Lent Week #2 – a Transformed perspective
How Easter can challenge our views about God and Life
Preacher: Phil Swain Readings: Luke 13:1-9
We continue our Lenten journey within our “transformation” theme and how Easter has the power to transform our minds or our thinking … and even perspectives on faith and God and life. This week our narrative reading from Luke 13 is a challenging story where Jesus is being asked to give his take on some tragic current events … “Why did these things happen?” Jesus answers by challenging some of the theological understandings around God and Suffering; the consequences of sin; and how we hold the tension between God’s compassion and the justice. As part of our time exploring this reading from Luke, we are going to also wrestle with these same questions and how we hold the tension between God’s compassion and grace and God’s justice.
Sermon Text
I remember a conversation that I had very early in my ministry at my first church. I was a young, naive, 30-year-old minister and a lady from my church asked whether we could have a chat. Sitting beside the river at Yamba she shared some of her life story … to say that she had had a tough life would be a massive understatement. Almost everything that could have gone wrong in her life had gone wrong. I was sitting there overwhelmed with sadness and anger as she shared the things that had happened or things that had been done to her. At the end of her story she said, “I know that people get deal different hands in life … I just don’t understand why all my cards have been so bad?”.
This lady wasn’t just telling me these stories so I could feel bad; or that I could understand her better. She was asking me to do some theology. (Theology simply means God talk). She was asking me if I could give a faith perspective on why these bad things happen to her? Was God punishing her? Was God looking the other way and failed to stop them happening? Was it a consequence for some sin that she had done? Was there a reason for these bad things coming to her and not others?
Last week we started our Lent journey – using these six weeks in the lead up to Easter to reflect on how Easter should challenge and change us … how Easter is transformative. Last week we explored how Easter can challenge and change the way we think about things. Romans 12:2 tells us not to blindly follow the patterns of thinking that society has but rather to let God transform our minds – help us to see things differently.
We looked at last week that while the world might tell us to make us that we are number 1, to only care about our life and our needs; Jesus tells us that true life can be found in loving God and sharing love and compassion with others. The world might tell us that productivity is the highest value … always be busy and go, go, go; but Jesus says that there is another way of thinking and that stopping and resting every now and again is good; spending time with others is good.
Today we take this idea a step further and just like my friend in my story at Yamba … and do some theology. I am going to invite us to wonder how Easter can challenge and transform not just our thinking but also our faith perspectives … or the way we see and understand God.
In our reading from Luke 13, the crowd ask Jesus to help them understand two tragic current events … Herod’s massacre in the temple and the 18 people killed when a tower collapsed on them. Both of these events are horrible … and the people wanted Jesus not to just give his opinion on what happened, but to do some theology. How do we understand these events from a faith perspective? Where is God in these events? Why did these people die?
There was a prevailing theory at the time of why bad things happen. It is a theory that we find a lot throughout the Old Testament of the bible and into the time of Jesus. This theory in very simple terms is … blessings come to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Actually, the OT understanding on blessings & suffering is slightly more nuanced that this, but people didn’t really have time for complexities … it was simpler to just say that suffering is a consequence of sin. If you are suffering, you must have done something wrong.
As I said, this thinking was throughout the Old Testament and into the gospels. For example, when Job family was killed in a terrible storm and he became sick with some illness, his friends said to him that a person “only” reaps what he sows. Therefore, Job must have secretly sinned against God.
7 “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?
Where were the upright ever destroyed?
8 As I have observed, those who plough evil
and those who sow trouble reap it.
9 At the breath of God they perish;
at the blast of his anger they are no more. JOB 3:7-9
Or we can move into the gospels and see the story of the man that was born blind. In John 9:2 Jesus disciples asked Jesus,
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”. If this man was suffering with lack of sight … they someone must have done something wrong to cause it.
So, in terms of our reading from Luke 13… those Galileans who Herod murdered and mixed their blood with the sacrifices … they must have been bad people for that to happen to them. Those 18 who had the tower fall on them must have sinned for this bad thing to happen to them. This was the prevailing theology – their understanding of God that had been taught to them. But it makes God come across as unloving, vengeful, even cruel. It this how we understand God?
Jesus pushes back against this theology, this faith perspective and offers them a different perspective.
2 Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? 3 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. 4 Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
Jesus said … do you think these people are worse sinners because this happened to them? Do you think that God was punishing them? Jesus clearly says NO. This is not the way that suffering works. Suffering cannot be always equated with God’s punishment.
