Luke 13:1-9
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. 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?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
This brief conversation between Jesus and some bystanders reveals two truths, one about us and the other about God.
First, it demonstrates just how much we crave order in our lives. Part of the reason tragedies – whether of the natural or political kind – are so upsetting is because they disrupt the order we grow accustomed to and thereby challenge our sense of stability and safety. If random things can happen to others, we wonder, might they not also happen to us? Rather than live with that level of anxiety, we are tempted to reassert a sense of the orderliness of the world by attributing some kind of cause to what has happened. So in this case, if these bystanders characterize as sinners those who were slaughtered by Pontius Pilate or killed when a building collapsed, then they have explained the tragedy and, while still horrible, it at least seems less threatening to them. We’ve seen that play out in our own day, when so-called religious leaders “explain” Katrina as God’s punishment of the people of New Orleans or AIDS as divine retribution on those who are gay.
But Jesus will have none of it. Those who died, he asserts, were no better or worse than his hearers…or us. Rather, we have all made mistakes, we have all strayed from the course for our lives that God desires, we have all sinner, as the Apostle Paul writes, and fallen short. In this sense, we have not yielded the fruit for which we were planted and risk being cut down. And therefore we should repent; that is, turn around.
And that leads us to the second truth about this parable, that God continues to wait, continues to tend, continues to bear with us, all the time encouraging us to turn from our desire for order and safety and security and live into the potential we have to love each other.
The temptation at this point is to assume that God is the landowner eager to cut us down and Jesus the gardener asking for forbearance. But Jesus does not say that and few of his parables can be so easily reduced to simplistic analogies. Rather, he simply says that there is yet more time – not all the time in the world, as we also will at some point die as did those who died by tragedy. Yet, just now, there is still more time: more time to turn, more time to love, more time to give, more time to live into the way of relationship God intends.
So let’s do it.
Prayer: Dear God, we regularly fall short of your desire and intentions. Invite us, therefore, to turn in repentance, sorrow, and gratitude that we may use the time you have given us to love others as you have loved us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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