Sermon for March 23, 2025 - The Third Sunday of Lent
Why? Why did this happen? Why did it happen to me? Why did it happen to her? Why?
It is a question I have heard often during one summer, as I made my daily rounds at at a hospital in downtown in Phoenix, Arizona. There in my role as a chaplain intern, this question would predictably find its way into many rooms, onto the lips of many patients and their family members. There is a painful urgency in the need to know why we suffer.
Is it because of a flaw or a fault at the root of the situation – of every situation? Is it because the people who suffered deserved it? Is it because I deserved it?
Does it have to do with the complex systems in which we are all embedded: the sinful actions or inactions of powerful people; the structural violence to which whole societies become desensitized, with human lives as casualties?
Is it simply that humans are imperfect, fragile, and mortal? Or because the created order is simply larger and more mysterious than human lives and deaths alone? Or simply because tragic accidents have no explanation?
These diverse hypotheses would sometimes vie for attention; some felt plausible, and others felt unhelpful. But my role there was not to seek explanations. Rather, it was to bring my wholehearted listening presence to this suffering and to seek alongside my patients an open space where God could breathe a breath of life and peace where we frail creatures can find none in our own strength.
In today’s passage from Luke, we really hear two passages with a thematic hinge. In the first, we hear a dialogue between a common, human understanding of suffering and sin – and the understanding of these things revealed in Jesus. And in the second, we hear another dialogue: between a common, human understanding of God – and the God revealed in Jesus. Both passages begin from where we so often find ourselves – trapped in a dead end -- and gently introduce a corrective that expands our vision and liberates us to more clearly behold the God of love and possibility.
In the first section of the passage, Jesus intuits a question on the part of his listeners: Why? Why did it happen to them? Those Galileans who died so brutally at the hands of Pilate; and those who died so suddenly under the rubble of that fallen tower – surely, they deserved it? surely there was a flaw or a fault at the root of the situation? Surely it was their sin?
Jesus – this man who magnetized crowds with his full, generous, trustworthy presence – lays their distracted theory to rest. No. Those who suffered these things are no better than you, and no worse.
But unless you repent, he says, you will all perish as they did.
These words cut through the question, “Why did this happen?” These words level the ground between those who suffer and those who observe from a safe distance. Facing squarely the reality of suffering and death, but on very different footing, Jesus’ words also make space for a corresponding question: “How will I live or act in response – today and now?” In the language of the church, how will you repent – how will you turn, change, adopt a larger view that reconnects you with God’s flow of larger Life?
This, too, was a question I heard asked – spoken in many ways-- by patients who were finding the courage to face the present moment and its suffering as it was, not as they wished it were. These were people for whom suffering, or the suffering of their loved ones, seemed to stir depths of truth and meaning in response to life’s purpose. Responses like: I don’t have forever. Our time here is limited. I will make the most of the days I have. I want to let go of my resentment. I will stop blaming myself or anybody else. I want to forgive and be forgiven. Now I know that Love is all that really matters. And, one of my favourites: I can’t feel it, but I trust it: God is present and at work around me.
These moments of luminous clarity were so sacred to witness and honour, just as Moses took off his sandals before the luminous clarity of that bush there in the wilderness; the bush that blazed with fire but was not consumed.
It is with eyes attuned to this hidden potential that I began to gaze upon all the patients I visited. In this was a clear invitation to practice seeing differently: seeing more like the gardener in the second half of our passage, who sees the hidden potential in every situation that seems outwardly barren.
I read this parable of the barren fig tree as a dialogue between a common, human understanding of God – and the God revealed to us in Jesus. Like all parables, it does its work in us through the interplay of many possible meanings all at once: it’s a plausible dialogue between a landowner and a gardener; it has long been interpreted as a dialogue between God the Father and God the Son; it can be seen more broadly as a dialogue between God’s long-suffering justice and God’s persevering compassion. We can read it as a dialogue between parts of ourselves, including our own perceived fruitlessness, or a dialogue about our basic posture toward seemingly impossible situations or relationships. Part of its power is that the parable is left unresolved, open-ended: we are not privy to whether or not the tree bears fruit or is cut down. This parable opens onto a horizon line that turns our gaze back to that question: “How will I live or act – today and now – in response?”
Like the question, “Why did this happen?” the response “Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” is a sensible, outcome-oriented posture. It’s an orientation toward the past that wants to interrogate why potential has gone unrealized and its bearing on our present experience of lack. If this is a familiar response to you, perhaps you can imagine how this posture might bleed into our experience of God and our interpretation of the parable: a God who comes often in the guise of a task-master; one who is primarily concerned with what we haven’t done, how we have failed to measure up. Or, seen a slightly different way, a God who grieves the lack of fruit growing where it ought to grow: it’s in the middle of a garden, for goodness' sake.
What Jesus does here is so subtle and illustrates how gently but powerfully he seeks to introduce the open space, the open door, the broader horizon into every situation we see as barren, impossible, or fruitless. He comes to us – us landowners with our landowning gods -- as the gardener. A gardening god comes to convince us with another perspective: “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. If not, then you can cut it down.” In other words, maybe this tree has more potential hidden beneath its outwardly barren reality. Maybe that potential is simply waiting for the right moment to come to fruition, under conditions that are conducive to growth. This is an orientation toward the horizon of future possibility, rather than past failure. It’s a perspective introduced by a God less concerned with “Why?” than with “What if?”
But what do we make of that last concession: “But if not, you can cut it down”? This would seem to leave room for the foreclosure of possibility, for a moment that may yet come when the possibility of change, life, and growth are no longer open. Then the cutting down, if it comes, would seem to be a punishment for the failure to fruit. This is one received interpretation of much scriptural imagery of trees and axes – and its never good news for the tree. This line of thought has its own integrity, since as the Psalmist writes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Holy fear of dire consequences can motivate us to turn or change, the turning or changing of repentance. But that entry into a larger view – the other dimension of repentance that restores the flow of larger Life – requires something more than fear. “Fear is the beginning of wisdom” … which implies that it can only take us so far. For the long haul, it takes love. And yet: Love honours our agency, our consent, our capacity to choose; in other words, our freedom. The gardening God of the parable is Love acting in service of that freedom, a Love that goes to any length possible to convince us that change, life, and growth are possible: in other words, that Love will win. I believe the gardener of Life knows how the story will end (“If it bears fruit, well and good”) but honours the reality that, based on the information at our disposal, we often cannot imagine such a triumph.
Rowan Williams writes that the resurrection of Christ is “the open door at the heart of every situation.” In Lent, we practice the way of repentance as preparation for Jesus’ final journey: a journey through the heart of our suffering in order to show us, personally and in the flesh, that open door. The luminous clarity of true repentance bestows the larger view to which we are called, by a God with whom all things are possible.
