Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay
INTRODUCTION
Today is the 3rd Sunday in Lent—two more Sundays before we get to Palm/Passion Sunday and then Holy Week and Easter. In the lectionary, right since Advent last year, we’ve been on a great journey through the Gospel of Luke, which will continue throughout much of this year, although the Gospel of John will be the focus during Holy Week.
Last week we heard Jesus, at the end of Chapter 13 of Luke, lamenting over Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Such moving, heartfelt words!
This week we backtrack to the start of Chapter 13 to a passage that seems to have a pretty heavy focus on sin and repentance, and includes the familiar parable of the fig tree—hence the fig branch and the fresh figs we see on the table in front of us. We’ll read the passage in two parts, in fact, and try to connect up the dots—what does Jesus mean exactly when he tells us not once but twice in one short passage that “unless we repent we will perish?”
GOSPEL READING Part 1: Luke 13:1-5
13:1 At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.
13:2 He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?
13:3 No, I tell you, but unless you repent you will all perish as they did.
13:4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem?
13:5 No, I tell you, but unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.”
SERMON Part 1
Well, what an interesting little passage. You know, one thing Jesus is always intent on doing, right throughout his teaching and ministry, is disrupting our traditional, old-time religious thinking—especially our traditional religious understanding of God—and that’s exactly what he’s trying to do here. Jesus is the great disrupter!
Old-time, old-school religious thinking—it’s common to religions right around the globe, including Christianity—imagines an omnipotent, creator God who fabricated the world holus-bolus, in a once-off creative act … thousands of years ago, at the beginning of time, whenever that was—and who continues to Lord it over the world, a control-merchant, puppet-master God, pulling the strings to this day!
Even though this God, we believe, loves the world, they seem also to have a nasty side-hustle in judgement and punishment—when we disobey them, when we sin. And that’s the context of what Jesus says in this first part of our Gospel reading today.
Now, we know nothing about the two incidents Jesus refers to apart from what is stated in this passage. Firstly, the Galileans who were killed by Pilate, the Roman Governor, while making sacrifices in the temple—presumably because they were breaking some important Roman regulation in doing so.
Jesus is teaching in Judea at this time, when some people tell him about the incident, and he asks them, as we’ve just heard: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” The people must have been thinking in the old-time religious way I’ve just described: this terrible thing happened to the Galileans, even though they were making temple sacrifices for their sins at the time, so presumably they were bigger sinners than everyone else, and the omnipotent creator God, working through the Roman authorities, was punishing them for it!
“No”, Jesus tells them, “…. unless you [yourselves] repent you will all perish as they did.” Ah, here we have this amazing little word—“repent”. Notice: not make appropriate, or perhaps better, sacrifices at the temple, but repent, to avoid the same terrible fate.
And then there were the eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—Jesus asks a second time: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem?”—being punished for their sinning by an angry judgemental creator God, this time tipping a big tower on top of them!
“No”, Jesus tells us again, “but unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.” Exactly the same words, with exactly the same word: repent!
So, nothing to do with sin and being punished by an old-time creator God—we all die sometime anyway, so it’s not physical death that’s at issue here.
Repent. If you Google “Luke 13:1-9 in Greek”, you’ll quickly find that the Greek word translated as “you repent” in English is “μετανοῆτε”—“metanoete”. The root word of this is “metanoia”, “repentance”. Here it is on the slide:
Metanoia
English: “repentance” or “conversion”
meta-: a complete inner change, a change in kind or nature
-noia : from gnosis, “knowledge” or “way of thinking”
metanoia: a complete change of mindset, a complete turnaround in your way of thinking
You could call it “Repentance+”, because it’s a lot more than just feeling sorry, saying a few words acknowledging your sins, making an appropriate sacrifice—it’s a complete change in your whole approach to life. You undergo a conversion, a metamorphosis, you become a new person.
The modern psychological usage of the term Metanoia really better captures just how radical a change it is that we’re talking about:
Metanoia in Psychology:
“the process of experiencing a psychotic ‘breakdown’ and subsequent, positive psychological re-building or ‘healing’”
‘Psychotic breakdown”—the repentance Jesus is referring to is definitely not something you can intentionally do yourself, rather something that happens to you; it’s like a spiritual death and then rebirth—which is of course how Jesus describes it elsewhere—dying, then being born again.
But what exactly is the nature of this Metanoia, this conversion, this transformation, this death and rebirth, that faith in and following Jesus brings about in us? From what sort of mindset, to what sort of mindset? Well, it’s quite simple from our natural-born mindset of self-centredness, selfishness, thinking only of me, to a new, very unnatural mindset of selflessness, putting others first, living for others.
