It's always the right time to repent

Luke 13:1-9

At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you, but unless you repent you will all perish as they did. 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? 5 No, I tell you, but unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.”

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. 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?’ 8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”

We are all familiar with the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  One way of answering this question is to say that, in fact, bad things do not happen to good people, that if people suffer bad things then they must actually be bad people even if they appear good, that there must some hidden sin that makes them deserve their fate.  There is a kind of comfort, at least for some, in the thought that everything happens for a reason, that events, even calamitous ones follow a kind of cause and effect, that in this life people get what they deserve.  In the days following September 11 there were ostensibly Christian leaders who asserted that the attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon were God’s judgment on a godless America, that America deserved it, and that, by implication, the way to avoid such calamity in the future was to repent and turn to God.  

In the passage from Luke, Jesus invokes a couple of apparently recent events that were “in the news” as it were.  We don’t really know anything about these events other than what Jesus shares here, but it seems that, in the first instance, some Galileans were in the temple offering sacrifices when Herod had them all slaughtered, for reasons unknown.  But then Herod didn’t really need reasons.   (This was a time and place when due-process did not exist, and the powerful could take whatever action they found politically expedient.)  To have their blood mingled with the blood of the sacrifices was not only a gruesome fate, but an abominable one too.  People die all the time, but not like that.  Such a hideously exceptional fate could only befall the worst kind of people, for surely God would not allow a good person to suffer like that.  

In the second instance, Jesus relates the story of another time a tower fell, in the town of Siloam which, killing 18 people.  Accidents happen all the time, but when something so unusual, so spectacular occurs, the urge is to make meaning, to conclude that those people buried in the rubble must have been unrighteous - or at least less righteous than their neighbors - for why else would this have happened to them rather than to others?  

Jesus knows that this is how his hearers would tend to think about these events, So in both instances he asks a version of the same question: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?”  “Do you think that [the ones on whom the tower fell] were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem?”  While some in the audience must’ve been thinking, “Well… yeah?”, Jesus declares an emphatic, “No”.  

I’m guessing that no one here is the sort of person who thinks that God apportions blessings and curses strictly according to who does and doesn’t deserve it.  Otherwise you’d probably find yourself another church.  But if you do take that view, it becomes all but impossible to have a coherent view of God, creation, and how the two relate.  Even so, there remains within the Christian faith a tension between the need to find meaning in events - to see in history the outworking of God’s will - and the apparent randomness and thus necessarily meaninglessness with which events take place.  In some ways this reflects the apparent tension between the Old and New Testaments, between suffering resulting primarily from faithlessness to suffering resulting from faithfulness.  In some sense, Jesus directs his “No” against the conventional way of reading the Scriptures, against a way of conceiving of God’s relation to the world.  It was presumed that anyone who hung from a tree - anyone who was crucified - was cursed, was the sort of person cut off from God’s blessings.  And yet, God, in raising Jesus from the dead, inverted the logic of this presumption.

The usual way, in my experience, that Christians try to reconcile the seeming randomness of events - not least, the tragic - with God’s active presence in the world is to fall back on the idea that, while finite creatures like us cannot perceive the meaning in suffering and death, everything happens according to God’s infinite wisdom, the purposeful outworking of God’s inscrutable plan.  The passage we read from Isaiah would seem to support this understanding, that God’s ways are higher than our ways, that we just have to accept what we cannot understand.  

Of course, it’s undeniably true that there is much that we not only do not understand but which we are incapable of understanding, but I think we understand enough to conclude that any theology which, in the face of tragic events - like the sudden death of young mother - concludes that this is some necessary part of God’s plan, which takes what is pretty clearly bad and instead renders it good - that kind of theology must be rejected.  We are tempted in this direction because it seems to provide meaning in events which otherwise lack meaning, but this is cold comfort bought at an impossibly high price.  It makes God’s love more or less indistinguishable from God’s hate.  

I must admit that I struggle to make room for God’s presence in our world exactly because I want to spare God any direct responsibility for the terrible things that happen.  I’d rather a God who doesn’t intervene at all than one who occasionally helps out but who otherwise apparently stands aside as people suffer.  It’s not just that I can’t imagine how the world’s suffering could be part of God’s plan, it’s that I don’t want it to be part of God’s plan - certainly not in all its particulars, where we imagine that God somehow needed an abused child to suffer.   And yet, the “answer” to the human condition at the heart of Christian theology is that God’s own Son became human, dwelt among us, and suffered as one of us, suffered for us.  Rather than imagining a God who stands outside of creation intervening when necessary, pulling various strings, we are to imagine a God who is intimately present with us, who understands our weakness, who knows what it feels like to suffer.  

There’s a lot more to tay about that - and I’m sure I will - but it’s really not even the point of the passage.  Although Jesus insists that the suffering of those killed in these two events were not worse sinners, he does not address - at least not directly - the question of why these things happened.  He does seem to accept that we live in a world where bad actors like Herod can do terrible things, where inhuman forces like falling towers can snuff us out.  To the extent that Jesus makes meaning from these events, he does so in way which is a bit unsettling, at least to people like us.  Jesus urges his hearers to see in these events reminders of their own mortality, of the reality that death comes to us all, that judgment arrives one way or another, and thus the question always before us is, How shall we spend our days?  What kind of people will we be?  

The present moment is always the right time to repent; there may not be a tomorrow.  Jesus then tells the parable of a fig tree which bears no fruit.  The owner of the vineyard orders it to be cut down, but the gardener asks for more time to rehabilitate the tree.  One moral of the story is that God is patient, but not indefinitely so.  As long as we have breath, there is still time.  

As long as I’m making assumptions about you, I’ll add that we are probably not the sort of people who like using words like repentance and judgment.  But judgment holds an essential place, for it affirms that this life matters, what we do and don’t do matters, what happens to us matters.  At the end, God will pronounce some things good and some things bad.  And we should want it that way, for God will indeed judge the meaningless suffering inflicted upon us, inflicted by us.  The thought that we will be judged should be sobering, but not frightening, for our judge is the one  planted us in the garden, who made us to bear fruit, who desires for us to bear fruit, and who gives us the chance to repent.  So the question put to us - especially during Lent - is this: Does your life bear fruit?  And, if not, Is it time to repent, to change your ways, so that it might?