Lent 3 C,
Year C
Isaiah 55:1-9; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
First the text and notes, followed then by my own commentary and sermon suggestions.
Luke
13:1-9
Repent
or Perish
13 1At that very time
there were some present who told him 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 others living in Jerusalem?
5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you
will all perish just as they did.”
The
Parable of the Barren Fig Tree
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 gardener, ‘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.’”
Commentary and Sermon Suggestions
As usual, our Gospel reading
for this week, Luke 13:1-9, lifts up some very difficult theological issues.
But that’s why we preach, isn’t it? That’s why preaching is important. If the
ideas were easy, they wouldn’t hire people like you and me to untangle the knots
and make sense out of them. J
This week I will only talk about the first half of the Gospel reading. For one thing, the first part, about death and sin and repentance, raises some powerful issues in and of itself, and probably, originally had nothing to do with the second half, about the survival of a fig tree. For another, I'm lazy and spent all week on the first half and will have to wrestle with fig trees another time.
According to the narrative
arc that Luke is following or creating, this is the very last part of a much
longer “speech” (or loose collection of sayings), that Jesus delivers after
dinner at the home of a Pharisee. It was evidently a fairly large gathering because
there were a number of people from the town present. The total speech runs from
Chapter 12:1 to 13:9 and covers a number of topics roughly woven together (some
more smoothly than others) around a larger theme about being vigilant in the
face of crisis. Some of the issues included keeping their faith, and remaining
morally and ethically strong, even under difficult conditions.
For example, the speech
contains the statement that we shouldn’t spend our lives worrying about what we
should wear or eat. So, Jesus says, “Remember the lilies of the fields: they
neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arraigned like
one of these” (12:27). On another, he says to not give up on your faithfulness
just because times are hard. And there's the story of the servants waiting for their
master to come home after his wedding, who eventually got tired waiting and gave up on
him. Jesus says, “blessed are those [servants] whom the master finds when he comes”
(12:37).
Finally, here in 13:1-9, he comes to
something of a climax in his talk. It is a call to repent and change our ways,
a “change of heart and life manifest in fruitful lives” (New Interpreters' Study Bible). As I mention in the notes on the text above, Luke mentions repentance more often than any
other book in the Bible. In fact, close to more often than all of the rest of
the New Testament combined.
Then, that evening, presumably
after dinner, someone in the crowd raises a question about a recent tragedy concerning
some grizzly deaths that had occurred in the temple. Evidently Pilate had punished
some Galileans for an unspecified crime (likely their involvement in an
insurrection plot) by killing them and sprinkling their blood in with the blood
of the sacrifice on the Temple altar. Incidentally, we have no other record of this
happening, however it is very much in keeping with the gruesome policies of Pilate.
Jesus’ response to it indicates that the questioner was probably suggesting
that God had caused the deaths as a punishment for their being “worse sinners” than
others.
Background “Riffs”
As an aside, here are a couple
of “riffs” that you could go off on in your sermon that could flesh out the
background of this simple two-sentence story. First would be to think about the possible underlying emotions driving this question. For example it could have reflected a
basic prejudice by those in Jerusalem against the lower class Galileans who they believed should be considered sinners, prima facie, solely because of their
class. An attitude that still lies just under the surface in much of our
discourse about race and nationality and gender today. Or you might mention a
frequent attitude among marginalized peoples that any opposition to the
government is out of line and sinful. “Those
people,” they might say, “could have put the lives of the rest of us in jeopardy by that
action; they should have just stayed in their place and not tried a protest.” But
in either case, the first thing Jesus says is no. I’ll come back to the second
half of Jesus’ response in a moment.
A second riff could be to give
a little primer on sacrifice as the mode of worship in the first century. It
may have been more bloody than our modern methods of worship, but no less
significant. In ancient Israel, sacrifices were gifts to God as a thank
offering for the bounty that God had given them. And they saw it as a
transformation of something temporal (the animal) into something transcendent
(the smoke, the spirit from the animal). We retain a lot of the symbolism
of sacrifice in our worship today, but without the (bloody) physical actions behind them. It’s not our
21st century mode of worship, but don’t let the bloody aspects of it derail us
from looking at Pilate’s even more bloody response and the moral and
theological issues that the story raises.
 |
| Traditional location of the "Pool of Siloam" |
The second story raised that
evening came from Jesus himself. It was about a time when a tower in Siloam by the waters fell over on
top of people and killed 18 of them. This was probably tower that guarded the aqueduct bringing
water to the pool of Siloam, that formed part of the old wall of Jerusalem.
