In our text for today from Luke’s gospel, Jesus finds himself in a crowd. Or to put it more clearly – a crowd, yet again – has found and surrounded him, listening to him teach.
From this mix of disciples and onlookers, curious and skeptical alike, packed around him, a few people pipe up:
“Hey, Jesus…have you heard about the Galileans who Pilate killed, when they came to offer their sacrifices in Jerusalem….horrible, right!?”
Maybe, you’ve experienced something like this. The flow of conversation is going along where it wants to go – and then someone brings up a big horrible thing that has happened to them or in the world, placing it squarely into the center of the room.
There’s no more not talking about anything else. Something’s got to be said about that horrible thing. Some sense has to be made of it.
This happened to me recently. I was on a phone call with a friend from Wichita, Kansas – we were catching up on life, going back and forth.
And then the big heavy thing finally settled into the middle of our conversation – the horrible disaster of the airplane flying from Wichita, Kansas to Washington DC that collided with a helicopter and crashed in the Potomac River, killing everyone on board. My friend was part of a community grieving this horrific loss.
Our chit-chat ended right then and there.
What do you say next in such a moment?
How do you explain or make sense of such suffering?
“Hey Jesus…have you heard about the Galileans who Pilate killed… Pilate mixed their blood with that of their sacrifices…. Horrible.”
When that big horrible thing is dropped into the middle of the crowd, Jesus can’t avoid it or dismiss it.
Instead, Jesus responds as if he’s bringing to the surface an impulse that lurked within the crowd:
“Do you think that these Galileans suffered in this way because they were worse sinners than all the other Galileans?”
Jesus names the reality of what has happened – that this group of people had suffered and died…but Jesus also exposes and critiques the impulse to assign blame to these victims.
To further underscore his point he brings up another example of suffering and death – a tower that collapsed, killing eighteen people. Again Jesus refuses to make any kind of judgment connecting the righteousness of these people to why they suffered and died. Jesus refuses to go there.
Yet blame is a perfectly normal, human response to loss and suffering. When something tears at the fabric of our normal lives – we start searching for answers and explanations and justifications.
And it’s easiest to locate responsibility for why things went wrong almost everywhere else and with anybody other than ourselves.
Often these are entirely plausible and justified explanations: The Galileans died because Pilate was a brutal leader in an imperial system...The folks passing by who were crushed by the towers died not because of the route they chose to walk that day – but because of the shoddy construction of those who built that tower.
Or if one of our friends or family members dies for any number of reasons…we might blame our friend for their unhealthy diet and exercise habits in the prior decades, we might blame the doctors and nurses, looking for some mistake to point to for why our friend died, we might blame our whole health care system, we might blame the whole world we find ourselves in and even blame God who made it.
I wonder if this inclination to blame others comes from a profound grief and sorrow bubbling up, looking for some place to land, some explanation to make sense of what has happened. If somebody or something is at fault here – then at least I can be OK going forward.
But Jesus in our short story refuses to make sense of why this evil and suffering happened. He refuses to place blame on those who suffered. Instead of cycles of blaming others and justifying ourselves that we’ll be OK – Jesus uses these horrific experiences to call for repentance.
Twice Jesus repeats – “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
And for the record here – when you are processing with your friends about something hard or horrible…I do NOT encourage you to directly copy what Jesus says here… you might find yourself being slapped or cussed out or quickly losing a friend.
But Jesus speaks these harsh words nonetheless – as the Common English Bible translates it – “Unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.” Jesus shifts the crowd’s attention from the suffering of others to taking responsibility for their own lives. But how does this kind of repentance happen?
How do we repent from where we’ve gone wrong, when our instinct is to gravitate towards blame in the face of suffering? How do we change our hearts and lives, when our very normal human response is to justify what we are already doing?
Jesus seems to know that simply telling the crowd to repent in and of itself, doesn’t actually lead them to pursue lives of justice and mercy. So Jesus tells them a parable.
