In a nation and a world that is divided by so much right now I bet we could all agree that this little passage from Luke for this morning is really tough. So tough that most would choose to avoid it, but not the creators of our lectionary. They have made sure that we deal with it at least once every three years. So, deal with it we will with all its questions about suffering, evil, judgment, sin, forgiveness, repentance, and grace. And no, I will not be providing answers to all of these questions, as even Jesus doesn’t provide certainty in this passage, but we will like Jacob with the angel sent by God, wrestle with the questions for a bit.
First it would be helpful I think to set this passage in its proper context. Our passage for today is situated just a little over halfway through Luke’s Gospel. From the first chapter of Luke, we hear what Jesus will be all about. Before Jesus is even born, his mother proclaims that the child born to her will “scatter the proud,” bring down “the powerful from their thrones,” “lift up the lowly,” “fill the hungry with good things,” and send “the rich away empty” (Luke 1:46 and following). John the Baptist, as he tells the world that Jesus is coming, calls for repentance. When he is asked what this means he replies, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” He advises tax collectors to “collect no more than the amount prescribed for you,” and soldiers “not to extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages” (Luke chapter 3).
In his first public sermon in his hometown synagogue, Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah about a Messiah who will bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and a year of jubilee and proclaims that he is the fulfillment of these promises (Luke chapter 4). Jesus heals, casts out demons, teaches, preaches, and sits at table with those on the edges of society. In chapter seven he proclaims that a sinful women’s sins are forgiven because she shows love, and he rebukes the Pharisees with whom he is sharing a meal for not showing that same kind of love. He repeatedly warns people not to judge and to love their neighbors as themselves. He feeds thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a few fish. And then at the end of chapter 9 he sets his face to Jerusalem where he knows he will face his death.
Jesus knows that if he continues to preach the kingdom of God, he will so threaten those in power that he will be put to death. His preaching and teaching begin to take on a sense of urgency because Jesus knows that his time on earth is now limited. His death at the hands of those in power will soon be at hand. He wants his followers to understand that he is not an earthly Messiah who will conquer the Romans. This is not how God acts in the world. Instead, he is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God, of heaven, of the world as it should be, a world that can only be experienced and glimpsed if one has new eyes with which to see it. The kingdom of God is a world in which God’s justice and mercy reign supreme. It is a place where power is expressed in love for and with and not in the hoarding of anything.
So, in chapter 11 we hear Jesus saying to his listeners, “Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness” (Luke 11:34). Jesus wants the crowds following him, and us, to see the world with new eyes, with God’s eyes. And he realizes that getting people to see in new ways might take a little shock therapy. And that brings us to our Gospel reading today at the beginning of chapter 13.
We don’t know exactly what those who were with Jesus said about the Galileans who were killed by Pilate, but it seems they must have given an opinion about why they died. It is not hard to imagine that they implied or said openly that they thought the Galileans were killed because God was punishing them for some kind of wrongdoing. Jesus very clearly disagrees and goes on to add an example of a random accident. He insists that we must not equate tragedy with divine judgment and punishment. Sin does not make atrocities come, they just come. Good behavior does not protect us. Tragedies happen to the good and bad alike. They don’t come from God; they are just part of life in this fallen world. In fact, if tragedy were punishment for sin, we would all be dead.
But what tragedies should do is wake us up to the fragility and shortness of life. None of us knows how long we have on this earth. We should be seeking to make our eyes healthy so that we might be full of light. We should be continually seeking to see with the eyes of God, that we might bear fruit worthy of God’s kingdom. And to see with the eyes of God we will need to repent.
We tend to think of repentance as being about groveling over things we have done wrong, and certainly we have all done things wrong for which we need to seek forgiveness from other people and from God. That is a given. But the repentance that Jesus and John the Baptist preach about is something a little different. It is about a change in orientation, a change in vision, seeing the world with new eyes and in new ways. Repentance requires taking on a new point of view, a new understanding about God and God’s reign, a new understanding about the world at large and our place in it. In this understanding, to repent is to be jolted into discovering a different reality rather than about trying to satisfy an impossibly demanding Deity.
If you read Luke (and the other three Gospels carefully) you will see that Jesus doesn’t devote much effort to criticizing or condemning individuals, except for villains like Herod Antipas and Pilate. He is not concerned with personal virtue or purity. Jesus does care about providing sustenance and vitality to others, to bearing fruit. Jesus cares about justice for those living lives defined primarily by injustice.
