We call it “blaming the victims.” I did it myself when I first heard about the 737 Max crash in Ethiopia just prior to some air travel myself last week. I remarked to my wife that American planes are probably better maintained than Ethiopian planes. A couple days later my son-in-law corrected that opinion, explaining to me that Ethiopian Airlines is actually well-run, with a pretty good safety record overall.
Jesus addressed the natural human tendency to blame victims, imagining that they somehow must deserve their fate, in our text for this week, Luke 13:1-9. Jesus denied in verse 3 that the Galileans murdered by Pilate in the act of making sacrifices to God were somehow worse sinners than other Galileans (verse 2). However that denial is quickly followed by the perhaps unexpected warning, “but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”
Another current event of Jesus’ time, a tower falling on eighteen people, is given similar treatment in verses 4 and 5. Jesus denies blame for the victims while at the same time using the disaster as a warning to unrepentant sinners.
Then in the last part of the text, verses 6 to 9, Jesus tells a little parable about an unfruitful fig tree, with the same warning as the point, repent or suffer the consequences.
The parable in verse 8 is tempered with a little glimpse of the mercy and patience of God in the gardner’s request for patience with the fig tree.
Yet, as Klyne Snodgrass says in his book on the parables, mercy is not the primary theme here. In contrast to measuring the blame of others, He calls us to look to ourselves and our own need to repent from sin rather than to identify others more sinful than ourselves. And that is a big part of what Lent is all about.