A lot of folks are perplexed about Luke 13:1-5. The teachings I’ve seen attached to this passage are all over the map.
Let’s step back a moment. What is the one thing Jesus preached from the start? “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” That was the message of His forerunner and cousin, John the Baptist, as well. And that term “Kingdom of Heaven” meant the Messianic Kingdom. For most, that meant a literal restoration of the Davidic dynasty ruling in the region Rome called “Palestine.”
It could have been that, had the people obeyed the call to repent. You see, the call to repent was a call to return to the Covenant of Moses. The Jewish leadership, both Pharisees and Sadducees, had moved away from the ancient Hebrew mystical viewpoint of Moses in their understanding of the Law. The Pharisees in particular had come to dominate the teaching among common folks with a legalism that came from rejecting all the trappings of decadent Hellenism, but embracing the Aristotelian logic as the foundation for intellectual understanding. This was a radical departure from the ancient Hebrew outlook.
In this case, the call to repent included going back to that ancient Hebrew mystical outlook. It meant seeing the Covenant not as “law” but as the personal wishes of their heavenly Father. In the Pharisaical mind, their corpus of legalistic reasoning was God. It was a potent mix of materialism and resulted in the false notion that they had God over a barrel because He was bound by their semantic wrangling over the words of the Pentateuch. They even imagined that God admired their smart aleck maneuvering. This was the very thing from which Jesus demanded they repent.
Thus, in the cases of the Galileans who were slaughtered around the Altar in the Temple, Jesus was asking rhetorically if the folks who reported this incident imagined themselves exempt from such horror. As a Galilean Himself, Jesus asked if they imagined that this bunch whom the Roman soldiers killed were somehow bad Galileans and God allowed them to die for their sins. The real answer was obvious in the context of Jesus’ teaching: They died because they weren’t protected by the Covenant.
We don’t know what may have set these Galilean victims apart from any other Jewish Galilean, but Jesus was saying that Galileans in general were not under the covering of the Covenant. The whole nation of Israel had strayed so far off course that God had removed their covering, their hedge of protection against the violence of foreigners. In God’s eyes, they had no special protection because they weren’t standing in His favor. And the Covenant of Moses was the only way to gain that favor.
And Jesus cites a further example. There was a bunch of men working on a tower of some sort near the Pool of Siloam. The stonework collapsed and crushed 18 of them to death. Did they die for some hidden sins? No, they died because they had no covenant protection. Nothing protected them from random accidents.
Thus, all the promises of shalom were inapplicable to their lives because the Jewish leadership had seduced the nation and led them away from the Covenant. Not in the words of the Covenant, but they had departed the meaning behind the words. They did not stand in God’s shadow. So political violence or random accidents could fall on Jews just as they did on any random Gentile out there with no knowledge of the Covenant. Having the Covenant did the Jews no good since they weren’t obeying it.
They needed to repent from their hearts and return to the God of the Covenant. That Covenant was their identity as the People of Jehovah. It wasn’t a matter of DNA or mere behavior, but a matter of personal family loyalty. Otherwise, they would continue without the Covenant protections, and eventually it would all be handed over to other peoples who would form a new Covenant Nation under the Messiah. This is a mystical kingdom of hearts, instead of a political entity.
Everything Jesus taught was under the Covenant of Moses. That Covenant was closed, and the mission and privileges of Israel passed to the Messianic Covenant. Everything in the New Testament stands under the Covenant of Christ. We must be faithful in order to harvest the blessings that the Jews imagined they should have had. While this covering may not exempt us from the consequences of God’s inscrutable plans for humanity, it does give us whatever protections are possible from His divine favor.
It’s far better than the random stuff that hits everyone else.
