Third Sunday of Lent: March 23, 2025
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Readings: Exodus 3:1-15 | 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 | Luke 13:1-9 | Psalm 63:1-8
This week’s gospel reading comes from a section of Luke that contains Jesus’ teaching on the topic of repentance. In the interaction between Jesus and those who bring him the report of the slaughtered Galileans and the Jews crushed by the tower, we are given a sense of urgency regarding the need for repentance. Jesus insists that the time is short, that now is the time to repent, now is the time to change our ways, to turn back, to turn around. In the course of his teaching, Jesus debunks the notion that suffering is a sign of divine wrath, applying the urgent need to repent even to those who seem blessed in this life. All have sinned, Jesus insists. All have a need to resist evil.
In our present moment, I suspect we hear this reading from Luke differently than his original audience. I suspect that many of us have moved away from theologies that suggest a causal link between suffering and sin. Perhaps we never held those theologies to begin with. We don’t see poverty, cancer diagnoses, natural disasters, or the impact of war on innocent civilians as a statement of God’s wrath. The questions of the masses brought to Jesus are not our questions at all. Instead, when we look around, when we observe the suffering in our families, our communities, our country, our world – I suspect we ask different questions: why the evil seem to prosper, why the powerful remain protected, why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, why the innocent suffer at the hands of tyrants, why bad things always seem to happen to good people. Why must we, the faithfully gathered here, listen to Jesus’ urgent plea to repent, when we are not the ones wreaking havoc in our world?
Perhaps we can answer this question by connecting the reading of this passage to the context of Lent in which we hear it. This is, after all, a season of repentance, a season to prepare our hearts for the Easter celebration of resurrection, to renew our faith and practice, to embody more faithfully and more courageously the reconciliation God offers us in Jesus Christ. This is a season in which we are called to examine our lives and our hearts, to turn once again to the loving reach of a God who meets us where we are, whose Spirit enfolds us in an embrace of transformation, and whose Holy Child shows us the way. This is a good connection to make, and one we would do well not to take lightly. But I wonder if there isn’t something more for us in this Gospel reading.
In her reflections on this week’s reading from Luke, author Debie Thomas appeals to Padraig O Tuama’s book, In the Shelter: Finding Welcome in the Here and Now. She describes his use of the Buddhist concept of mu, or “un-asking.” “If someone asks a question that’s too small, too flat, too confining, Ó Tuama writes, you can answer with this word mu, which means, ‘Un-ask the question, because there’s a better question to be asked.’ A wiser question, a deeper question, a truer question. A question that expands possibility, and resists fear.” Thomas goes on to suggest that this practice of un-asking is at the heart of this week’s Gospel.[i]
The people who come to Jesus want to know why – why did this tragedy happen? And, if we’re honest, I suspect that many of us wrestle regularly with this question – especially in our current context. It is in our nature to want answers to the why questions.
We are creatures who inherently desire to make meaning of what is happening in our lives and in the world around us. And when things happen that don’t make sense, that we can’t explain, it can be easy to get caught up in cycles of anxiety and fear as we seek to spin a narrative that puts everything neatly in its place and to draw connections of causality. We may not operate with a worldview that connects sin and suffering the same way that Jesus’ listeners did, but we are still plagued with an innate desire to find an explanation for suffering. This desire has led people across the generations to posit theories of suffering, of why God allows such tragic and terrible things to befall us humans. We want to know, why?
In our reading from Luke, Jesus seems unconcerned with this question. Yes, he does dispel the notion that suffering is the result of sin. But, strangely to our contemporary ears, Jesus also doesn’t address the kinds of questions we are wrestling with today. He does not use this encounter to speak of the evil of power, to rail against the violence of tyranny, or to denounce the machinations of imperial rule. Instead, he calls his listeners to repent, to un-ask the question. And, then, he tells them a story about a landowner, a gardener, and a fig tree.
For those of us who are driven by a need to articulate a theory of everything, Jesus’ recitation of this parable in this moment is disarming. What does a fruitless fig tree have to do with the reports of mass murder and tragic death? And, once again, we are confronted with Jesus’ response: mu, un-ask the question. There is a better question to be asked. By telling this story, Jesus invites us to sit in the unresolved questions of why, to enter a story rather than seek a platitude. The parable itself invites a host of new questions that probe, that expose, that draw us into mystery rather than certainty.
Many of us have been trained in the practice of listening to parables. We have been taught – either indirectly or directly – that part of the art of listening to parables is entering into the story. We are taught to identify characters and plot twists with the point that the parable is intended to make. In the case of our reading today, the fig tree is easily identified as the sinner in need of repentance before it is too late. But the beauty of parables is that there is often not one, single reading that makes sense of it all. There’s not one, single interpretation that negates all others. And so, parables offer us a way of un-asking the questions, of entering the story from multiple perspectives. In many ways, it is an exercise in empathy, a way to hear the story from multiple points of view. And, in the end, parables are always invitations to change, to repent, to embrace transformation.
Last Tuesday, I met with the vestry for our monthly meeting. We used this parable as our opening devotional, listening to it with our community in mind. We spoke about the various characters and conditions named in the story. We wondered about the insistence to cut down the fig tree, about what it might mean for a plant to “waste soil,” about why aerating the soil around the tree is necessary. We wondered who we, as a parish, are in the story. In the course of our conversation, we saw ourselves in each of the various characters and conditions of the parable: the landowner wanting to rid the vineyard of dead plants; the gardener seeking to save the plant through cultivation; the fig tree in need of tending; the soil in need of loosening and nutrients.
I was struck most by this last entrance into the story. Someone asked why the soil needed to be broken up and Katrina Hamilton educated us: if the soil around the tree or plant is too compacted, the roots are incapable of depth and breadth. The plant will not get the water or nutrients it needs to bear fruit, and so the soil needs to be broken up to allow for the roots to stretch, to find adequate water, to be fed by the rich soil, so that the plant or tree can produce its intended fruit. In the end, though, we cannot force a tree to bear fruit. All we can do is cultivate the environment in which it grows.
And this has been the invitation of this parable that I keep coming back to this week. The parable invites us into the messy practice of cultivation. We are invited to get our hands dirty, to break up the compacted soil in which we are planted, to mix in fertilizer, so that our roots might find the nutrients it needs to produce the fruit of our repentance. The beauty of the metaphor of the fig tree is that the tree will produce fruit if given the proper environment and care – it is inherent to the nature of a fig tree to produce figs. Likewise, it is inherent in our nature to produce the fruit of repentance: the fruit of radical and fearless welcome, the fruit of reconciliation and transformation, the fruit of profound love for the stranger.
The why questions can paralyze us. They can lead to soil compaction, to an inability of our roots to spread deep and to find the proper nutrients. They can stifle our growth and our ability to produce good fruit. Jesus is inviting us to look beyond the questions of why to the practice of patience, to risk the hard and messy work of cultivation. Because it is here that we will find the transformative power of the Spirit moving like sap through our veins, producing a harvest of righteousness, justice, and love. May it be so. Amen.
[i] Debie Thomas, “Ask a Better Question,” https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2130-ask-a-better-question