Jesus asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Luke 13:2-3
Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before?
Where did we get that idea? That wasn’t even true for Jesus.
This week’s scripture selection from the Revised Common Lectionary finds Jesus preaching and teaching on his way to Jerusalem.
Maybe the heat of the road is burning through his sandals, or maybe the crowd is beginning to smell bad, or maybe Jesus is just worn-out.
Whatever the cause, Jesus is getting grouchy.
Just a few verses earlier, you could almost hear Bobby McFerrin’s soothing percussion as Jesus crooned don’t worry, be happy.
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear,” he said reassuringly. “For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor bard, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!” Luke 12:22-23
But that was then. Now, Jesus is telling the crowds, get with the program or you’re going to hell.
A little black storm cloud has appeared over Jesus’ head.
He reminds the crowd how God deals with sinners.
“Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’” (Luke 14:4-7)
If I were preaching about Jesus’ unconditional love and infinite forgiveness for all people, these are not proof texts I would choose.
The United Church of Christ doesn’t mention the passage when it invites everyone and anyone into its congregations, no questions asked.
At first glance – even at second glance – it looks like Jesus has some serious questions about your chances of sneaking into heaven. It seems he sets conditions for his love, and his forgiveness has limits.
What is he saying? You think Bernie Madoff was bad? Not as bad as you if you don’t repent. Hitler? You’ll be his roommate in Hell if you don’t repent.
Jesus, isn’t that a little harsh?
Hell is such a horrifying concept that many of us can’t believe it exists – or, if it does exist, we can’t believe the God who loves us unconditionally would send us there.
There are even those who believe everyone, ranging from the thief who was impaled on the cross next to Jesus to Lucretia Borgia to Hitler to Ted Bundy, will be spared eternal damnation.
This consequential universalism is hard for many of us to swallow, especially by those who have been victims of murderous crimes and rely on God to be just.
At the same time, how many of us are so sinless that we would readily cast others into Hell because they don’t share our theological views? I knew many Christian missionaries who served in Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Shinto cultures who couldn’t do it.
“Every day I lived with wonderful, kind, and thoughtful non-Christians,” the daughter of a missionary to Burma once told me. “I knew beyond doubt that God was not going to send them to Hell because they didn’t accept Jesus.”
We like to preach a gospel of unconditional acceptance. When we invite people to church we like to promise God does not judge them, that God doesn’t care who they are – thieves, murderers, drug addicts, abusers, losers – God loves them anyway. And we can find many passages in scripture to back us up.
But other passages, like the one before us now, are more troubling.
In his book What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills warns us not to assume we can ever fully understand Jesus. Wills rejects that kind of presumption, and singles out the What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) faction as a particularly cheeky example.
“Can we really aspire to do what Jesus did?” Wills asks. “Would we praise a twelve-year-old who slips away from his parents in a big city and lets them leave town without telling them he is staying behind? (Luke 2:48)”
There are some things God’s son might do that shouldn’t serve as a model for our own behavior, Wills points out.
“If we could cast out devils, would we send them into a herd of pigs, destroying two thousand animals (Mark 5:13)? Some Christians place a very high value on the rights of property, yet this was a massive invasion of some person’s property and livelihood.”
Such behavior might work for Jesus, but do not try it at home.
Wills also quotes G.K. Chesterton:
“We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellant dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is … very nearly the reverse of the truth.”
In the passage before us, Jesus is showing a side of his nature we don’t like to see. We’d prefer the tender Jesus portrayed in those pastel pictures in our Sunday school classrooms, the Jesus smiling at a lamb slung casually across his shoulders as he walks gingerly through gaggles of clinging children.
But of course we know there is more to Jesus than that. According to legend, the Rev. Peter Marshall, the Scotland born pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, offended his well-heeled congregation when he described a different side of Jesus.
Peter Marshall was A Man Called Peter in the 1951 biography by his wife, Catherine Marshall, and the subject of the 1955 film of the same title. Marshall, who was also chaplain of the U.S. Senate back when the title was an honor, was a powerful preacher who achieved posthumous fame when his wife’s book became the Book-of-the-Month Club’s selection.
The sermon that offended the proper Presbyterians in Washington included these words:
We have had enough of the emaciated Christ – the pale, anemic, namby-pamby Jesus – the ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ – Perhaps we have had too much of it. Let us see the Christ of the Gospels striding up and down the dusty miles of Palestine – sun-tanned bronzed fearless. Let us see the white knuckles of the carpenter’s hand as He upset the tables of the money-changers and glared at the racketeers. Let us feel the terrific dynamic of the personality that walked clear through the lynching mob that sought to throw Him over a cliff. He strode through them, and no man laid a hand on him. That’s the Christ we ought to see. Let’s see the Christ who called a spade a spade and let the chips fall where they might. Take Jesus out of the perfumed cloisters of pious sentiment, and let Him walk the street of the city.
It is certainly no perfumed, cloistered Jesus who brings us this warning:
“Unless you repent, you will all perish.”
The theme of repentance runs like a steel thread throughout Luke’s Gospel, and it is certainly consistent with the invitation of every evangelist from Ignatius Loyola to Amy Semple McPherson to Billy Graham. In order to reap your heavenly reward, you must repent and be born again. That is the message Jesus is setting before the crowd and, if you think about it, the message is anything but arbitrary. The collapse of the tower of Siloam that killed 18 random people was arbitrary to be sure: but Jesus assures the crowd that the same fate will be in store for all of them if they don’t repent.
This is an important insight for people who believe God uses disasters and diseases to punish the sinful. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson both declared the AIDS epidemic was God’s punishment on sinners, but Jesus makes it clear that catastrophes like a plague or the collapse of a building are not willed by God. Punishment, illness, and suffering are not the result of sin but the fate of all unrepentant peoples.
Jesus’ call to repentance must be taken seriously, of course, because it opens the door to eternal life.
But the issue of whether that door will be closed arbitrarily on unrepentant sinners or persons of other faiths is open to question. Jesus makes this clear when the fruitless fig tree in the parable is reprieved.
Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’” (Luke 13:7-9)
The parable suggests God is willing to be patient. And, as one commentator on the passage writes, God has yet to slam shut the door to salvation. “In other words,” states Preaching the New Common Lectionary*, “God’s mercy is still talking to God’s judgment, and on that conversation hangs our salvation.”
That’s why many Christians, including members of the United Church of Christ, wear a red or rainbow colored pin in the shape of a comma. It means one should never put a period where God has put a comma.
That message applies to all us sinners, repentant or otherwise:
God is still speaking.
* Preaching the New Common Lectionary, Year C, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, by Fred B, Craddock, John H. Hayes, Carl R, Halladay, Gene M. Tucker, Abingdon, 1989.
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