Instead, Jesus said, “unless you repent, you too will all perish”. The word “repent” here is interesting. We have probably been taught that repent in Greek means “turn around” but there are two Greek works that translated repent … ἐπιστρέφω epistréphō (which means turn around but is NOT used here in Luke 13 and most other places). The Greek work in Luke 13 for repent is μετανοέω metanoéō which means change your mind, or change your thinking … or … a transformed mind or perspective!
Jesus is challenging those who are asking the “why did the tower fall” question to change their thinking, look for a different perspective.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, an Irish theologian and poet, reflecting on this passage notes the Japanese word “mu”. Based on a Buddhist practice, sometimes in response to a question a person might say “mu” which means “un-ask” or “you are asking the wrong question”. We might imagine the crowd pressing in with their “why” questions and Jesus responding with “mu” … you are asking the wrong question, you are looking at this all wrong.
Remember before when I said that the Old Testament perspective on suffering is more complex or nuanced but most people just simplified it to mean good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Maybe it might be helpful to have a look at the more nuanced answer.
Jesus (and the bible as a whole) offers us a way of living that leads to a blessed life. This does not mean a life with no suffering … but rather a full life that includes blessings.
At the same time Jesus (and the Old Testament in particular) highlights the hard truth that sometimes there are consequences of bad choices and sometimes those consequences can cause suffering. For example, if I murder someone and end up suffering in goal … that is a consequence of my bad choices.
While we understand this flow … it works flowing this way BUT it does not work backwards. IE … if a person is experiencing blessings in their life; it does not mean that they are good (or necessarily following God’s way). After all Jesus says that God send rain on both the righteous and unrighteous.
And more importantly (and I want to make this clear), if a person is experiencing suffering in their life; it does not mean that they are bad or are not following God way. Most suffering is just because bad stuff happens and most of the time that bad stuff happens randomly.
This is why Jesus said that it is NOT the people’s sin that made the tower fall on them. Suffering does not work that way. If suffering did work that way, Jesus said that towers should be falling on us all … which they are not … therefore suffering does not work that way. God was not punishing the ones who died. That is not how God works.
Jesus is challenging those who are asking the “why did the tower fall” question to change their thinking, look for a different perspective.
And in doing so Jesus shares the parable of the fig tree. Conventional understanding – in Jesus’ day and now – might want to read this parable in terms of productivity. God is like the vineyard owner who expects the fig tree to produce figs and as it is not, then chop it down. Consequences for our actions (or lack of actions in this case).
But in telling this parable Jesus is challenging us to “see things differently” or “ask the right question”. What if God is not like the vineyard owner, looking to maximize production, striking down unfruitful trees? What if God is like the gardener? What if God is the one who is willing to be patient, to remind the tree that they are worth of tender care and do whatever it so that the tree experiences the blessings of fruit?
Maybe in response to this reading instead of asking how we can be more productive in our lives, we should ask the question “what tending do we need from God so that we can flourish?”
Note also that the fig tree in the parable is growing amid a vineyard. The focus here is cultivating grapes, not figs. Maybe some people are struggling to flourish because they find themselves in fields not meant for them and expected to thrive. How do we not rush to judgements and consider the complexity of individual situations and in doing so be more gracious in our thinking?
I like these faith perspectives – but I cannot hide from how the parable also talks about the limited patience of the owner and Gardiner. Yes, compassion and care is shown so that the fig tree might flourish but that is not unlimited.
God is not willing to let us sit in a unflourishing state for too long and at some point there is point where second chances might run out, when time might run out and we experience the consequences of our unflourishness. And this is challenging to consider.
Daniel in his sermon in two weeks’ time will dig into this deeper – the tension we have between the compassion, love and grace of God and the judgement and justice of God. I think that this is another area where we might be challenged to have our perspectives transformed.
But it does raise the question … if God desires for us to be flourishing in our faith and in our lives, then what might that look like? This time next year, what extra fruit would you like to be producing? What work might God need to do, or what changes might be needed in your life or thinking for that to happen?
As I said last week, these types of transformations are not immediate but take time. This is what Lent is for. Making some space in our lives (and in our minds) for God to work and encourage and challenge and transform.
May our Lenten calling be one where we open ourselves us to the renewing of our minds, the reshaping of our perspectives, the tending to our fruitfulness so that we might experience the fullness of life that the way of Jesus brings.
Amen.