Transcript
Through the written word, and the spoken word, may we know your Living Word, Jesus, Christ our Savior. Amen.
Good morning, church. I don’t know how you read the news, but I tend to do it with one eye opened and one eye closed, as if I could filter out the worst of it or at least slow the information down enough to decide whether I really want to know this thing. But every once in a while I see a headline about something scary—maybe it’s a wild animal attack or some other surprising kind of misfortune—and I read every last word of that story looking for reassurance. I want to know that the person attacked by the bear left the trail, or the family lost in the woods for a week forgot a map. I don’t want to hear that they followed the rules and did everything right. I want to believe that I can keep myself safe.
Something like that may have motivated those who spoke with Jesus in our gospel reading today. They bring a news story to him, one so awful we might be tempted to discredit it except that we know from other sources exactly why Pilate was such an unpopular Governor of Judaea. The Jewish historian Josephus describes some of the things Pilate did, actions that seemed meant to enrage the local Jewish population and keep them uncertain and off-balance. Pilate flouted laws and conventions, he tried to bring pagan Roman symbols into sacred Jewish spaces, he mis-used money from the Temple treasury to build an aqueduct and then brutally crushed the protest that followed. He was a cruel governor. He created the kind of chaos that kept his subjects fearful and unable to predict what he might do next. And one of the worst things he did is retold here in Luke.
Worshipers from Galilee had come on pilgrimage to offer sacrifices in the Temple. Perhaps fearing an uprising or perhaps for no reason at all, Pilate sent in his troops and had those worshipers killed. Their blood–the blood of the Galileans—was mingled with the blood of the sacrifices they had been offering in faithfulness to God. The reality of Jesus’s day is that you might—without warning—be slaughtered in your place of worship. Why has this terrible thing happened? And where is God? Does he see? Does he care? Will he do anything about it? I can imagine all these questions swirling in the minds of those who have brought this story to Jesus.
Maybe they are also wondering—could Jesus be the one who will do something? Will he bring justice? Will he make it right? Will he, at least, show that he is as angry and outraged as we are? But Jesus—as we see again and again in the gospels–identifies the questions that lie beneath the questions. He asks them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No.” In other words, don’t be tempted to mitigate the horror–the wrongness of it–by telling yourself that these people were somehow to blame. This suffering was undeserved, but also–in a devastating coda—Jesus says, “... unless you repent you will all perish as they did.”
Jesus seems less interested in offering comfort than in raising the stakes of the whole conversation. And he raises them again with his own news story: eighteen dead in the collapse of a tower. That one we can’t even blame on Pilate. It’s as if Jesus is reminding his listeners that not only do they have the chaotic oppression of Pilate and of Roman imperial rule to contend with, but they have an even deeper chaos to consider—a chaos that simply blows in on the wind. A chaos that grows like a crack in a foundation stone. This is the unpredictable chaos even we are familiar with: buildings collapse, floodwaters rise, wildfires spread.
So, what in the world does Jesus mean? The answer, as it almost always is in the gospels, is a story. The answer is a parable. We tend to think of parables as brief stories with memorable details that communicate some moral or lesson. And they are brief stories with memorable details, and they frequently do offer some commentary on morals or ethics. BUT, this is not really what they are. This is not what they DO. The parables of Jesus are always an invitation to imagine a new world. An-everything-being-made-right-world. A heaven-come-down-to-earth world. With the arrival of Jesus, in his ministry of teaching and healing, God’s kingdom is breaking in, but it’s such a different sort of kingdom that it’s hard to recognize. It’s like a pearl. It’s like a mustard seed. It’s like a gardener gently tending a barren fig tree.
And so, in Luke, we move from one half of this passage to the next. We are invited by Jesus to shift our gaze from the world as it appears to be—chaotic, full of senseless suffering, and with nothing being made right—to the imagined world of a vineyard where a man has a fig tree that is not bearing fruit. The people sharing the terrible news with Jesus are essentially asking Jesus to help them make sense of it. The easiest answer to swallow is that it is somehow the Galileans fault. They sinned, and so they were destroyed. But Jesus offers a parable that lets no one off the hook. He has told them, unless you turn and go a different way with your mind, your heart, your whole self, you are also heading toward death. We are each of us the fig tree, and the vineyard owner is checking us over, looking for fruit. As the parable goes, the owner has come looking for three years. The owner is patient, but he is also a good judge of vineyards and fig trees. It isn’t right that any tree take in the nutrients and life of the soil and give no fruit. The life of this tree is being sustained by the vineyard and by the patience of the vineyard owner, but it’s as if the good life of that place is stuck or blocked inside that tree. Life is going into the roots and it’s not coming out in the fruit.
