Third Sunday in Lent, Year C. For the Psalm, Ps. 63.1-8; for the Gospel, Luke 13.1-9. “The Failed Fig Tree”

17 Mar Third Sunday in Lent, Year C. For the Psalm, Ps. 63.1-8; for the Gospel, Luke 13.1-9. “The Failed Fig Tree”

I remember some time ago watching a man on television speaking about mass shootings that had taken place in Christchurch, New Zealand on 15 March 2019—shootings carried out by a single person during Muslim Friday Prayers, first at the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton and soon afterwards at the Linwood Islamic Centre.  He talked about the events hesitatingly for a few minutes and finally stopped, saying in effect, “I just have no words for what has happened. I can’t talk about it.”

Who couldn’t sympathize? There are some things so awful, so appalling and outrageous to our every decent instinct that it’s almost impossible to talk rationally or reasonably of them. We instinctively say that such things are “unspeakable”—and I think we’re right to.

But surely that doesn’t mean we just let such things pass with a shrug? Surely we have questions?

Christians, Muslims, and Jews—we all believe in the God of Abraham. We believe God cares for what God has made, that God is Merciful and Compassionate. Why then does God allow these things to happen? Those fifty people in the mosque at Christchurch had come together to pray to God and praise Him, hadn’t they? What was God up to then, that God didn’t protect such people? How do we explain such events?

One move is to say that such people are sinful, and therefore God, who is righteous, has punished them. That might seem to most of us a little hard to sustain when one of those killed at Christchurch was only three years old, but still I know of Christians who would offer such an argument.

It’s the same argument as is offered in the Old Testament to Job in the Book of Job. Job is a good man who suffers terribly. His friends comfort him by telling him he must have committed some serious sin and he ought to repent and then God will make everything right.[1]

But Job is adamant. He’s done the best he can to be a decent human being and he doesn’t see why he should be treated like this. “Let God come and face me and let’s have it out,” he says, or words to that effect.[2]

The odd thing is, God enters the story at the end of the book and God says that Job is right. God doesn’t run the world like an angry boss who clobbers you if you step out of line. And Job’s friends have got it all wrong.[3]

All of which brings us to the gospel passage that was set for today—the passage we just heard.

Jesus and those round him are talking about two local disasters that have disturbed and distressed people.

One is a result of human cruelty—the Roman governor has ruthlessly killed a group of Galilean worshippers. For some reason they’ve been regarded as a threat to imperial security and so, as we hear the story, the governor has “mingled their blood with their sacrifices”.

The other is a more or less accidental disaster—a building in Jerusalem called the tower of Siloam has collapsed and killed eighteen people. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How are such awful things to be explained?

Apparently there are those around Jesus who use the same argument as Job’s friends: “Ah, they must have been terrible sinners for God to punish them like that!”

But Our Lord utterly rejects that idea.

“Do you really think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” he says. “No, I tell you… Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you really think that they were worse offenders than everyone else living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you!”

“But,” he adds, “I’ll tell you this: if you don’t stop thinking like that, one day you’re going to find yourselves in the same situation they’re in!”[4]

What then? Does our Lord have some better “explanation”? Actually, he doesn’t. Or at least, if he does, he doesn’t tell them what it is.

Instead, he tells them the rather strange little story about a fig tree that we hear in this Sunday’s gospel.

This tree, he says, is barren—which is to say, it’s useless. It cumbers the earth, eats up resources and produces nothing.

“Yank it out and burn it,” the landowner says, reasonably enough.

But—

“Wait,” says the gardener. “Let it alone for one more year!”

Nor is that all, for the gardener himself will put something of his own into this—

“Let it alone” he says, “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.”

And there the little story ends. No certainty is offered, no real conclusion—just a modest little hope and a plea for patience.

So how are we to explain such tragedies as those we are speaking about?

Well, perhaps we need to learn something from the man on television who said of the Christchurch shootings, “I can’t talk about it.”

Or maybe we need to learn from what we’re told of Job’s comforters, who did fine so long as they didn’t say anything, but really screwed up when they started to talk.

Perhaps above all we need to learn from our Lord, who offered no explanation, only a plea for patience.

For the truth is, we can’t “explain” the Christchurch shootings—or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Holocaust, or the murderous attacks on Israel of October 7th 2023 and the murderous destruction of Gaza that followed it, or any of the other hideous atrocities that litter human history—and especially we can’t “explain” them if by “explain” we mean, “show how they were good things really”. They weren’t.

