At the end of every good action movie the big time bad guy finally gets what is coming to him. When the good guy hero dispatches the evil-doer, the audience cheers. Obviously this final judgment was well deserved and proved that the wicked will be punished — hopefully in some dramatic and dreadful way. We all like to believe in cosmic come-uppance.

In this week’s gospel text some of those listening to Jesus speak ask him to comment on some “current events” of the day. The tragedies reported by those in the crowd and those noted by Jesus here in Luke’s text are not recorded in any other surviving literature/historical first century documents. But the events sound sadly familiar. The unexpected and untimely deaths of both the “Galileans” slaughtered by Pilate and of those crushed by the “to…