Scripture: Luke 13:1-9; 1 Corinthians 10:1-5; Matthew 7:1-5 Series: Lent
Lent calls us to turn our impaired, judgmental gaze away from others and inward to ask ‘where is the fruit?’ — discovering we cannot bear fruit or save ourselves, but only Jesus can, and our God seeks rather than destroys us.
Illustrations: anesthesia-aesthesis-etymology, speck-and-log, judges-scoring-competitions, glengarry-glen-ross, jesus-galilean-accent, judging-others-judgments, lost-sheep-prodigal-return
March 23
A Sign
“I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.” 1 Corinthians 10:1-5 NRSV
“At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He 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. Or 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?’ 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 13:1-9 NRSV
I’m always fascinated with words and the history of words: the study of etymology, where a word comes from. Sometimes there are words that are so common that we don’t think about where they come from. For me, one of these is anesthesiology. There is also anesthesia and anesthesiologists, the doctors who come in and knock you out to give you the gas or the epidural.
I remember when I was in seminary and I came to the realization that anesthesia and aesthetics have the exact same root. It’s the same word. It comes from the same Greek word aesthesis, one of the ways of which to translate is judgment. Aesthetics is the study of judgment. Anesthesia or anesthesiology is the study of a lack of judgment; how to make someone not judge: the study of not judging. That’s why anesthesia keeps you from judging the pain in your body, whether that pain comes from childbirth or a broken arm or a root canal: anesthesia uses methods to impair your judgment for a medical purpose, for reasons that your judgment needs to be impaired.
There are non-medical ways of impairing our judgment, as well; limiting our judgment, making it more difficult for us to see and understand ourselves and our world around us. In fact, a lot of the world today are tools of impairing our judgment. I’m sure we could all list things in our lives that cause this, that cause our judgment to be impaired. One thing I think we often miss is that judging others is a way of impairing our own judgment. It takes our attention away from ourselves.
Jesus said a lot of really smart and wise things. One of my favorite things he ever said was: do not look for the speck in your neighbor’s eye, and miss the log in your own. When we fixate on the errors of our neighbors, we can be blinded to our own. Judgment itself has a difficult meaning in English. There’s a judge who sits in a court who makes a ruling of judgment. There are judges in MMA or boxing matches, who score the fights. Or at the Olympics who score the gymnastics routine. There’s the judgment of a piece of art. There’s also judgmentalism, which is not a good thing.
If someone says, “Oh, you’re being so judgmental. I love it!” This is not a positive description of a person. Judgmentalism is judging for the sake of judging.
The more common Greek word for judgment is krine. This is the judgement that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 7 when he says, judge not, lest ye be judged. This is the critical form of judgement but it is not the only one.
As humans, at a base level, we are judging all the time. We judge the world around us. We’re judging the pain levels of our bodies. Are we in pain or not? And this is why anesthesia gets us back to Luke chapter 13.
Luke 13 starts with this passage about other people. Folks bring up to Jesus some scandalous things that have been going on. Pontius Pilate has done something dramatic: he killed 18 Galileans while they were preparing the Passover sacrifice. Any other sacrifice only takes place at the temple, so it has to be Passover. Jesus is also a Galilean to the folks near Jerusalem. Nazareth is near Galilee and the first miracles took place around the Sea of Galilee. Jesus most likely spoke with a Galilean accent, which may be hard for some of us to imagine. I think most of us imagine Jesus talking to us with a voice similar to our own. To many of the people in his time, Jesus was a healer or miracle worker from Galilee and hearing what terrible things that Pilate, the agent of Caesar, was doing to Jesus’s people should have riled him up with righteous anger.
“Jesus, did you hear about the Galileans whose blood got mixed with their sacrifices?”
They were killed while sacrificing the lamb, so the bloods were mixed. People are murdered and the sacrifice is defamed. The people are making a judgment about Caesar, about Jesus, about justice, but their judgment is impaired.
Jesus is already on his way to Jerusalem. They don’t know what is going on.
They are angry at Pilate and they want Jesus to have the same anger. They see Jesus as a revolutionary of sorts who is about to take on the wicked Romans and who should be as outraged as they are about the actions of Rome. Instead, Jesus is outraged by anyone’s death. He compares the people killed by the Romans to those who died by an accident in Jerusalem when the tower fell.
