NOTES for Luk 13:4
Answering the question religious people have asked in every age, "what have we done to deserve this?", Jesus points them to an event whose details history has not preserved for us. But even without details it becomes clear that this concerns something we would today call a technological disaster: the tower of Siloam, about which we have no other information, apparently collapsed suddenly, and people died under its ruins, people who, judging by the Savior's words, were not at all the worst in the city.
This is His answer to another question asked at the same time: why did people known for their faith and piety die at the hands of Herod, who then ruled Galilee? Here too the issue is an event mentioned nowhere else, but everything we know today about Herod and his rule shows that there could have been many such episodes under him.
Apparently Jesus' answer to the question "why?" is quite clear and quite terrible, although in a fallen world it was hard to expect anything else. In a fallen world there is no reward for the righteous and no punishment for sinners. It is amoral, and evil rules in it. Here anything can happen to anyone, and neither faith, nor piety, nor a person's good qualities can change his position.
There are no guarantees that something horrible will not happen to a good, believing, and pious person, not only at human hands, but simply because of what we are used to calling an absurd accident. After the fall, man found himself in a world where there is no place for God, where He is unwanted and His access is extremely restricted, restricted by the very free will that man so loves to abuse. And God will not intrude where man does not want to see Him. Yet He can still help man, but only in His own world. In the Kingdom.
There, where He is the full master and where, therefore, there is no place for chance, at least when it concerns a human being. There everyone receives, not a reward, no, but what he sought and could not find in the fallen world when he walked the path that finally brought him to the threshold of the Kingdom. "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish" are strange words to hear from the Savior, addressed to deeply and sincerely believing, religious, and pious people. But Jesus is speaking of the Kingdom.
"At last take the final step on the path and enter where evil has no place" is, in essence, what He calls them to do. Here, in the world where evil rules, nothing can be done. As the Kingdom enters the world, the world will change, but in its present state it cannot become good. The answer is entirely realistic and frightening in its realism, but it also offers an alternative. It is the answer of the Messiah who brought the Kingdom into the world.