Luke 13.1-9
The gospel reading begins with a story as current as today’s headlines. A crowd comes to Jesus and reports an atrocity that sounds like breaking news: ‘Religious pilgrims martyred.’ Pontius Pilate ordered their deaths. Even if the New Testament hadn’t been written, or we didn’t have the Creed with its line about how Jesus “was crucified under Pontius Pilate,” we would still know that Pilate was a tyrant. Historians like Josephus and Philo tell of Pilate ordering his troops to kill a group of Samaritans climbing Mt Gerazim; or of him seizing Temple funds to pay for the construction of an aqueduct, then violently crushing the protest that rose up against him. It’s an all-too-familiar story of paranoid political leaders unleashing violence on others.
Is there any way to make sense of it all? Confronted with suffering, especially innocent suffering, it’s natural to look for reasons, meaning. The question of evil and suffering in the world is an urgent one, then and now.
To this story of Pilate’s violence, Jesus adds an example of his own. South of Jerusalem, in a place called Siloam, a tower collapsed and killed eighteen people. Is there a cause-and-effect to suffering? We find this urgent question in the psalms with their laments; in Job as he lays his questions before God; in the disciples’ question in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John when they point to a blind man and ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” as if blame can be assigned.
Is disease, destruction, or suffering punishment or payback for things done or left undone? We have plenty of clichés suggesting that’s the case. ‘They got what was coming to them; What goes around comes around; The chickens have come home to roost.’ But is there a direct link between bad things happening and the things you have done? Jesus’ response is clear. “No, I tell you.” Our Lord refuses to link personal suffering with personal sin, refuses to link tragedy with guilt. For anyone in their suffering, for anyone who has asked the question ‘Why?’ Jesus’ word is a word of assurance.
Yet given that assurance, what Jesus says next sounds odd. Right after he refuses to make a direct link between suffering and sin, he says. “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Now I believe that Jesus’ assurance means that when we ask ‘Why?’ about a chronic or terminal illness, when we stand at the graveside of a friend, or when we add our voice to the psalms, Job, and the broader biblical witness, we won’t find easy answers about payback, punishment, or blame. Jesus says the deaths of the Galileans and the people of Siloam are not linked to their being particularly sinful. They weren’t worse sinners than anyone else. Odd, then, that Jesus says starkly, urgently that both events are a sign that we must repent. Why the warning, here of all places, to change our hearts and lives or we will also perish?
Hold on to that question. For now, though, we’ll set aside the first half of this morning’s gospel about headline-making suffering, personal suffering, and explore what Jesus says in the second half in his parable of the fig tree. “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.” The parable quickly then turns into what sounds like an old-fashioned parable of judgment. The fig tree has fallen short of what it’s supposed to be and do; it’s not bearing fruit. “Cut it down!” says the landowner. “Why should it be wasting the soil?”
Think back to John the Baptist’s preaching before Jesus’ ministry. People came to John at the Jordan River to be baptized; he called them to repent; his words were stark, urgent: “Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the trees. Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” When Jesus, in a parable, describes a fig tree that does not bear good fruit, he sounds like he’s going to pick up John’s axe and message. “Every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down.” But, as you heard, that’s not what happens. In the parable, the fig isn’t cut down. The gardener intercedes, asks for mercy on the fig’s behalf. “Sir, let it alone for one more year until I dig around it and fertilize it.” Judgment gives way to grace.
From my point of view, that gardener shows us Jesus. Jesus comes into the world and into our lives and intercedes for us. He comes, as he says elsewhere, to give life and not to destroy. In his first sermon in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says that he has come, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This is a year of restoration and healing, of forgiveness and new life. And this year doesn’t depend on the calendar.
Now I know that when gardener intercedes on the tree’s behalf for one more year and says, “Let it alone,” it doesn’t sound particularly significant; it sounds like a simple request for a bit of patience over the next twelve months—see what happens, then reevaluate. “Let it alone for one more year.” Yet there’s a world of grace and assurance in the words ‘let it alone.’ Some translations have the gardener saying, ‘Pardon it.’ Only how do you pardon a tree? The prayer book has no prayer for the pardoning of a tree. Yet the ancient biblical word behind, ‘Let it alone,’ is quite literally the same word Jesus prays from the cross when he says, “Father, forgive them.” On the cross, Jesus intercedes for a sinful world that conspired against him. “Father, forgive them.” Pardon them, let them be. “Let it alone” is a word of grace, the opportunity for life, for the fig and for us. It’s forgiveness. In Jesus, judgment gives way to grace. We live, as the fig lives, in the year of the Lord’s favor.
This is assurance for us, that Jesus doesn’t link personal suffering with personal sin. In him, we have the assurance that we live in the year of the Lord’s favor.
Yet even with that assurance, Jesus’ stark and urgent words remain. “Unless you repent.” Unless you repent. You! What could that mean? The Wednesday Bible Study a week and a half ago talked about repentance and repenting not so much as feelings of guilt and remorse. (That could well be a part of repentance, sometimes appropriately so.) But repentance and repenting are more like a change in the direction of your life, less an emotion than an action, a turn from one thing to another, leaving behind one way of life as you turn toward God in trust and with renewed purpose—to “take hold of the life that really is life,” as St Paul says. That’s repentance.
And the need for this turn toward God is always there, daily conversion, because we daily take hold of so many things other than God, take hold of things that distract us from life in God. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, once noted that most of us go through life with a tendency to divert ourselves. Pascal lived in the 1600s and so I can hardly imagine he had to distract and divert his attention then, but I am well-aware of how easy it is to be distracted now. Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” he recognizes the human tendency to avoid facing what really matters—both the basic questions of life and big questions of life: meaning, purpose, God, my sin and failings, suffering, heaven, hell, salvation.
Jesus, in the stories of the suffering of Galileans and of the people in Siloam, sees a window of opportunity to focus on big questions and show us the need to rethink our lives. ‘Are they worse sinners than the rest? Not at all.’ Yet in saying, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did,” our Lord gives us a stark, urgent reminder of what we know is true but are often too distracted to face: that life is fragile; we are mortal; we don’t have all the time in the world to rethink our lives, to repent and turn toward Christ.
This season of Lent is a time for serious reflection on our lives and priorities—to sit quietly in a room alone, look at our own life, and turn again to the God who gives us life. “If today, you hear God’s voice,” says Psalm 95, “harden not your hearts.” We don’t have all the time in the world. But today, through the mercy and grace of God, we are given the opportunity to live and grow in grace and live each day as a gift from God. In Jesus, you live as the fig lives—in the year of the Lord’s favor—so that you might “take hold of the life that really is life.” To repent and bear fruit.
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