Jesus and the Front Page

Text: Luke 13:1-9

When Jesus began his ministry he proclaimed that he had come to seek out the lost and make the blind see and the lame walk and set the captives free. And then he went around doing all of those things to make sure people understood that he is not some novelty that will be the talk of the town one week and forgotten the next. His actions were meant to show what God’s kingdom is like here on earth. He wanted those who heard him and witnessed his work to turn away from running after what is not real and true and run instead toward the abundant life that God wants for them - what God wants for all of us. 

We call that salvation, and God offers it freely and without our having done anything to deserve it - we call that grace - but the gift of salvation has to be accepted, and acceptance doesn’t just mean loving Jesus in your heart. It doesn’t even mean trying not to sin. It means being transformed, realigning your life away from shallow vanities and toward the values Jesus has been making real, values that are centered on love, and to act on those values. Because love is an action, not just a feeling.

The people who follow him or encounter him as he makes his way to Jerusalem, which is where we are in the story, respond to Jesus in a variety of ways. Some turn away, some beg for mercy, some try to test him. They all are looking for some kind of response from him, whether from suspicion, or curiosity, or desperation.

Today, they ask him to comment on current events - a couple of headlines from the local news - a state-sponsored massacre of faithful people while they were offering sacrifices in the Temple and a tragic accident where a tower on the city walls fell on innocent bystanders. They want him to explain what all this has to do with God. The popular belief of the day, and sadly this belief has persisted among some, was that if something bad happened to someone, it was because they were sinners who deserved God’s retribution. After all, if God is responsible for all that happens in the world, then a calamity must be the result of human sin.

Without getting into theology (that God’s sovereignty leaves room for the freedom of both humans and the created order - and indeed, for God), Jesus dismisses their questions. God does not arbitrarily decide to punish some people for their sins while sparing others. After all, we are all sinners, as much as we would like to escape that designation. And we are all going to die, as much as we would like to escape that, too. 

But it is death, not God, that is capricious. Death can come while you are engaged in a religious ritual. Death can come because you are standing beneath a wall. Whether death is caused by brutality or by accident, it’s not God’s doing. But when death does come, we will all have to stand before our Maker. 

Like his predecessor John the Baptist, Jesus went around urging repentance. Not the “I’m sorry” kind of repentance, although that’s a good start, but the repentance that is shown by a grateful reordering of your life in response to being found or healed or set free, a response to being restored in either body or soul. When you truly understand what you have been given, you don’t persist in a shallow life chasing after vanities. You don’t just stop and feel good because you have been treated with love and shown mercy. You go and do likewise. You go and treat others with love and you go and show mercy to others. That’s what repentance is.

To illustrate, Jesus tells the story of the fig tree that was not bearing fruit, and thus destined for destruction. The gardener asks the owner to give the tree another chance, to give the gardener time to keep on tending to the tree - and then if it still doesn’t bear good fruit, the owner can cut it down. This is a reminder that if life is fragile and death is capricious, maybe we don’t let the window for transformation close before we get around to reorienting our lives, before we get around to bearing good fruit in a world that is starving for it.

Lent is a time to engage in self-examination. We start the season with the ritual of receiving ashes on our foreheads to remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. The point of it is not to go around being morose about the reality of our mortality but to give ourselves a check up. Do we remember that God is ridiculously generous to us? that God will search for us when we are lost instead of cutting us loose because we went the wrong way? that God wants nothing more than for us to have a life that overflows with every good thing? And to feel that we are loved even when we don’t feel or act like we are lovable? that God doesn’t expect perfection, just faithfulness?

According to William Wordsworth “trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.” We are born bringing God’s glory into the world and we are meant to show God’s glory to the world as long as we live, through the way that we live. But we forget, we wander off, we jump on whatever bandwagon comes along, we become blind to beauty and deaf to the love song that God sings to us every day. We look around and see only destruction and do not see God’s glory being shown through those who amid the destruction are binding up wounds, holding the hands of the grieving, standing up for those who are suffering, sheltering the stranger. 

We don’t have to wait until we have reached some state of perfection before we pluck up the courage to do the same. The beauty of our life in God is that every day we live we get another chance.