Luke 13:1-9
March 14,2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Our neighbors whose house is just below us planted an apple tree close to our property line. This area was thick with ivy, unmanaged red plum trees and to be honest, from where I sit, is an area that is far from my sight. It’s the last section of my yard that I would spend time to weed and prune. But in the middle of this tangled up brush, our neighbors planted an apple tree.
Last year, I decided to bring some order to this area of our landscape. I pulled away the ivy. I planted some ground covering. I yanked out the blackberry vines. And topping this whole area off, our neighbor hired some guys to prune the towering plum trees so that this scrawny apple tree would finally get some sunlight and a chance to bear fruit.
I am told that apple trees don’t bear fruit for a year or so. So far our neighbors’ apple tree has borne no fruit. It may finally get some blossoms this year. Unless this apple tree bears some apples, it will be cut down to make way for something more productive.
Here’s another example. Most of us have been students one time or another in our lives. To succeed in school, you need to be productive. When we take a new class, the teacher would pass out the syllabus and go over the course requirements. There would be readings, exams and class discussions. And there would be a paper or two to see if we have understood how the new knowledge affected our thinking. Almost invariably, there would be someone who would say, “Does this mean that we have to do all of these things on this syllabus?”
There are requirements to meet in order to succeed in class. Stay within these requirements and you would be fine. Transgress these rules, and you’ll be in big trouble.
Just like our neighbors’ apple tree after it has been in the ground for awhile, it needs to bear some fruit. If it doesn’t, you would cut it down and put something else in. Unless, you’re fulfilling the requirements and making progress on your class, you would not get a passing grade. If you’re not doing well in a class, you mind as well drop the class and spend your time on another class where you might be more successful. There’s a limit to the things in life.
Limits in Life
Where would life be without limits? There are credit limits on our credit cards. There are time limits on our newspaper coupons. Warranty limits to our electronic purchases. My four new Bridgestone tires have a 45,000 mile warranty. You have only a semester to complete all your class requirements. Our neighbors’ apple tree has about three years to bear some fruit or it would be cut down.
But when it comes to Jesus, Jesus was not good in setting down limits. One day they asked him about forgiveness. Should we forgive, “seven times?” They knew that Jesus was big on forgiveness and would never accept once or twice. So they said, “Seven times, how do you like those numbers, Jesus?”
And Jesus replied, “Forgive seven times seventy times,” in other words, without limits.
Jesus told other stories. A shepherd searches for the one lost sheep. How long did he search for his sheep? 24 hours and then he quits? No, Jesus said the shepherd searches for the one lost sheep until he finds it. This is limitless searching.
In our Scripture for this morning, we have a parable from Jesus. There was an owner who had planted a fig tree in his yard and for three years, he came to this fig tree to look for fruit. So he told his gardener to cut the tree down and make room for something that would be more productive. “Why waste good soil?” the owner said. But the gardener said to the owner, “Let me dig around its roots to loosen up the soil and let me put some manure to fertilize it. Let’s hope that next year, the fig tree would give us some Fig Newtons. But if it doesn’t have fruit next year, then we can cut it down.
In this parable, Jesus is saying to us that there is still time. The time limits are not over yet. The warranties have not expired. This is not a story about getting three strikes and you’re out like what we have in California. It’s not a story about God who is punishing us for our sins but instead, it’s about a merciful God who loves us and forgives us. He tells us that there is still time for you and for me.
Times of Tragedies
At the beginning of our text for today, we see some followers of Jesus coming to him to tattle on the Galileans. The Galileans were offering sacrifices at the temple when they were killed by Pilate. They seem to be saying to Jesus, “Surely these Galileans had sinned and were deserving of their fate.” But Jesus doesn’t indulge them by discussing the sins of the Galileans, but instead he tells these followers, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”
Then Jesus mentions the death of eighteen people when the tower of Siloam, a most likely part of the outer wall of the city of Jerusalem, fell on them. It’s not too difficult for us to think about what happened on September 11, 2001 when the Twin Towers collapsed killing thousands of innocent people in New York. Jesus said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?”
It’s clear that neither the Galileans nor the eighteen Jerusalem residents expected to die. It was unforeseen. They had no time to repent or change their ways. They didn’t have anymore time. But in each of these incidents, Jesus didn’t allow his followers to debate whether those who perished were any more sinners than they were and therefore deserved their fate. Jesus refocused their attention on themselves. In both incidents, Jesus said to them, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Whether they are incidents in the Bible or current events in our time, tragedies of cosmic proportions sometime happen. Like the followers, we like to figure out whether or not these people may have done something to deserve their fate. To that perennial question of crime and punishment, we have no satisfactory answer. But what we do have and what the followers of Jesus heard is that Jesus is calling us to repent. And God is still giving us time to do so.
Still Time
One of the most inspiring parts of our ministry together at FCBC is when people come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior. We might be tempted to say that Baptism is only for the young people. It’s too late for me. I should have learned about the Bible stories when I was a kid. But now I’m over 40 and it’s too late for me now.
