The Headline Jesus Was Handed

The ceasefire collapsed at the start of the month. After Iran struck three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on the 6th and 7th, US forces began a bombing campaign that has now run thirteen consecutive nights — coastal surveillance, air defence sites, logistics, maritime capability. Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan have come under Iranian fire in return.

You have read some version of that paragraph a dozen times this month. Your eyes moved over the numbers and kept going. That is not a criticism; it is how everybody reads a war they are not in.

There is a scene in Luke’s gospel where a group of people walk up to Jesus with a current event. Pilate had killed a group of Galileans while they were in the middle of offering sacrifices — soldiers, worshippers, blood on the temple floor. It was the ancient equivalent of pushing a phone across the table and saying, have you seen this.

They wanted the thing we always want from a headline: a verdict on somebody else. Were they worse than the rest? Was it deserved? Whose fault was it?

His answer was no — they were not worse. And then, before anybody could relax into that, he added a sentence nobody came for: unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

Then he raised a second story himself, unprompted. A tower in Siloam had fallen and killed eighteen people. Not politics, not persecution — a building accident. Same answer. Not worse than you. Same warning.

He took two headlines about other people and, in about thirty seconds, made both of them about the person reading them.

Because news about death is not information about strangers. It is notice.

Every name in this month’s reporting had a morning that started normally. Not one of them had the day marked. What separates you from them is not righteousness and it is not caution — it is a few miles and an amount of time nobody has told you the size of. And on the far side of that time there is not simply an ending. There is an appointment.

Jesus did not tell those people to be afraid and leave it there. The whole point of saying it out loud, while they were still standing in front of him, was that there was still something to be done about it.

God’s answer to a world full of people who die unready was not better warnings. It was a substitute: he sent his Son to take the judgment in the place of guilty people, and to walk out of his own grave three days later. That offer stands for as long as you are reading this and not one minute longer.