It was a terrible tragedy. Greg
Jenks, a New Testament scholar at St Francis Theological College, in Australia,
believes that both of these stories may be related. At about the same time that
Jesus was making his way to Jerusalem, Pilate began an aqueduct project to
bring more water to the city. That’s a good thing, but he was going to pay for
it by stealing money from the Temple treasury and many local Jews protested that. So, the first group who died could
have been enraged Jews who protested against the robbery, and then paid for it with their
lives. And the second group could have been the workers on one of the towers related
to the water project. So, Jesus asks, were they suggesting that the
people who Pilate killed and had their blood mixed with the Temple sacrifices were worse “sinners”? And that those who died in the tower collapse worse “offenders”
for what they had done?
He asks both of these
questions in a rhetorical way, The implication in both was yes, that is exactly
what they were suggesting. Yes, they believed that because these poor people died
the worst possible deaths, therefore they must have been the worst possible
sinners.
Jesus’ responses to these two stories
The first part of his
response to both questions is simple, of course not. And that answer is very helpful.
God is not a killer. Thinking so is nice when you are talking about a Saddam Hussein or
Bashar al Assad (brutal dictator of Syria) dying, but the argument gets a
little weak when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of innocent people
in Haiti during its earthquakes and floods and cholera epidemic (which was, by the way, introduced to the island by the United Nations earthquake relief workers). Did they sin more than
us, and therefore God destroyed their country? Of course not, and Jesus makes
that plain.
But the second part is more
difficult. I can understand his saying that you need to have a life of
repentance and new meaningfulness, but it at least sounds like he is adding that if you don’t repent you will die just
like those Galileans did, or you’ll die the way
that they did. It’s the “like they did” part that remains troubling.
I don’t think he means that if you are a sinner, you
will die in the same manner that they
did. That is, you’ll have your blood mingled with some kind of Jewish
blood-offering in a temple. And I don’t think he means that if you don’t
repent, you’re going to die too. That one doesn’t actually make any sense,
because of course you’re going to
die. Everyone dies. It’s the end of life. It comes. Get over it. It doesn’t
mean you’re a sinner if you die. It means you are mortal and your clock ran
out.
But surely he does mean that if you don’t repent then
you will die in some way that is similar to those guys. And that’s your biggest
take home for a sermon from this passage. If you die and you have not turned
your life around (Greek: metanoia)
then it could, in fact, be argued that you will die cut off from God and from hope
and peace in your bones, the very way that these people (might have) died. I
say “might have” because since none of them lived to do interviews about their spiritual
life we have to just say, “for the sake of argument, let’s say that none of
them had a meaningful connection with God, and if you don’t turn you lives
around, then you will die with the same lack of meaning." Jesus is not saying
that that unless you repent (turn your life around) you’ll die too, just like
they did, because you certainly will
eventually die like they did, no matter what your repentance status is. But he
is saying that when you die it will be a cut-off, soul-evacuated life—like theirs
(probably) was.
One thing that might be helpful is to point out that, while the literal meaning of the word "perish" (apóllymi), refers to dying or eternal punishment, in the New Testament it is also often used to mean something closer to being lost or estranged or separated. For example, Mark 8:35: "those who want to save their life will lose (apolesei) it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it." Or the three parables of Jesus in Luke 15, the shepherd who lost a sheep, the woman who lost a coin, and the father who lost his son, all use the word, apóllymi for the thing that is lost, and clearly none of the stories are about someone who is being punished for eternity for their sins.[17]
A more nuanced (and more accurate) reading of Jesus' words here about how we should respond to the deaths of the workers and protesters is to separate the two clauses. On the one hand, no, those people did not die for their sins. And on the other hand, you should not die separated from God. They are not closely related thoughts. You should turn your life around in meaningful, God-related, way now, because you may die estranged, alienated, separated from the love of God and others and yourself.
There are two things going on here.
The first, I think, is the
deeper meaning that you shouldn’t throw blame around when you see suffering.
That’s not only rude and in poor taste, it’s also a wrong use of the event.
Instead use it as an occasion to change your own life.
When you see a car accident,
don’t say, “whew! Those stupid bozos. I’m sure glad I’m not like those guys.” A
better response would be to feel shaken and torn inside and think to yourself, “how
awful that was. It makes me realize how fragile and temporary life is. I should
take life more seriously and meaningfully.” The most important “learning” that we
should find in a death (if indeed there is one, and sometimes I’m not sure), is
not that the person who died deserved
to die, or that God “Took him home.”
It’s silly and unproductive to think that God picks and chooses who to kill off
according to the level of sinfulness in the deceased, or from some dark divine
plan that only God understands.
When I preach on this story,
I often use a real story of an exchange I heard at the collation following a
funeral years ago. A lot of well-intentioned people were milling around saying
it was sad, and all, that old John died, but y’know, he was a rounder back when
he was a kid, and God probably gave him that diabetes and gangrene that took
him, as a punishment for all that.” After two or three of these exchanges, an
old Methodist on-the-wagon alcoholic, who knew a thing or two about “rounders”
and sin, glowered at them over the punch bowl and said, that if God strikes
down people for the sins of their youth, then every single man and woman in
this town would be walking around with a limp.”