“No”, Jesus says to us, twice, “but unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.” Not physically perish, necessarily, murdered by Pilate or crushed by a tower, but dead inside, spiritually dead, imprisoned in your own self-centredness, a slave to your own selfish desires. A fruitless, barren life.
Which brings us, of course, now, to the Parable of the Fig Tree, the second part of our Gospel reading today.
GOSPEL READING Part 2: Luke 13:6-9
13:6 Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.
13:7 So he said to the man working the vineyard, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’
13:8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.
13:9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down.'”
SERMON Part 2
Here’s the fig branch; and here are the figs—well, the tree in the parable didn’t actually bear any fruit!
For three consecutive years—no fruit. But why? Well, I’m sure you’re all gardeners here. There are two obvious possible reasons why a tree doesn’t bear fruit: there’s either something fundamentally wrong with the tree itself, internally—maybe it has a disease, or it’s just a weak, barren specimen to begin with—or, something wrong with the external, environmental conditions it’s subject to—it might benefit from being fertilized, watered more effectively, nurtured, encouraged.
Now the fig tree in this parable is, of course, us—you, me. Are we, ourselves, just naturally so self-centred, selfish, closed in upon ourselves, that we’re never going to undergo the Metanoia, repent and escape to a life of selflessness, serving and living for others, bearing fruit? Maybe—but where there’s life there’s hope, the vineyard worker might say—and we would love to be given another chance, once more chance to bear fruit.
And others we might know, and might ourselves be ministering to, can they ever really change?—but, yes, we keep giving people another chance, keep encouraging, nurturing, fertilizing—although there might come a time when we have to uproot them … from our lives … cast them away, lest they cause harm to us, and others.
The grace, the faith, to undergo the Metanoia, is universally available to all people, through Jesus—that’s what the Kingdom is—but not everyone accepts it, opens themselves up to it, bears the fruit of it. It does seem to require some sort of break-down to happen in your life, to be forced on you almost involuntarily. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer and chronicler of the Soviet era writes beautifully about this happening to him in the Gulag, the prison camp, out in the wilds of Kazakhstan, where he was imprisoned for 8 years from 1945-53 (Gulag Archipelago, Abridged version, pp308-9):
And as soon as you have renounced that aim of “surviving at any price,” and gone where the calm and simple people go – then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way.
To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you.
And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings.
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you – and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels – patience.
You are ascending ……
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness – and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another’s strength. And wish to possess it yourself.
The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending ……
The great Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes a similar transformation, writing in a letter to a friend from Tegel prison in Berlin, 11 months before he was hung by the Nazis in 1945:
We rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep; we are anxious … about our life, but at the same time we must think about things much more important to us than life itself. When the [air raid] alert goes, for instance: as soon as we turn our minds from worrying about our own safety to the task of helping other people to keep calm, the situation is completely changed; life isn’t pushed back into a single dimension but is kept multidimensional and polyphonous. What a deliverance it is to be able to think and thereby to remain multidimensional. I’ve almost made it a rule here, simply to tell people who are trembling under an air raid that it would be much worse for a small town. We have to get people out of their one-track minds; that is a kind of “preparation” for faith, or something that makes faith possible, although really it’s only faith itself that can make possible a multidimensional life, and so enable us to keep this Whitsuntide [Pentecost], too, in spite of the alarms.” [A Testament to Freedom, p506]
So, as the worker says in the parable: “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down.'” It might need a very painful prune—or, yes, something even more radical, to happen to it!
We could be the fig tree in question, still waiting to break out of the barren prison of our own selfishness; or we could be the vineyard workers, nurturing and caring for others in their journey towards a selfless, fruit-bearing life.
Finally, back to old-time religious thinking and the omnipotent, creator God that Jesus is always trying to disabuse us of. God – the real one who exists—is not an omnipotent judgemental, control-merchant creator. Jesus commonly referred to God as his Father, and, yes, part of this is the old-time religious patriarchal language of his day; but another part of it – the true part—is God as divine parent who gives birth, gives life to the universe, this living, growing, evolving universe.
The old God of religion is the worst sort of parent—controlling, narcissistic, negligent—thank God they don’t exist! The real God who does exist, who Jesus presents to us, is, by contrast, the best sort of parent: respectful, solicitous about giving us our freedom, aware of the danger we are to ourselves with our reckless self-centredness, always staying in touch, ready to help us in our hour of need. And what we need most urgently is not to save our own skin—we’re pretty good at doing that ourselves anyway!—but to repent and undergo the Metanoia, learn some selflessness so we can live a fruitful, creative life. We all need it, the whole human race needs it—and that is what the God who exists delivers, in spades.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done. Amen
