‘unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’ ((Luke 4:5)
Luke 13:1-9 (Year C: The Third Sunday in Lent 24th March, 2019)
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A NOTE ABOUT TODAY’S READINGS
For this coming Sunday the appointed readings in the Church of Ireland are as follows:
And the readings in the Roman Catholic church are as follows:
And 1 Corinthians and Luke as above.
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SERMON NOTES (1,064 words)
When Jesus was confronted with stories of what happened in the massacre of the Galileans where the Roman soldiers ran amuck or ‘those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them’ he had to be honest with those listening. Those listening including not a few listening today in parts of the world and the church will have notions of a fierce, vengeful and detached God who enforces cruel justice and punishes those who sin. For these folk, wars, epidemics and various sufferings were and are the price of sin. We are reminded of the question posed to Jesus in John 9:2 ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’. But, in the gospel of Luke we are not told that Jesus assigned responsibility for this suffering to the victims who had broken God’s law. We know enough from reading all of the gospels and not least that of Luke that God, in Jesus Christ, came not to condemn, not to punish, not to afflict but to save, to heal and to restore. However, suffering is the reality for all human beings and some much more than others.
The point is that Jesus knew how to draw from his suffering the very power that would not deliver us from suffering here and now but lead us to a place of acceptance and conquest. ‘Bearing with it’ was not the message for those who were poor, excluded and despised as a result but rather ‘woe to you rich’ (Luke 6:24) who deprive others of goods, power and respect.
In other words we are responsible in our ways, whether we like it or not, for needless suffering as a result of things we have said and done and things we failed to say and do that we should have done. Put another way, we are individually responsible for some degree of injustice and damage in our personal relationships whether at home or at work or somewhere else. But, the story does not end there. There is ‘structural sin’ embedded in the way that societies and polities are constructed and in the way that relationships of power and dominance operate in this world. In a way, we can be part of, and responsible for, that too. Perhaps the saddest aspect of this type of ‘structural sin’ is that we may do it in the name of God or some other cause because we have never engaged with an alternative story or possibility. We can sit in armchairs observing the world and pontificating on how others should live not really knowing anything of their sufferings or never having faced the difficult question of how one would think or feel if this or that happened to oneself or one’s family. The saying ‘don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it’ could be rephrased ‘don’t knock it unless you have been through it yourself’. Indeed.
To say all of this is not to avoid one of the key messages in this text and which is built on a separate question of ‘why do good people suffer?’, namely: if we do not turn from lies, selfishness and cruelty towards others then we, too, will experience huge suffering and destruction. For ‘unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did’ Jesus tells us (verse 5). Life is short and eternity is long as one saying goes. In this life, we have an amazing opportunity to live by truth, goodness and beauty. The passing of years and the experience of bereavement involving one’s parents or even the next generation – our generation – brings home the reality that life is precious and to be embraced in the here and now. The question of ‘life after death’ needs to be matched with the question of ‘life before death’. On the latter question, we can, hopefully, agree with people who do not hope beyond death. Ours is not to force our values and views on others but rather live in such a way that these same values and beliefs we say we stand by are curious, attractive, meaningful and life-giving for others – including those who have given up believing and hoping a long time ago.
In hearing this gospel we are reminded that our lives are precious, that there is no room for complacency and that time is constantly getting shorter. This is not a reason for gloom or neurotic anxiety about this sin or that sin, about this broken relationship or that broken relationship or about this omission and that omission. There are remedies for failure. These include a stubborn trusting in God’s mercy and help no matter what. They also include recourse to those means of grace that God puts in our way: a walk in the mountains, sharing a cup of tea with someone, a book, a project. Add to this times of grace spent in reflection, prayerful reading of the great poetry and stories of the Bible and confession. Confession? The Irish took the blame for inventing individual auricular confession to an ordained ministry but the practice has biblical roots (John 20:23 and James 5:16). Leave it like this:
- All may
- Some should
- None have to
In the story or parable of the fig tree we are told, figuratively, that following three years of trial the vines were given another year to bear fruit or face being ‘cut down’. In three year’s time from this Sunday a few of us may not be around to hear this particular Gospel reading on the 3rd Sunday of Lent (Year C) on 20th March 2022. Most of us will be around but of one thing we can be sure – if we live we will be three years closer to death. The time for repentance or metanoia in Greek – is now. A metanoia of heart, mind, attitude and behaviour is meaningful only in the now. That is the key message in this week’s reading from Luke. It is the now of the Gospel.
Many are the regrets of some as they enter the final third of their living years. But, one regret we will not have is that we had loved too much and that we had lovingly gave away too much whether by virtue of time, money and our very own lives. The question of human suffering is seen for what it is – a call to compassion.
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SOME IDEAS FOR INTERCESSIONS
Confident of God’s great mercy and infinite loving patience we pray for:
- Justice for those who cry out in poverty and oppression…..may we respond through help and action to address the causes of poverty and oppression.
- The people of Mozambique suffering the impact of a recent cyclone…may they find relief and support from the international governments
- All of the countries and governments of the 28 member states of the European Union at this time …
- The communities in which we live and work…may we live according to gospel values….
- The Christian churches … that we may proclaim gospel values by the way we live and the example we give to a world seeking truth, goodness and beauty…
- One another….
- Other named persons ….
- Remembering with thanks those who have gone before us….
- … praying in silence….
Loving God gather up our prayers – those spoken and those unspoken in the depths of our hearts. In the places we live, work and communicate, may we be channels of peace, healing and reconciliation in a divided and sick society.
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A PRAYERFUL WALK THROUGH LUKE 13:1-9
Preliminaries
We are somewhere around the year 80 A.D. or a little later. Luke is writing for Christians mainly in Greece. Most of them are not Jews but converts to this new movement centred on the figure of Jesus of Nazareth and fast becoming a clearly different and separate movement to Judaism. Break-ups are never easy. And when we consider the traumatic events following the final destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the bloody siege at Masada rock to the south as well as the dispersal of the Jewish people from the holy land we are in exceptionally troubled times.
v.1-5 Tragic news
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.’
This passage opens up with a possible reference to a massacre that took place where pagan sacrifices were made and where Pilate directly provokes and punishes Galilean rebels by mixing their blood with that of the pagan sacrifice. Jesus takes two examples from contemporary society to illustrate that human tragedies do not signal an angry God punishing particular groups of people. Rather, he uses the example to make a different point: unless we turn back to God we end up harming ourselves and others. This warning remains as true today as it did two thousand years ago.
v.6-9 A personal and community warning – a parable from a barren fig tree
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.”’
The key point, here, is that every day and every moment is an opportunity. Over to you.
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