Sermon: Lent
3 2010
Truth about suffering – Luke 13:1-9
There is a
horrible lie that people sometimes tell about
God: namely that he uses tragedy
to punish us for our sins. Sometimes
people inflict that lie on themselves, as they struggle to come to terms with
sickness or loss, and they tell themselves they must have done something to
deserve it – I suppose in some obscure way the idea of a harsh punishing God is
easier to cope with than the thought their suffering might be purely
accidental. Sometimes, scandalously,
people inflict on others this lie about a God who punishes. After the earthquake in Haiti the American
tele-evangelist Pat Robertson explained that the people of Haiti had been
cursed for swearing a pact with devil, this is a man who also explained
Hurricane Katrina as God punishing America for allowing abortions. That is a nasty smug and false theology – it
attempts to reassure us that we will be OK, we will be safe from tragedy,
because tragedy is for wicked people, for people beyond the pale, but we will
be OK because we are a part of God’s in crowd.
From our
Gospel reading today it is clear that this lie about a punishing God has been
around for a long time, and that Jesus had no time for it. Jesus takes two tragedies that were as fresh
in the minds of his hearers as Haiti or Hurricane Katrina are for us. One example involves brutality by the authorities
as Pilate slaughters a group of pilgrims from Galilee. There are no historical records of that
particular incident, but there are records of plenty of other occasions in
which Pilate was violent and bloodthirsty in his treatment of the Jews. The second example is of a tragedy that was
purely accidental, the tower of Siloam, which may have been one of the towers
in the walls around Jerusalem collapsed with great loss of life, killing 18
people. Jesus asks do you think those 18
who were in or under the tower at the time were selected because they were
worse that all the others in Jerusalem, or were the Galilleans picked out by
Pilate greater sinners than the others?
And he answers his own questions emphatically: no I tell you.
That’s one
lie knocked on the head, the lie of a punishing God who hands out suffering to those who deserve it. But there is another lie we may be tempted to
tell about God, the lie of a complacent God, indulgently indifferent to our
sins. There was famous poet who as he
lay dying was asked if he wanted to confess his sins. He explained he wasn’t worried because “God
will pardon me, that’s his job”. If like
that poet we are confident that whatever we have done will be forgiven, then we
might be tempted to conclude that the idea of sin doesn’t really matter, we can
do what we like and it will all come out in the wash.
Jesus gives
his hearers, give us, a warning to shatter that complacency – sin does matter
and unless you repent you will all perish – in case that doesn’t sink in he
repeats this crucial warning, unless you repent you will all perish. Repent doesn’t mean say sorry, it doesn’t
mean grovel and beat yourself up. When
Jesus asks us to repent, he asks us to turn around and embrace a deep change, a
change of heart and mind, a change in the direction of our lives. If we can’t or won’t do that then we will all
perish, not because God will strike us down with a thunderbolt – Jesus has just
told us that is not how God works. We will
perish because the path we are on is inherently self destructive. We are like a stampede of cattle heading
towards a cliff edge, we need to change course now or we won’t survive. Sin
leads to a spiritual death as we find ourselves cut off from God, it may even
lead literally to our deaths if we so damage each other and our planet that
life cannot continue. So we must repent or perish.
Jesus
tempers that stark warning with a little parable. He asks us to imagine a fig tree newly
planted in a vineyard that for three years fails to produce fruit. The owner worried that the tree is literally
a waste of space and is keen to get rid of it.
But the gardener who has been tending the tree, bargains for another year’s
grace, promising in that year to nurture the tree even more lovingly in the
hope it might bear fruit. Brilliantly
Jesus stops the story there – we don’t know what happens to that little fig
tree as it lives poised between bearing fruit and heading for the bonfire. We are that fig tree, and we are living in
that year of grace while God is heaping love upon us, longing for us to bear
fruit and realise the potential that there is in us. All it takes is us to say yes to God, and to
allow his Spirit to go to work on us.