We know Jesus Christ as judge. Together, we profess that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” familiar words from the Nicene Creed. The figure of the vineyard owner offers us a way of seeing Jesus truly. He judges rightly when he says there is no room in my vineyard for a tree that will not take in life and give out life. But, in the world of this parable, the gardener also shows us Jesus. Remember, these parables aren’t simple morality tales. Live this way not that way. Instead, they are revelations. Headlines from heaven that tell us who Jesus is and what he is up to. And what is our gardener up to? He looks at us and sees all the ways we are not allowing the life of God to work in us to bear sweet fruit. Whether the owner cuts us down or not, we are going the wrong way. And as he is again and again in the gospels, Jesus is moved by compassion for us, and he bends to wash our feet, to heal our children, to turn our water into wine, and, as we see in this story, to dig tenderly around our roots and feed us so that we can be filled with his life. So that we can overflow with sweet fruit.
God is love, and God loves us. We are Christians. We know this. But what does the love of God look like? In a world gone wrong, in times and places where unjust rulers do terrible things, when innocent people suffer and die, where is the love of God? In the imagined world of this parable, in this vineyard with its owner, its tree, and its gardener, we see how heaven comes to earth. We see a good and patient judge who wants to set things right, who wants a vineyard full of healthy trees. And we see a merciful gardener. A gardener who says, I know this one’s headed toward death, but let me try again. Let me bend low and offer myself and give this tree another year, another chance, another season of Lent, in order to repent. In order to turn. In order to be filled with my life. God’s love looks like judgement. And God’s love looks like mercy. And Jesus Christ our judge is also Jesus Christ our advocate.
I could end my sermon there with that gaze toward our own hearts and with the knowledge that our God is a good judge who will set things right, that if justice seems delayed it is because our God is also patient and full of mercy. But I’ll share a few more words because I think we sometimes over-spiritualize the stories we read in our Bibles. Now what could I possibly mean by that? Is it possible to be too focused on heavenly realities as we study Scripture? Growing up, I sometimes heard it said of a person, “He’s so heavenly minded he’s no earthly good.” When Jesus invites us to see his kingdom breaking into this world’s reality, he isn’t asking us to ignore this world’s reality and pretend it cannot hurt us. That’s why in the collect appointed for today, we pray, “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.” God cares about us, body and soul.
When Jesus says, repent or perish, he is of course speaking to us today about the state of our own hearts and lives, but first he was speaking to these people at this time, and he knew something they did not know–their way of life, as faithful worshipers bringing their sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem, was coming to an end. Pilate’s slaughter of the Galileans was only the beginning. In AD 70 the Romans fought a devastating war that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. The small-scale destruction of the Galileans in the Temple, terrible as it was, was only the beginning. A greater destruction was coming. Jesus knows this, and he weeps for the city and its people.
It makes sense that his first followers longed for a political savior. They were oppressed by Rome in terrible ways. How wonderful it must have seemed to imagine Jesus sending Herod and Pilate and all those Roman soldiers running for their lives. But God did not become a human in order to depose the emperor and sit on an earthly throne. Because earthly thrones and earthly kingdoms always, eventually, go the same crooked way. Instead, the path of freedom Jesus offers leads not from one earthly kingdom to another, but from one world to another. The Second Temple and its worship and way of life will be destroyed. One day, even the Roman Empire itself will be destroyed. But there is another kingdom, God’s kingdom, a kingdom of justice and mercy led by a judge who gives his own life to make things right, and this kingdom—glimpsed in every parable and every miracle and especially in the cross and the empty tomb–will have no end. This kingdom cannot fall because Christ is its cornerstone. Walk the Jesus way. Receive citizenship in his kingdom by living as his disciple, and you will never perish. You will live. You will bear fruit. Thanks be to God. Amen.
