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Luke 13:1-9

Lent 3, March 23, 2025

Holy Trinity Cathedral

 

“Deserving what you get?”

 

Yesterday at the Saturday brunch, a guest got upset and threw their cup of coffee across the table.  We don’t often get angry outbreaks like this, but when they happen they are upsetting for the volunteers.  Those who help out try to treat arrivals with dignity and respect: to provide a hot meal, a warm space, and a safe community for an hour.  The Church does outreach because we believe that God has a preference for the poor, the ones far from the centre of human power and wealth.  As humans, however, we have an unspoken preference for what we think of as the deserving poor: those who are grateful for help.  And so, when someone speaks or acts with violence or selfishness, we are not as likely to think kindly.  We may judge them as makers of their own trouble.  But really, who deserves what they get?  Or is the question, who gets what they deserve?

 

There is an old idea we can call retributive justice.  It is found in many cultures and religions.  Basically, it means that good people should be rewarded in this life.  Bad people should be punished.  That would be fair. Now, we know that good and bad things happen.  Most of the time, we can even agree whether something that happens is good (for us or others) or bad (for us or others). But the struggle is to understand why, and whether we deserve it.  The trouble with the concept of retributive justice is that often we try and work the concept in reverse.  We look at the bad thing and think it has occurred because the person was bad and deserved punishment.  Or we attribute the good thing that has happened and come to the conclusion that it proves God is very happy with us.  One particular form of this is what is sometimes called “the prosperity gospel”.  If God blesses the good with material things, outward riches are the mark of inward righteousness.  That’s a creed that may be comfortable for those who have a lot in life; it doesn’t sit well with most of the rest who have little. It’s also not what Scripture says as a whole or what Jesus teaches in particular.  Especially when people ask him about why bad things happen. 

 

If God were to judge us rightly, we would all fall short.  No one is so holy that they get a pass: not the Jewish crowds that listened to Jesus, not the teachers of the law, not the disciples, not you and me.  We get a window into a couple of events that happened in Jesus’ time.  One is about execution of some Galileans.  Galileans lived in the north of Israel and had different religious practices than the people of Judea with at the Jerusalem Temple.  The question about their sin and suffering perhaps implies that Galileans were not “good” Jews like them, so they deserved the vicious reprisal from the Roman governor.  Jesus responds that those Galileans were no worse than any others to deserve such punishment.  Likewise, Jesus speaks of a local construction disaster.  The ones who died in the tower collapse were no worse than any other inhabitants of Jerusalem.  God wasn’t out to get them in particular.  Just because these people died doesn’t make them bad.  Neither does it make Jesus’ listeners good by comparison.  People don’t always get what they deserve.  And they don’t always deserve what they get.  It’s not about being deserving at all.

 

 “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (Luke 13:5). Instead of death, Jesus offers repentance as the way to life.  Repentance means turning to God’s mercy for forgiveness no matter what we have or haven’t done.  And from that point on, changing our attitude towards loving God and others as ourselves. But it’s not enough to simply refrain from doing harm or live quietly for self.  To be a human fully alive is to bring life to others.  We are made to bear fruit, like the fig tree in Jesus’ parable.  Here’s a tree planted in a vineyard.  It may be green and leafy, but it is not fulfilling its purpose if it doesn’t have any figs.  The owner wants to chop it down because it is unproductive.  But the gardener has a plan to help the tree.  First, he offers to break up the hard ground around the roots, allowing water to reach the roots better.  Then he can fertilize the soil to give it the best chance of receiving nutrients for fruiting.  The investment of time and work comes with an expectation that the tree will respond.  If the tree doesn’t naturally grow better, then it’s firewood.

 

In the parable, God is the owner of the vineyard, Jesus is the gardener, and each of us is that fig tree.   God is willing to invest in us even though we don’t deserve it.  Through Jesus’ intervention, we are each offered mercy.  However, that divine hand of forgiveness can only help if we reach out in repentance to take it.  If we think we deserve what God is offering and just take what we can get, we have missed the promise of salvation.  The fruits belong to God, not to our own efforts.  On the other hand, if we don’t think we deserve forgiveness, we cut off our life-line.  We would be like a fig tree refusing the water and nutrients that are lavished on it to restore it to health.  Our personal attitude towards repentance is the first step.  Once we recognize that we need help, that begins to change our attitude towards others.   Maybe they need God’s help too!  Humility makes us less quick to jump to judgement and a need to see a punishment for others’ sins.

 

Bad things don’t just happen to bad people.  And people aren’t good because good things happen to come their way.  We continue to struggle with the causes of suffering in this world.  But it would be wrong to always assume that an individual’s past sins led to their present condition.  Jesus promises that God doesn’t handpick people to suffer in this life because they did more wrong than others.  Suffering is not divinely inflicted.  Everyone encounters bad things, some more than others for reasons we cannot explain.  Our response to human suffering, however, is up to each of us.  That’s where it comes down to personal responsibility.  We can choose to believe in a deity that punishes or a God who wants our repentance in order to give us new life.  And we can choose to live that out through our actions from this point on.

 

The Lord knows there are people that have a long way to go in order to overcome their misconceptions about how the kingdom of heaven works.  Jesus calls us in love to repent for the sake of our souls.   We don’t get what we deserve: punishment for our sins.  We don’t deserve what we get: the forgiveness of God.  So how can we judge others except as we ourselves are judged?  Amen.