In an earlier chapter, Luke records the admonition of Jesus: "Do not judge and you will not be judged yourselves. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned yourselves" (Lk 6:37). Luke follows up that teaching now with Jesus' reference to two concrete instances of people being killed. It seems that people simply reported the Pilate incident to Jesus. However, knowing the propensity of people to link disaster or suffering with personal sin, Jesus is quick to respond to the potential judgement hidden in the report: it was so easy to think that those who were killed must have been sinners. In fact, from what we know of Pilate's cruelty, this incident tells us more about the possibility of Pilate's guilt than about that of his victims. In his second example of the tower in Siloam in Jerusalem, Jesus disassociates what happened from any judgement of guilt on the part of those killed.

While Jesus often told parables to convey His teaching, we see today another aspect of His ministry: He lived in a real world, not a world of mere story-telling, and that real world calls us to reflect upon ourselves as we reflect on the things that happen.