The parable is about a fig tree that is facing down its own death. It hasn’t produced any figs. And for the past three years the vineyard owner shows up, never seeing any fruit. The owner is fed up and wants to cut it down. But then the gardener, employed by the landowner, makes his case to let the tree be for one more year – and the gardener will dig around it and put manure on it. Then if there’s still no figs on the tree, all fine and good – then it can be cut down.
Just like Jesus offers no explanations for the suffering for the people who have died, here Jesus gives us no backstory or explanation for why this fig tree is barren.
We don’t know if it’s old and gnarled or if it’s just been planted three years ago. We don’t know if it’s been well-tended and pruned or if it’s been neglected in rocky soil. All we know is that for some reason, this particular tree hasn’t borne any fruit. Something has gone wrong.
And the gardener, instead of going looking for someone to blame or getting defensive and rattling off all the things he has done – intercedes, pleading for more time, give me and this tree just one more year, he says.
But, Jesus doesn’t finish the story. We don’t know if the absent landowner agrees to practice patience and care or if he commands the tree to be chopped down right then and there. We don’t know if the tree ends up flourishing when it receives extra care, bearing loads of figs that coming year. We just don’t know.
Instead, Jesus’ parable invites us to look with wonder at this fig tree and imagine where God’s grace might be also working in our lives and world. The parable asks us to see beyond the binaries of right and wrong, productive and barren, and look into the mysterious, dark soil where God’s life-giving grace is active.
Jesus’ teaching to us is not a set of answers to explain this mysterious world and its deep pain, or a set of justifications to signal our own self-righteousness… But Jesus’ teaching is a skillfully-wielded shovel, his words breaking up the compacted crust of the soil of our lives, opening us up to the life-giving oxygen and water, and manure and patience that is God’s grace.
And God’s grace reaches deeper than our own explanations of why things are the way they are. God’s grace cracks open space in our tightly-held timelines, loosening our plans, unclenching our fists that cling to myths of productivity and unhealthy visions of fruitfulness. God’s grace is that sharp word that tells you and me the truth that you are no more a sinner or saint than anybody else and also that apart from God, there is no life for any of us.
God’s grace is the word of love – that there is always, always enough time for God to work something new in our lives and this world.
Grace reminds us that it is never too late to open ourselves and the tragedy of our reality to the merciful care of God.
There’s a part of myself that wishes I could offer myself and offer you all a better explanation of the tragedies of the text and the tragedies that confront our own lives. But Jesus, at least in today’s text, gives no such explanation. Jesus rejects any attempts to blame or justify suffering.
Instead he invites all those who hear him, including us today – to wonder how our lives will be different when we turn to the God the giver of life and salvation. None of you is a waste of time or space – but each of you is made out of this hallowed earthy ground by a loving God who breathes God’s spirit into you.
Because for our God – there is no tree planted who is a waste of soil. There is no human, not one of us, who is beyond God’s redemption. For our God, every leafing branching thing and every breathing creature, has a role to play in the drama of God’s love.
Jesus too is a child of the Soil and as God’s Son, and speaks to us a word that cuts through the clamor of calamity, urging us to repent and move beyond blame, to turn around, and live out the kingdom of God in the here and now.
And if you are put off by the urgency, radicality, and harshness of that call to repentance, remember that God’s word of grace goes even deeper.
So be encouraged that God’s grace is still working your life even if you feel like a disappointed landowner, or a gardener tired by your efforts, or even if you feel like a fig tree with bare branches, questioning what you have to show.
Even when confronting the most horrific that life throws at us – those big heavy horrible things that drop into our conversations and rear their heads in our lives at the worst moments … be curious even then.
Because as followers of Jesus, we trust that God’s grace is enough.
God’s grace gives us the time and nutrients and gentleness and provocation for us to grow towards the light of Christ.
Thanks be to God for the sharp word of grace that cuts like a shovel into hard earth. Thanks be to God for the fragrant pile of grace that smells like manure.
Thanks be to the God of life, who gives us all we need.