Repent! (and Move Past your White Guilt)
Luke 13:1-9
Luke 13:1-9
We find Jesus in a pretty wound up state this week in our passage. This section comes at the end of a long set of teachings, so if this was a sermon, you could see it as the crescendo to the ending. It starts with a question about some current events that the questioners would like Jesus to comment on. Jesus essentially waves them off, and directs them back to his message. You need to repent. Jesus then brings up and dismisses another current event, just to emphasize his point. You need to repent.
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 round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.
He concludes with a story about a man who is convinced not to cut down his fig tree by a gardener. This story is a little interesting by itself because Matthew and Mark both have similar fig tree stories. Luke is the only story of three that is a parable. In the other two it is Jesus who sees the fig tree and Jesus who choses to destroy it. In Mark, Jesus curses the fig tree on his way to the temple. After he flips the tables, the disciples see the tree on the way out, and it is withered and dead. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus finds the fig tree and seemingly murders it with a vicious stare-down as the disciples look on.
The stories are different because of what the fig trees represent in each one. In Matthew and Mark’s stories the tree represents the temple system that Jesus just railed against in each story. Jesus has just labeled the temple a “den of robbers” and the fig tree represents what to do to that corrupt system and the people who profit from it. In Luke’s gospel, the fig tree isn’t related to the story about the temple, it is the conclusion of his previous statements about the need to repent. Instead of representing the temple system, it represents the people that are hearing Jesus. You, the reader or listener at the time, have not yet borne fruit. You don’t need to be cut down for that, but you do need to repent and start bearing some fruit.
Jesus’s call to repentance is a topic that is difficult to fully dig into. What I was taught about repentance as a child is that I should pray to God and confess my sins. If I had hurt someone or stolen something, I should confess that to God and be forgiven. All sins were individual sins, and the assumption was that I would stop the sinful behavior immediately. They would say we should turn away from the sin, and turn toward God. Unfortunately, there was never a great answer for what to do if the sins I felt on my heart were sins I was not able to turn away from.
If you’ve been reading along for the last few months, you can see that many of the sins that Jesus describes in the gospels are less about one person wronging someone and more about how a society treats the people in it. (If not, here’s a few to try.) We may give of what we have, but we still are supported by and supporting a society that fundamentally does not love all neighbors the same. Our country is committing a litany of sins against its own citizens and is resting on a foundation of some of the most egregious sin the world has ever known. You can’t be “In the world, but not of it”, as some might say, if you live on stolen land, in a city founded on the profits of stolen labor, protected by powers that oppress the poor and marginalized, and staying well fed while others are starving. The sins of our modern capitalist economy are easy to document, but very difficult to turn away from.
Rather than being bogged down by these sins that we can repent, but we can’t stop, Jesus lays out a way forward. Bear fruit. Let the weight of all this atrocity pull you into action rather and crush you into inaction. We are called to remember the stories of two fig trees. The one that represents the powers of oppression and domination, God will destroy. The fig tree that represents us still has time to act. We must repent of our sins of complicity in a crushingly sinful system, because we have to be able to admit what is going on. Then we have to move forward in faith that God will use us to help create something better. While we can’t do the work all by ourselves, we can’t do nothing either, because that would be an even greater sin.