They want Jesus to affirm their judgment their aesthetic choice. They want Jesus to be with them on this. And he’s like, “Nah, what they are doing is not good but you need to look at yourself.”
Then he tells a parable about a fig tree.
“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.’ ””
The focus is really about fruitfulness and judging the fruitfulness of a thing. Again we come back to judgment and a lack of judgment. How does Jesus judge and how should we judge? How much fruitlessness do we tolerate before we chop down a tree that is sucking up all of the water in our yard?
What Jesus points out here and elsewhere, is that judgment is always at least a two-way street. More often, though, it is a three or four-way street. Judgment is not just between me and you but between me and you and others looking on. Judgment does not take place in a vacuum. We judge the judgments of others. “I can’t believe they thought this was a good restaurant?! I can’t believe they thought this was a good movie?!”
Judging their judgments is, in fact, something easier than judging another person. And in this, like in so many other things, we are impaired. We are anesthetized. We think we know what we are doing but we are confused and mistaken.
The fig tree doesn’t seem as much like a parable as the other parables of Jesus, but Luke introduces it as such. As a parable, a figurative story, we must read it carefully and also read into it. Who are we in the parable? Are we the master, the gardener, or the fig tree?
The overarching question is: where is the fruit?
On the surface, this seems like a results oriented MBA sort of parable. What outputs are we getting? Is our market share growing or shrinking?
It could remind me of David Mamet’s great play, Glengarry Glenross, about salesmen in Chicago, which was turned into a movie in the nineties. There are three salesmen. What are they selling? We don’t really know, but the corporate guy comes in to tell them what they could win if they sell the most.
As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.
Any time stakes are involved, I am more concerned about third place than first. I am more concerned about being the fruitless tree that is chopped down than the fruit-filled one heavy with produce. It can be tempted to read it in a zero-sum way to think that Jesus is going to chop me down if I don’t produce anything soon. Sure, I could win a set of steak knives, but I’ll most likely be fired.
With all the parables, though, the context is important. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He knows what he must do. He knows that we cannot save ourselves. If it were merely a question of optimizing human fruit production, he would be a different god entirely. The mission of Jesus is different.
On his way to Jerusalem, he has been told about the people killed in Galilee. The people come up to him wanting a judgment on Pilate. He undercuts their point by speaking about other folk killed in Jerusalem. He does that to take our gaze from others and the lives of others and our judgment over the lives of others, whether they be righteous or wretched.
Jesus responds with a parable that turns the gaze inward. No matter where you find yourself in the parable, the question: where is the fruit?, is applicable.
Where is the fruit?
The fruit is not salvation here. Remember, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to save us. The fruit is holiness. The fruit is the glory of God. The fruit is love. The fruit is sacrificial love. The fruit is loving our enemies. The fruit is actually loving our friends.
What Caesar does matters in that his rule impacts the lives of people, but Caesar and the rule of Caesar should not exhaust our gaze. Our judgement is clouded when we focus solely on the actions of others and when we are blind to our own actions. We focus on the speck and ignore the log.
Looking inward doesn’t save us. It shows us that we can’t save ourselves. We need Jesus to remove the log. We need Jesus to bear fruit. We need Jesus. When Pilate leaves, another Roman will return and rule and control the lives of the people. Replacing Caesar will not make life worthwhile. As Paul said in our reading from 1 Corinthians, even the Hebrews who immediately saw the glory of God in the wilderness and through the Red Sea, and yet it still wasn’t enough. The miracles weren’t enough. The sacrifice wasn’t enough. On our own, they couldn’t bear fruit and we can’t bear fruit. We need Jesus.
(Almost Christian)
Lent is a time to be willing to ask the question “where is the fruit?” And to not be afraid of the judgement. We don’t need to numb ourselves from looking inward for any judgement here is temporary.
As we say in the creed, Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead. Ultimate judgment is not ours to make, on others nor on ourselves.
Ours is the simple question for ourselves: where is the fruit? If we don’t find it, we shouldn’t point to the lack of fruit of other people, but start or restart doing the things that bear fruit: study the scriptures, pray when we aren’t expected to, fast, give our time, give our money, invite, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, share your faith. These actions are the fertilizer but the fruit only comes from Jesus and our good God will not chop us down. Like a shepherd whose sheep is lost, our God will seek us and find us. Like a father whose son has forsaken him, our God will celebrate our return.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.