Luke 13:1-9
13At
that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose
blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2He asked them, ‘Do
you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse
sinners than all other Galileans? 3No, I tell you; but unless you
repent, you will all perish as they did. 4Or 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? 5No, 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. 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?” 8He
replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put
manure on it. 9If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if
not, you can cut it down.” ’
The
season of Lent asks us to embrace a spiritual gravity, a downward movement of
soul, a turning from our self-sufficiency and sinfulness. When we are asked to
see what we struggle to comprehend – that we are blind. Lent provides us with a
certain vantage point for our soul – a different place to stand so that we can
see that we don’t – even when our eyes are open.
I
like to think of Lent as an eye-test which aims to assess our blindness by
focusing our attention on two critical things: our creaturely mortality and our
moral culpability. We are, in other words, finite beings and sinful persons –
destined to die and incapable of changing that reality or ourselves. So Lent is
a time to remember what we so painfully forget – that we are dust and that we
need God to save us.
The
Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann calls the gift of Lent a “bright
sadness.” A time when we look at the world as it truly is through confession
and repentance – so that we can then grasp both the pains of this life and God’s
great mercy, so that we can meet temptation in the light of Easter’s dawn, so that
we can be healed. Lent reminds us that
in the presence of the Great Physician – the most appropriate thing, the most
painful thing, the most helpful thing, is to show Him our wounds.
What is this “bright sadness”
that Schmemann speaks of? Well, I believe that Jesus wants us to see that it is
repentance. What is repentance about?
1.
Repentance is about what we
can’t see
Our
passage begins with those who wish to discuss the apparent death of some
Galileans at the hand of Pilate – a bloody and horrible death, apparently while
they were making sacrifices. But Jesus senses something not apparent in their
remark – that they believe this horrendous thing happened BECAUSE of those
people sinfulness (a response, no doubt, to Jesus’comments on judgment in ch.
12).
Jesus
doesn’t deny a link between death and sinfulness – sin and death are both
enemies that will be finally destroyed. But
his answer to those who would wish to see some moral algorithim at work between
the particular deaths we die and the particular sins we commit receives a swift
rebuke - “No.” Jesus says “no” to such formulaic reasoning and I must
confess right off the bat it’s often the only math I like. I, of course, could
use the recent example of Pat Robertson saying the earthquake in Haiti happened
because of Haitian voodoo and some secret pact they made with the devil but
that would let us off way too easy. For it’s not just death and mayhem that
many of us like to see and calculate but simple success and failure that we
like to systematically compute with “divine-like” efficiency. “Oh look there’s
the Whatsamahoozit family whose daughter has social problems – I tell you they
just don’t know how to parent. I would do better.” “Oh good Jim is here – you
know he’s divorced – it’s such a shame that people can’t try harder and make
their marriages work.” It’s our long list of fault-finding, our desire for the silver
bullet of failure or success. It’s our pronouncements of too dumb, too poor,
too rich, too self-centered, too lazy, workaholic, weak-willed – where mistakes
aren’t something we do they are all we are and we stand in God’s stead and with
all the divine discretion we can muster and pronounce the cause, the crime, and
the sentence. Illus. Ben Shelton’s short
film, “Under the Bed” We are the blind who think we can see.
But
if we’re honest – it goes even deeper than that. Because I suspect that we make
such judgments not simply out of some glee that others are suffering but also
to account for why we might not have it so hard. We like to think that our success can so easily be chalked up to living
right, towing the line, or praying every day. We want to find an order that
helps explain the secret of our success – which, we reason is no secret at all
because we did it. Jesus’ emphatic “no” is a judgment against all such moral
equations and thinking and reveals sin as something far more complex than any
wrong decision or moral failure but rather an insidious turning of oneself into
God. And so my sense is that the
judgment that will be levied on us will be not be punishment, per se, but the painful reality of
actually gaining sight – that we will see our true condition, the real pain
of the world and our part in it, our failures and how we’ve wounded others,
wreaked havoc, and laid waste to dreams, beauty, and all of life. And when such
sight happens, when we find ourselves blinded by the real light of the sun (or
is it Son?) all we will do is weep.
I
like to think that we receive Jesus’ “no” on our person when Lent begins. On
Ash Wednesday we put ashes on our head to remind us that we are dust – it’s
interesting, however, that we put them on our forehead – not our hands, our
heart, but close to our critical faculties, our minds – to acknowledge what we
can’t see - that even our thoughts are dusty, dark, incapable, Isaiah reminds
us, of thinking God’s thoughts. So rather than come to Jesus with our half-baked
theories of goodness or uprightness, or skewed visions of how life is supposed
to work, we should acknowledge., “Help, Lord, we can’t see.” It’s like trying
to solve a rubic’s cube in the dark. It’s acknowledging that we are the broken
who think we are god.
2.
Repentance
is about what we can see.
Our
problem is that in our sinfulness we can’t see, right? And yet, that’s not the
whole of it. Repentance is also about what we can see and do. So, what do we
make of Jesus’ repeated statement, “but unless you repent, you will all perish
just as they did.” Is he saying that unless we see differently we die in the
same way that these people have?” Well, I don’t know about you but I’m not
terribly worried about Pilate or my blood being mixed with sacrifices – maybe
high cholesterol, but that’s a different story.
And, okay, I know accidents happen but Jesus has already declared
emphatically that you can’t make a necessary causal connection between personal
sin and suffering. So, where does that leave us? Well if we read this text with
Lent in mind then the first thing Jesus is saying, at least implicitly, is that
we all die. We all wear ashes. We are all headed in the same direction– whether
by accident or providence, by the hand of some fiend or by the seemingly
randomness of events, we will face the grave. So if repentance is adopting a
new mind, a new way of seeing things, then our vision must first and foremost
calibrate the fact of our own death.
This
progression of sight that I am alluding to is exemplified by the Psalmist in Psalm 39, who argues that the first
step to repentance is to see that our best attempts at morality are failures.
Vss. 1-3 represent a failed moral program, vss. 4-6, offer a way of seeing that
focuses not on what we do but who we are – we are creatures that die - it’s
hard to judge someone on a death-bed – those who are there often offer only
regret. It’s hard to be god when you recognize that you are dying and broken,
truly see it, and that everyone else is dying as well. And those who recognize
their death-bed recognize that they can do nothing to save themselves. And only
then does the Psalmist say, vs. 7“And now, O Lord . . . my hope is in you.” Illus. Dante’s Inferno and the Geography of Hell where heaven is below hell – the
only way out is to see that one must climb down.
So,
if dying is an inevitable element that we remember in Lent – so is our moral
culpability, our fruitlessness, our failure – by what we have done and what we
have left undone to address the darkness in ourselves – that’s what you can see
– the inner blackness that we so readily project on others, the darkness that
we cannot dispel on our own. So Jesus’ warning to repent is that we need not
die twice – a graveyard death and an eternal one.
Jesus gives us a
word picture to help us see what we can and should see:
The image is self-explanatory, it’s big and bright –
aimed at those with visual impairments:
·
It reveals that repentance is about seeing God’s
mercy and patience.
·
It shows repentance as allowing Jesus to dig
around into our lives.
·
It displays repentance is about a good gardener
and a bit of manure.
It’s about seeing . . .
the One who is able and willing to heal us of our
blindness,
the One dying on a cross, a criminal under a curse, the
God who looked like a failure, who died-judged
the One who rose again and invites us to be healed, it
will hurt, surgery always does
And all this amounts to a curious “bright sadness”
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