Sermons
March 16, 2025 (3rd Sunday in Lent)
Turn Right
Luke 13:1-9, 31-35
A certain girls’ softball coach, whose name I don’t know, was facing a difficult decision as he warmed the team up for their last practice before their final roster was announced. Brenda came to practice and tried hard, but she couldn’t quite get the knack of hitting the ball, and missed most of the fly balls that came her way out there in right field.[1] The coach planned to cut Brenda, until his daughter, who was also on the team, pulled him aside.
“Try Brenda at first base,” she said. “I was playing catch with her, and she never missed a ball no matter how wild I threw them.”
Although he was skeptical, the coach followed his daughter’s advice and gave Brenda one last chance. He was pleasantly surprised. It turned out that Brenda had little trouble catching the ball when it was thrown across the infield. She still had some trouble with fly balls—but over the course of the season, as she gained confidence in her new position, she got to where more balls landed in her glove than on the ground.
Had the coach’s daughter not interceded on Brenda’s behalf, she’d have been cut from the team, with the assumption that she just couldn’t play softball.
The theme of Lent every year is repentance. Contrary to the popular understanding, repentance is not just feeling bad about things we’ve done wrong. A person can feel bad about something they’ve done wrong, and still keep doing it. And that isn’t repentance. Repentance implies a change, a turning away from something that’s not right in our lives, and a turning toward what’s better.
Twice in the first part of our scripture being today Jesus calls us to repent. Both of those calls come in the context of discussions of traumatic events.
We don’t have any record outside the Bible of either of these two events, the murder by Pilate of Galileans who were worshipping at the temple or the collapse of a tower on the Jerusalem city walls that killed a number of people. More than likely, that’s because, in the first case, these kinds of acts of cruelty were pretty commonplace under Pilate; and in the second case in the scheme of things a building collapse that killed 18 people it’s just not that major an event. Of course it would have been major to the families of the people who died, but it’s not going to make the annals of history that we’re still reading two millennia later.
But these events seem to have resulted in conversations that have always taken place when there is a tragedy: Why did this happen? In spite of our claim to be more knowledgeable and wise than the supposedly primitive people of Jesus’ day, we still ask the same questions, and sometimes reach the same conclusions.
I think there might be a certain amount of comfort to be derived from looking at victims of a tragic event and declaring them to have somehow “deserved” their fate. Years ago, when there was an earthquake in Haiti, a certain TV evangelist proclaimed that they “deserved” the destruction and loss of life it brought to them, because somewhere in their history, they supposedly made some kind of a pact with the devil to end their enslavement.
If we can look at a tragedy and determine that its victims somehow deserved what happened to them, then we can say to ourselves, “Well, then, nothing bad will happen to us; We’ve never made any pact with the devil.” We’re better than they are.
Jesus absolutely rejects this way of thinking. You cannot, he says, look at these devout folks from Galilee, who were in the temple offering their sacrifices just as we are all called to do, and say, “well, they clearly sinned; thank goodness I’ve never sinned like they did, so I’m safe from Pilate’s murderous cruelty.”
But he does not reject the notion of the judgment of God. He says these tragedies don’t show us that their victims are more sinful than the rest of us; instead, they ought to remind us that we cannot predict the moment of our death, and that knowledge probably ought to affect our everyday life.
I sort of have a problem with that notion, though. It’s been the subject matter of far too many manipulative altar calls over the years: “If you were to die today, where would you spend eternity?” It sort of scares people into belief, and I think that even in church, decisions based on fear are often not very good decisions. I also wonder if a response to a fear-inducing altar call will stick for very long.
And, quite honestly, I have difficulty buying into the theology that is contained in such a call: God is just waiting, itching, to punish us eternally for our sins the second we die; But if we will just repent, and accept Jesus as our savior, then Jesus will stand between us and the wrath of God that is ready and waiting to destroy us. That theology has affected how we’ve interpreted the parable Jesus tells in our reading today.
We have a tendency to see all parables as allegories—stories in which each character or symbol stands for something or someone else. And some of them can legitimately be seen that way, but maybe not all. Perhaps you’ve heard this parable interpreted something like this: The fig tree represents a human life, receiving sustenance but not giving back any positive fruits in return. The owner of the vineyard represents God, seeing the unfruitful tree and ordering it cut down because it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing. And the gardener, who intercedes with the vineyard owner on behalf of the tree, represents Jesus, whose mercy stands between us and God’s judgment.
But I wonder if that’s the best interpretation—especially if we believe either that Jesus did not understand himself to be divine, as some theologians do; or that Jesus is the incarnation of God’s entire nature, as many other theologians do, including myself. The idea that God is all about judgment and Jesus is all about mercy doesn’t make sense if we see Jesus as fully divine, as well as fully human.
I propose, instead, another interpretation. This one makes more sense to me, and I think it’s more in keeping with the whole witness of the Bible, including the Old Testament.
We often think of the Old Testament as being all about the judgment of God, and the New Testament as being all about God’s mercy. But that doesn’t hold up when we study what the Bible actually says. For one thing, judgment in the New Testament is oftentimes a lot worse than it is in the Old. Nobody’s ever thrown into a lake of fire to fry[2] for all eternity in the Old Testament.
More importantly, God’s mercy is abundantly to be found in the Old Testament as well as the new. Indeed, when God reveals God’s name and nature to Moses on Mount Sinai, it is mercy and grace, steadfast love and faithfulness that carry the most weight. And the formula first seen there, in Exodus 34, is repeated over and over and over in the Hebrew scriptures—not just in words but in action, as God over and over and over again takes the initiative to re-establish the covenant that his people have repeatedly broken.
I suggest, therefore, to the parable of the fig tree is not about the hand of a wrathful God being stayed by a merciful Jesus. Instead, what if we see it as the interplay between two aspects of God’s nature: God’s righteous judgment and God’s tender mercy? And as we have seen throughout the Bible, ultimately it is God’s mercy that carries the day. The tree is given one last chance to be fruitful.
But our text is about repentance. What does this parable say about repentance? Can a fig tree truly repent?
Well, let’s think again about what repentance means.
When we repent, what we are doing is changing our behavior. We turn away from unfruitful behavior—because this really isn’t about growing fig trees, after all—and to turn toward bearing fruit. And there is something very important to learn about repentance from this parable.
Notice that the tree isn’t simply left alone, with the instructions to bear fruit next year or else. It won’t be about whether or not the tree tries really, really hard to produce figs. When all is said and done, whether the tree bears fruit or not seems to depend on something outside itself: the actions of the gardener.
And I think, finally, that what this parable tells us is that our ability to repent, to turn away from an unfruitful, sinful life and toward a life of discipleship and abundance, does not come from ourselves. It’s not about whether or not we try really, really hard to live right. Our ability to repent, instead, comes from God.
Out of God’s mercy, God has already begun the process that may lead to our repentance, to our living the life that won’t leave us subject to judgment on the last day. God didn’t do it because we deserved it, any more than the gardener fertilized the tree because it was already bearing fruit. It was a gift, one that we have only to accept, to begin living the life of repentance to which God calls us.
[1] The few times I’ve been foolish enough to attempt to play softball, I’ve been put in right field. That seems to be where an incompetent player like myself can be placed so they don’t do much damage.
[2] h/t to Nirvana and The Meat Puppets.