When a crucifix kills a priest, everyone wants a verdict

Someone in the crowd brought Jesus fresh news: Pilate's men had killed worshippers from Galilee in the middle of their sacrifices, as verse 1 tells it. Jesus heard the question hiding inside the report, and he answered with a second disaster all Jerusalem knew. A tower near the pool of Siloam had come down and crushed eighteen people. Nobody had ordered that one. It just fell, and Jesus could guess what people were saying about the dead.

On Saturday, October 17, Fr. Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari was celebrating a livestreamed evening Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Partway through, the heavy wooden crucifix above the altar fell and struck him on the head. He was facing his people and didn't appear to see it coming. "Father, Father! Call an ambulance!" people shouted, just before the broadcast cut out, and he never got up. The archdiocese asked for prayers for the repose of his soul. No one has said why the cross fell.

The clip spread quickly, and so did the old question: if God exists, why does this happen? Two answers come fast. One, from the skeptic, is that a cross killing a priest proves nobody is up there. The other, from the pious, is that God took him for a reason we can't see. Both turn a death into a verdict, and both claim to know more than anyone does.

Jesus answered that question with one word, and then he stopped explaining.

Luke 13:5I tell you, no, but, unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way."

No, the eighteen were no worse than anyone else in the city. That is everything he says about them. He offers no reason for the tower and no plan behind it, and then he turns the question on the people who asked it. It sounds harsh until you see where it points. The dead are past any answer. The crowd still has time.

Then he tells a story about a fig tree that has stood three years without fruit. The owner wants it cut down. The gardener answers him:

Luke 13:8-98He answered, 'Lord, leave it alone this year also, until I dig around it, and fertilize it.9If it bears fruit, fine; but if not, after that, you can cut it down.'"

The gardener doesn't pretend the deadline isn't there. He asks for one more year and offers to spend it digging around the roots himself.

According to the Argentine outlet MDZ, as reported by the Economic Times, Fr. Sánchez had been preaching that evening about how we spend our time. "We are all going to die," he said, adding that the hours given to God and to the people we love count for more than the rest. His words point the same way Jesus pointed at Siloam.

Siloam gives no reason for a death like his, and it won't let anyone hang a verdict on the man who died. It turns toward the people still here, and the warning it gives them comes from someone who wants them to live.