But what is justice? Samuel Wells, an English priest and Christian ethicist, sees justice as a world in which everyone has a chance to flourish, and I think that is a pretty good definition. Justice cannot guarantee flourishing but it can create the foundation from which flourishing can happen. Justice does not dictate what flourishing looks like but seeks to create the conditions in which all can flourish in their own way. Therefore, injustices are those obstacles humans put in the way of other human beings that keep them from flourishing. In Jesus’ time one of the many injustices would have been the extreme taxation of Jewish farmers by Herod and the Romans that increased their wealth and impoverished those being taxed. No one can flourish if they do not have enough to eat. Today poverty is still an issue, as is racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and individual and systemic prejudice against LGBTQ+ people. To follow Jesus is to seek justice, to seek the ideal world in which everyone has the opportunity to flourish, even if we know we cannot achieve heaven on earth (only God can create that). But we seek this world anyway, knowing that we will catch glimpses of God’s kingdom along the way.
And seeking justice necessarily requires repentance, it requires a reorientation of how we see the world. Seeking justice requires new eyes with which to see. Since the ideal, complete justice, will never be achievable by us, we have never actually experienced this world, we have to imagine what it might look like and this takes conscious effort. The world as it is has a powerful hold over us and causes us to think and believe that the world as it is is the world as it is meant to or has to be. We create reasons why it is like it is. The Galileans died at the hands of Pilate because they did not follow Torah properly. God was punishing them. In terms of percentages, more black people live in poverty in this country than white people because black people just don’t work as hard as white people. I am where I am in my life because I worked hard, and not at all because of the advantages given to me by the circumstances of my birth—skin color, place of birth, education level of my parents and their economic resources and so on.
We have to be able to imagine justice to be able to see injustice. When I imagine a world of justice, it is a world in which everyone has enough to sustain themselves. No one is struggling to find enough to eat, or adequate housing, or sufficient clothing, or decent healthcare. No one is forced in a life direction against their will. Certainly, bad things (catastrophes) happen to people and people make poor choices, and in those moments, others are walking alongside them loving them back to healing and wholeness. There may be differences in achievement and wealth, but no one is able to hoard so much that it prevents others from having enough. Flourishing is possible for all, and each person gets to say what flourishing means for them. If they encounter obstacles to their flourishing not of their own making, they are listened to and helped. And once you begin to imagine this world in which flourishing is possible for everyone, you are ready to recognize what is none of these things, to see what should not be. And you will feel compelled to respond. And this process of seeing anew, of repentance, is a process required of every human being, and a process that continues throughout our entire lives.
I have had many moments in my life when I have felt called to repent and to see things anew. I suspect that I will have many more, as I am far from being a perfect human being with perfect vision. As I write this sermon, one moment immediately comes to my mind, it was the moment when I watched the video of George Floyd being murdered by police officers. In the past I would not have watched such a video. I do not watch violent movies or read violent books. I do not like nor find a thrill from violence. But because my eyes had begun to be opened to the systemic racism in this country, I decided that I had to watch this video. Not to watch, not to know, not to see this violence was a privilege granted to me by my white skin, and repentance for my part in systemic racism meant putting aside my privilege.
So, I watched, and I wept. I was repulsed and horrified. I watched as a man who could not fight back and was no threat to the police arresting him cry out to his mother as he died. I didn’t care what he did to be arrested. It didn’t matter. The police arresting him decided they were police, judge, and jury in that moment, and they condemned him to death. This was not the country I thought I was living in—a world that existed only in my protected bubble of white privilege. Even if George Floyd had committed some crime, he would no longer have the chance to repent and change his ways. He would no longer have the opportunity to flourish because he was dead. It was clear to me that his killers did not see him as the child of God that he was. If they had they wouldn’t have killed him. But I also didn’t see those officers as inherently bad people. I realized that they are caught up in a world that taught them in so many little and big ways that George Floyd was less than human and a threat to them simply because of the color of his skin.
I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. Injustice, once seen, demands a response. And I asked myself, what can I do about it? I realized that my vocation at this time in my life is to preach, and it is in my preaching that I am called to name the gap between the world as it is and the world as it is intended by God to be. My vision is far from perfect, but it is improving through the grace of God, and my call is to share what I see with my improving vision with those willing to listen.
As long as we are still alive, we have the opportunity to repent. We may be the fig tree in the garden that is not bearing fruit or not bearing enough fruit, but the end has not come for us yet. Through God’s grace, we are being given opportunities every day to see anew, to change the direction we are travelling in, to have our eyes healed that we might be full of the light of God. Like the fig tree in our parable from Luke for this morning the question remains open, will we use the life we have and respond to God’s grace? Amen.