Why do we seek God at all? Is it because God “explains” things? I doubt it. I think we seek God because we need God, we want God. We long for ultimate love, for faithfulness at the heart of the universe. We seek God because, as the psalmist puts it in the psalm appointed for this day,[5] we are thirsty for God:

My flesh also faints for you

 as in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.

(Ps. 63:1-2)

The Song of Songs has it right. We seek God (and incidentally, God seeks us) as lovers..[6]  And what is the quality of love? Paul said it in a phrase–“love is patient (Ἡ ἀγάπη μακροθυμεῖ).” Which brings us back to our gospel passage and the odd little story that Jesus tells. If God is our lover, and we love God, then maybe we have to do what lovers always have to do, and be patient with each other.  We all know—God knows, I know it!—that God has to patient with us, with me. How about us in return exercising a bit of patience with God?

That doesn’t mean pretending there are no problems or questions—questions such as the Psalmist asks again and again, “Why?” “Why do the wicked prosper?” questions such as Our Lord himself asks as he hangs on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But it does mean being willing to live with those questions. It means being willing to address them to God, frankly expressing our fear, our disappointment and our anger, just as the psalmist and our Lord do. One of the great mistakes we can make in prayer is to suppose that we always have to be polite, however badly we feel. That is a sure way to end any relationship. Whatever we have to offer, however awful, God is big enough to take it.

Being patient also, of course, means what it says: it means hanging in there! One of the most powerful moments in C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters [7] is when Screwtape, writing of course from the devil’s point of view, says “our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

There’s a story I love about the great ballerina Margot Fonteyn. After she’d completed a dance she was asked to explain it. “If one could explain it,” she said, “one wouldn’t have needed to dance it.”

That first Good Friday, at the end of Our Lord’s journey to Jerusalem, Jesus died. He was the best person who ever lived, and he was crucified. What then? God did not explain the cross. What God did do was raise him from the dead. And this too, I suppose, was a kind of dance:

They cut me down

And I leapt up high,

I am the life

That’ll never, never die.[8]

There is so much around us that we do not understand, and God does not explain that, either. What God does do is give us a promise through his Son: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day” (John 6:54).

In that trust and that hope, at each Eucharist we approach the altar. In that hope we dare  place our trust in God, in words that the church has taught us centuries ago:

We believe in One God…

[1] See throughout, e.g. Job 22.5-30.

[2] E.g. Job 23.1-12.

[3] Job 42.7-17.

[4] I understand Luke’s word μετανοῆτε, normally translated “repent”, in its more basic sense of “to change one’s mind or purpose” (see LS μετανοέω), and I think that NRSV “as they did… just as they did” (ὁμοίως… ὡσαύτως) are the key words here. The point is, the view that “if they’re suffering, they must have sinned very badly” works well for us until we start to suffer ourselves, as sooner or later in some measure we all do. Categorizing other people’s suffering as something they must have deserved leaves us feeling safe, for it says that they are different from us (they were great sinners!) and were therefore vulnerable. Our own suffering, however, reminds us that we are like them after all, with the same hopes and the same fears. This, incidentally, is the basis of the scriptural commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself. In its English dress, and even in the Greek of the New Testament and Septuagint, it’s easy to misunderstand this as an exhortation to love your neighbour in the way that you love yourself. This is not, however, the sense of the original Hebrew and the Aramaic renderings with which our Lord will have been familiar. Here, the sense is clearly that you are to love your neighbour as someone who is just like you. Hence the commandment to be kind to the immigrant is unpacked with the observation that the Israelites themselves had once been immigrants in the land of Egypt (Leviticus 19.34). So one is bound to observe the evident absurdity in any United States’ citizen of European descent objecting to immigrants into the United States, since all such Americans are themselves, virtually by definition, the descendants of immigrants!

 

[5] In its choice of Psalm the Church of England follows the Revised Common Lectionary (Ps. 63.1-9), whereas the Episcopal Church follows the Roman Catholic usage (Ps. 63.1-8). I have no idea why there is this difference, and even wonder if it is the result of a mistake or a typo at some point in the process of preparing the lectionary!  In any case, from a strictly liturgical point of view, the Roman Catholic/Episcopal use appears to me to be preferable.

[6] For the view of the Song of Songs here reflected, see Ellen Davies, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Songs of Songs (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2000) 231-38, which I find very persuasive; also Robert B. Jenson, Song of Songs, Interpretation (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2005). Both, incidentally, are splendid books, and I thoroughly recommend them for any preacher’s library!

[7] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942). There have, of course, been many editions since.

[8] Sydney Carter, “Lord of the Dance” (1963).