Luke 13:2
And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans, because they suffered such things? And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans, because they suffered such things?
Jesus was answering people who had just reported the Galileans whom Pilate and his soldiers slew at the altar while they were offering sacrifices. Those who brought the report assumed the victims suffered because they were sinners above all other Galileans, deserved it for their wickedness, and were under God's judgment. In doing so they were judging others by outward fortune as proof of their own righteousness.
By asking whether those Galileans were worse sinners than other Galileans, the question challenges and denies that suffering a violent calamity proves greater guilt, is a reliable measure of guilt, or shows the victims were less favored by God. The calamity is not grounds for condemning the victims, claiming greater favor, or self-congratulation, and judging them as exceptionally guilty is mistaken. It is a warning to the living to repent, for unless they repent they will all likewise perish, a lesson repeated with the eighteen killed when the tower in Siloam fell.
The warning of judgment is joined with the invitation of mercy, setting God's justice and judgment together with His mission of mercy, illustrated by the parable of the barren fig tree. For His mission is not to destroy men's lives but to save them, and God sent His Son not to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved. The verse belongs to the warning of the coming kingdom of God with sharp rebuke of ignorance and indifference, since the people were quick to read signs in the sky foretelling the weather but did not discern the signs of the times that clearly pointed to His mission.
The warning also pointed forward to the destruction of Jerusalem, when unless the people repented and found refuge in Christ they too would perish. Many Jews would be killed in the temple courts while offering sacrifices as the Galileans had been, leaving them only a brief time to turn to what would bring them peace. Treating suffering as evidence of special sinfulness adds to the burden of afflicted people, as when the belief was unjustly applied to James White during his sickness.