clearly implied conclusion was that they were better people because they had not been judged that harshly.
The social media commenters I read suffer from the same fallacy. At the root of all their remarks is a rather egocentric assertion of rights: their right to know better, their right to express their opinion, their right to demand accountability. Those victims were good people who didn’t deserve to die; the bad people are the ones who should have prevented this horrible outcome, and they should be sued out of existence. Just like the folks 2100 years ago, they believe they have the right to determine what’s good and what’s bad, to determine who’s guilty and who’s not, and to do it from the anonymity of their social media handle. But careful, now — let he who is not guilty of this sin cast the first stone.
When Jesus said we need to repent, He wasn’t just talking about our need to change our perspective on sin, He was calling us to align our whole value system with God’s: how we view good and bad, life and death, and reward and punishment.
For example, have you noticed how we tend to value the life of a child over that of an adult? Almost every time the flood’s casualty numbers are reported, there’s almost an unspoken obligation to highlight that 36 of the known victims were children. Is a child’s life intrinsically more valuable, and their death inherently more tragic, than an adult’s? Weren’t all adults children themselves at one point in time? Do people depreciate over time like used cars? Not in God’s eyes, which I know because Jesus died for all, both young and old, but in ours they do. That’s because we apply our own rules and standards to determine what’s good and bad, who should be rewarded or punished, and who should live or die.
That’s what the parable of the fig tree in the vineyard is about. Just like the vineyard owner, we see things that we think are bad, unproductive, or simply don’t belong, like a no-good fig tree, and we cast blame. Can’t you see the parallel? “Cut it down!” we scream. “It’s just using up the ground. I’ve already wasted enough time pandering to that useless stick. In fact, it’s probably the reason the grape yield is down this year. If someone had gotten rid of it last year like I wanted to, it wouldn’t be the problem it is now.” God, on the other hand, says, “No — I’m not only going to give it more time, but I’m also going to do some things to try to stimulate growth and fruit. There is a limit to just how long I’m going to wait, but you don’t need to concern yourself with that. You need to be sure your heart is right and that you’re during what I want you to do, and leave what’s right and just to Me.”
When tragedy strikes, we scream, “It’s not fair!” because we believe that everyone has the right to live; but the Scriptures teach that we are all born sinful and deserve death. We mourn the losses, and there’s nothing wrong with that; but if our mourning blinds us from the warning that life is not guaranteed, that one day we all will die, and we never know when our turn will come, then we will tragically perish just like everyone else who was caught unprepared. Holding others accountable is also not wrong, as long as it’s based on truth and not a desire for vengeance or a posture of self-appointed superiority. As Peter reminds us, “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9), and we have to accept that grace means extending time and forgiveness to those who don’t deserve it.
So how should we respond to tragedy? For starters, don’t blame. Not because it’s not constructive, but because of what pointing fingers says about your own heart’s condition. Instead look at tragedy through God’s eyes. He doesn’t want any to perish, but His justice demands that ultimately there must be an end to the season of mercy. Tragedies are wake-up calls, not just to improve our readiness against bad actors and natural disasters, but to remember that we’re not in control of how long we live here or of deciding what’s good and bad, but we are responsible for the time we have and what we do with it. Heed the warnings and repent, because the greatest tragedy awaits those who had the opportunity to do that, and didn’t.