I love that story. As Paul
says, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
Whenever we blame someone’s death on their sin, or on God’s capricious taking
them home, or because it was “their time,” we tread in dangerous, almost evil
waters.
There are only two potentially “good” responses to death
(note the cautionary use of quotes and italics, because any good response can
be abused if we try hard enough). One would be to ask how can I turn my life around and become a better
person in light of the death of this loved one? Or “How can I celebrate this
person’s life by creating a better life?” The second is like it. “How can I
create a world in which there is a smaller number of children washing up on the
shores of Greece or Spain or Britain, or emergency rooms or jails or homeless
shelters in the US?”
So, it’s most likely that when Jesus says that without repentance, you
will die as they did, he was saying something like, “unless you repent and turn
your life around you will die—not in the manner
they did, but in the spiritual state
that they did. That is, not that repentance will keep you from dying at all (which
it clearly will not), or that repentance will keep you from dying with a tower
falling on your head (which would be interesting but silly for the story), but from dying while lost, alienated,
and separated from God. Unless you change and return to God, you will die cut
off from God as (presumably) those people did. So, repentance is not related to
their death, it’s related to their life. Their sin (of separation) had nothing
to do with their deaths. It had to do with their lives.
Conclusion, summary and difficult issues
Someone in the crowd raised this
issue because he or she believed that there was a direct correlation between
sin and suffering. These people suffered horrible deaths. Does that mean that
they must have been terrible people? It is the question found in Job, Psalm 37
and 73 and others. John 9:2. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that
he was born blind?”
We (you and me) occasionally
raise that question too. And occasionally there appears to be a link between the two. But on the whole, hunting
down that link is a bad direction to go in. The clarity of the down side is far
worse than the ambiguity of the up side. If we say that God punishes those who
are sinners and rewards those who are saints, then we get dangerously close to
saying that the people who died in the 9-11 tragedy (or in the plane crash in Ethiopia, or the racist mass killing in New Zealand...or whatever) were somehow more guilty than the rest of
us. And if we say that God rewards those who are good, then we slide overly
close to saying that some people are financially successful
because they were somehow more morally good than the rest of us. I don’t know
about you, but I’m not prepared to say that. How about Martin Shkreli, the hedge
fund manager, who bought up the rights to Daraprim, an important and inexpensive
life-saving drug, and then jacked up the price 5,000 percent, actually putting
at risk the lives of thousands of people? And who had absolutely no remorse for his actions later when questioned about it in Congress.
Jesus brushes aside that
theology and recasts the issue: If you don’t change your ways, and live a life
of repentance and trust in God, then you are going to approach death with a
life that has no meaningful connections to life eternal, a meaningless life.
Without a life of repentance, all of the rest of life is empty and lost. I
think that’s a more fruitful direction in which to go, and I think it was what
Jesus was getting at: don’t dwell on whether God did this awful act; dwell on
pondering what we are going to be like in light of it? Who am I going to be in light of it? How is it
going to change me?
Occasionally we see people
who are wonderful people and successful and healthy and we can think we see a
direct relation between their moral life and their checkbook or health. And
occasionally we’ll see a real scumbag who died young or badly with some degree
of justice. However, we all can also remember examples of truly decent people
who died long, protracted, awful, unjust deaths. So don’t ascribe the hand of
God in those. It just isn’t there. What Jesus calls us to is the quality of life, the relation with God life. Not a
financially or medically rewarding life. Don’t ask a theological question about
the ethics or morals of people who died in an accident, ask how that accident
can bring us to change our relationship with God and with our world. This is
the theological question that makes the most sense. You all are going to die
anyway, just like the people whose blood Pilate mingled with the blood at the
altar and who died under the crushing collapsing building. You don’t have a
choice in that. But you do have a choice in how you live your life before you
get there.
[3] “Suffered” (peponthasin). Second perfect active indicative third
plural from paschoô, common verb, to experience, suffer. The
tense notes that it is “an irrevocable fact” (F.F. Bruce).
“Worse
Sinners than all other…” (hamartoôloi para pantas). Para means “beside,” as in being placed beside the Galileans
for comparison, and so beyond or above (with the accusative). Lit. they sinned beyond all the Galileans.
“Cut it down!” ἔκκοψον
[οὖν] {C} “In order to reflect
the balance of external evidence for and against the inclusion of οὖν, as well as the absence
of any compelling consideration relating to transcriptional and intrinsic
probabilities, the Committee felt obliged to retain the word in the text, but
to enclose it within square brackets, indicating a measure of doubt that it has
a right to stand there.” Metzger, Textual Commentary on the Greek New
Testament, second edition.
䨁
“At the end of this verse there is added in some manuscripts, ‘as
he said this, he called out, ‘Let the one who has ears to hear take heed.’”
(Fitzmyer, p. 1009).