But Jesus said, “Let me dig around you and put some manure on you.” There is still time for you to learn the Bible and for you to come to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
Maybe you are saying to yourself, “I have been a faithful husband and a dedicated father. I did what was expected of me to earn a living and put food on the table, clothes on the kids, and a roof over our heads.” But during these long years of making a living, you have grown away from God. And now you are wondering what is going to happen when your work on earth is truly done.
Jesus said, “Let me dig around you and loosen up those tightly wound roots that has been like that for such a long time and let me put some manure on you.” There is still time for you to continue to be that faithful husband and dedicated father as well as a follower of Jesus.
Behind the motivation for Jesus’ followers to ask Jesus about the deaths of the Galileans and the eighteen Jerusalem residents was their own self-pride. They were confident that these people must have done something wrong to deserve their fate. They wanted to hear from Jesus an explanation for these unfortunate events so that they can say, “Why should we repent? We have not done anything wrong.”
Jesus did not give into their desire to self-elevate themselves to be better than the Galileans or the eighteen Jerusalem residents who perished. God is not a heavenly bookkeeper that checks off against the name of an individual what they have done that is good and subtracts blessings when they have failed to live up to God’s expectations. But instead, Jesus refocuses their questions on them. “Don’t worry about what may have happened to someone else. Look at yourselves. You need to repent.”
Self-pride is something that we can all identify with. Our ability to transcend ourselves and our world as human beings causes us to potentially see ourselves as infinite. We have this pride that overcomes our need for humility. We turn away from God believing that we have something more important to say than God. We become self-centered.
Paul Tillich says it this way, “turning toward one’s self as the center of one’s self and one’s world.” And for this we need forgiveness.
Jesus said, “Let me dig around you and free you of your self-pride and put some good smelling manure on you.” There is still time for you to repent of the idea that you can earn the grace of God by virtue of your own merits.
God’s Love & Our Responsibility
From this passage, we are tempted to characterized God for either being the all-loving God who would wait forever to forgive us and the judgmental God who is demanding righteousness now and ready to punish us for our sins. Both of these images of God are found here. In God, both authentic love and faithful responsibility, gospel and law, are two sides of the same God.
Both judgment and grace flow out of God’s overwhelming love for us. Without grace, words of judgment serve only to beat us down further into the quagmire of our humanity. But words of grace without words of judgment also lift us beyond the need for salvation. We need both sides of God to fully understand what God expects from us and what our response to God’s commands and expectations of us to be.
When we explore Jesus’ parable of the fig tree, we can understand the purpose behind Jesus’ announcement of judgment. Jesus confronts our sins not out of vengeance but out of love. Sin matters profoundly to God. He cares for us so compassionately that when we are like the barren fig tree, he would give us another chance to bear fruit. But God’s love also has firm boundaries—you need to bear fruit. You need to complete your course requirements to pass. God is willing to wait a bit longer for us to try again. And the time to start setting down healthy roots to draw the necessary nutrients to blossom and eventually to have fruit is now. To think that the matter can be dealt with in our own good time is to trivialize our need, misjudge the seriousness of God’s love and to possibly court disaster.
As friends and parents, we have heard ourselves saying to our loved ones, “I’m saying this to you because I love you.” We never like to tell someone some honest truth knowing that it may come across being judgmental. But when we do that, we do this out of love for the welfare of our friend or a loved one. When Jesus spoke to the disciples as he did, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did,” he was confronting them out of a genuine love to save.
As human beings, we will always have the propensity to believe that we have earned the grace of God by virtue of our own merit. This is the sin that we need to repent. Our challenge is to accept that God loves us, accepts us and offers us continuous forgiveness and grace. God does so not because we have earned God’s forgiveness but because God is God.
This does not mean that there are no consequences. In the absence of repentance, there will be war and rumors of war that divide nations against nations. There would be violence and the fear of violence we create against each other. There would be unexplained tragedies and the threat of terrorism that sadden us. But God does not cause any of these things to happen to us because God has determined that we are in need of punishment. But instead they are consequences of the unrepentant human state that we all share.
Even a fig tree that has borne no fruit for three years is offered a chance to bear fruit before being cut down. A bit of extra attention in the form of fertilizer and water might make a difference, and the tree would produce next year. What did the tree do to earn that chance? Nothing. What made the gardener willing to take the time to give it another chance? Jesus Christ as the gardener isn’t ready to give up on it yet..
The second chance that the fig tree got and the second chances that we all have; come exclusively from God’s deep love and grace given freely to us. There is still time for us to repent from our sins and to begin bearing fruit by living the lives that God has planned for us as Christ’s disciples.
Let us pray.
Gracious Lord God, you are patient with us, wanting none of us to perish, but for all to come to repentance. Thank you for the time that you give us to change and to become transformed in a new relationship with you as our Lord and Savior in Christ Jesus. Remind us that we are all sinners and are in need of forgiveness. Amen.