Luke 13:1-9

The third Sunday in Lent | March 20, 2022 | Lk 13:1-9 (RCL) | David Zersen |

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

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. ⁷So 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?’ He replied, ‘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.’

REALIGNING YOUR FOCUS IN LIFE

When driving to church recently in our winter climate I approached a long patch of ice leading up to the stoplight where I was going to turn right. I tried to brake gently in the hopes that my four-wheel- drive vehicle would acquire some traction on the ice, but I began to slide toward the intersection. I decided the best thing to do was to turn into the curb and stop the movement. My speed was too high, however, and I hit the curb with substantial impact. The car was stopped, but as I drove away, the car vibrated and I knew I probably had shifted the wheel balance. The vibrations continued as I drove on and I considered options. I could replace the tires because they were getting old anyway. But I knew that wouldn’t help because the balance was out of sync. The suspension might even need correction. My mechanic would know what to do.

In today’s text, a “Master Mechanic” is addressing a problem that novices think they can solve with the wrong solution. It’s not the tires; the balance is “out-of-whack”! To put it more theologically, minor adjustments won’t help if one’s whole life needs reorientation. Jesus understands that the basic concern of the Galileans is political. It had been a feast day, the Jews were offering sacrifices at the temple, and Pilate’s soldiers apparently killed some Jews and mixed human blood with animal blood in the sacrifices. Unthinkable! Blasphemy! “What do you think about this, Jesus?”

Jesus isn’t going to get involved in the political squabbles of the locals. He is driven by larger issues. The citizens, as is typically the case anywhere, want to know why such a thing should have happened—who was responsible–even why their sacrifices may not be doing what they were supposed to achieve. To understand Jesus’ point with the crowd we should remember the function of ancient sacrifices, a practice often misused and then criticized by the prophets in the Old Testament (e.g., Is. 1:11 and 43:23). When a person had troubles of one kind or another, a sacrifice was a good way to get God on your side. The lifeblood of the sacrificial animal contributed to the life force needed by the sacrificer. Jesus, in effect, says that such tit-for-tat accomplishes little. What’s needed is an entirely new focus in your worship life. The focus should not be on a practice that gets you what you think you want, but on a practice that will allow you to fulfil the needs of others. In reality, this is what Jesus’ whole life was about—and it’s what the sacrifice at the cross intends to accomplish. Not a tit-for-tat, his life for our life, but a total realignment of life, a reorientation. His sacrificial life creates a paradigm for our consideration.

This is the context in which we understand what Jesus means by “repent”. It is not just saying “I’m sorry”. Metanoia, the Greek word for repent, means change, refocus, start all over, and begin again. “Drop the blame game,” Jesus is saying. “Don’t concern yourself with the small things, with who maligned whom, with why something happened to you.” Such concerns, you see, are not the real crisis here. That’s fake news. The real crisis is that those blaming others for your problems are really hypocrites. The “blamers” who look for essential solutions to problems outside themselves are avoiding reality. People then and now are hypocrites when they don’t see the larger picture and, in essence, merely play at the game of life.

Being a hypocrite involves pretending that everything is centered on you. Do you remember the name Ethan Crouch? He was a sixteen-year-old boy in Texas in 2013 when he under the influence of alcohol and drugs smashed into a parked vehicle and killed four people and injured nine others. His defence attorney argued that Crouch was innocent because he was a victim of “affluenza”, the amoral influence of rich parents who allowed him to think that everything revolved around him and that he had no responsibility to anyone. There is a sense in which that fake illness has affected many in our affluent society. We may wonder when we have problems why such things should happen to us, of all people. After all, we haven’t done anything to deserve negative treatment. We are the good people, even God’s people! If anything bad is happening in our world, others should have to pay, but not us.

The new orientation to which Jesus is summoning us now (in a post-resurrection way) asks that we focus away from ourselves and look to the cross. At the cross Christians are asked to see a selfless love that focuses on others rather than on ourselves. When we look at others, we should see them through the cross that we hold in front of us. This sacrifice does away, once and for all, with the old sacrificial system that was manipulative and had to be repeated again and again, as the author of Hebrews tells us (10:1-18). Through the life surrendered at the cross, we are invited to reject the litigious society, the retaliatory systems in which our culture thrives. We are encouraged to reject the notion that somebody has to pay, that one way or another we will get even. One way or another we will ask God to help us pretend that the real crisis in our world revolves around our needs! Listen to Jesus as he tells his audience  (now including us) that such an approach is a dead end if we continue to believe that the real crises involve things happening primarily to us. They don’t!

Listen. Jesus is telling a story. It’s a story that unlike most of the parables in the Gospels seems to be filled with allegory, having a secondary level of meaning. In the story a land owner notes that a tree has not born fruit for three years. Maybe it should be cut down. It’s just using up the soil. (As an aside, I should mention that I have a black currant bush like that. It hasn’t produced any currants in three years! And I’m pondering its fate!) The gardener, however, suggests that digging a little manure around the base of it might fertilize the roots and save the tree for another year when it can produce fruit. Typically, Jesus’ parables don’t invite us to find secondary meanings behind the basic story line. This one however seems to beg us to do it. God wonders why people who live only for themselves should be allowed to take up space and Jesus pleads that by nurturing them with his loving realignment he can produce a whole new generation of people-centeredfruit.

Does anything about this sound contemporary? We’re not merely dealing with first century gardens and independent trees that want to produce fruit if and when they want to. We’re not dealing with tires that need replacement or deals that can be cut in our favour.  We’re dealing with an upside-down, topsy-turvy reorientation that realigns our approach to life, to people, and to ourselves. And it all happens because we’ve acquired a cross-eyed view of life that allows us to seek the essence of the Kingdom, the life-style of people who see Jesus before they see themselves.

I wish that orientation for myself more than anything, but I also commend it to you. We have been baptized into that realigned world and should seek, as Luther reminds us in his explanation to Baptism, to drown a dying way of life and daily rise to the full-stature of a new one being born in us. It happens when we remember that self-centered patch jobs and partial solutions to our problems lead only to dead ends.

It happens when we remember to imitate Philip, who entered this new realigned world by once saying to Nathaniel, “Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21).

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The Rev. David Zersen, Ed.D., President Emeritus

Concordia University Texas

djzersen@gmail.com