On
Tuesday, February 16 the small Pacific island nation of Fiji became the first
country in the world to ratify the United Nations climate deal agreed on last
December in Paris. Four days later,
Tropical Cyclone Winston, making landfall with sustained winds of 185 miles per
hour, slammed into Fiji, leaving tens of thousands homeless and 44 dead, by
last count. It was the strongest storm
ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, and on Thursday Joanne Woodland, one
of our parishioners who is vacationing in Hawaii, sent me a cell phone video of
the massive ocean swell kicked up by the cyclone, pounding the north shore of
Oahu. That swell will get here later in
the week, with waves up to thirty feet high forecast to hit the Sonoma Coast on
Thursday night.
Unless
we have relatives in Fiji, like the folks in the Fijian congregation that meets
every Sunday at the Methodist Church over on the next corner do, we might
imagine that big waves are the only impact that Cyclone Winston will have in
California. But maybe we feel
differently about the eight people shot in Kalamazoo, Michigan on the same day
that Winston tore through Fiji. After
all, that incident was in our own country, in a town like this one. The victims were like us, a young woman
watching children play outside the townhome where she lived, a father and son shopping
for a car, a teen-aged girl and her grandma, and three other older ladies leaving
dinner at the Cracker Barrel restaurant, when a stranger opened fire.
Whatever
the case, I think we have a natural tendency to create a mental distance between
ourselves and the victims we read about in the news. It would be hard for us to live if we went
around all day waiting for the bullets to start flying, or the wind to knock
our houses down. It is when people are
forced to endure conditions like these that they become refugees, and leave
behind everything they know and everything they own, to try to find a place to
live a semblance of a normal life. We
human beings need to believe that on balance life is good, and the odds are in
our favor of living in relative safety and health to a ripe old age.
So
when we hear about terrible events that call these odds into question, we look
for explanations, so we can feel like they have causes we can understand, and
maybe even control. Cyclone Winston was
so devastating, we say, because climate change is heating up the oceans, creating
more powerful storms. Or Uber drivers in
Michigan go on shooting rampages because they are mentally ill, and gun laws
are too lax, and media coverage of all these mass shooters is spawning
copycats. In the days before we had
sophisticated scientific, historical, and psychological theories of causation, we
explained such things in theological terms.
In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus responds to the news
of terrible recent events in Jerusalem.
And he asks his listeners if they really believe the popular explanation
that the victims of these disasters were being punished by God for their sins.
What
Jesus seems to be saying here is that the distance our explanations create
between us and the victims we hear about in the news obscures the truth that
they are no different from us. We may need
that distance to insulate us from the fact that our lives are a gift that can be
taken away, any day, any moment. But the
disasters that happen to others, says Jesus, are not only an opportunity to
give thanks that we have been spared for another day, but to recognize our
common predicament. It’s a chance to
really come to terms with how little control we have over what happens in the
world, and how little power to keep ourselves safe from harm. Not so that we will sink into helplessness
and fear, but so that we will turn to our only secure refuge, which is the
goodness, and forgiveness, and eternal loving-kindness of God.
To
underscore this message, the Gospel of Luke links this saying about disasters
in the news with a story about a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit. It’s a story that shows up in a slightly
different way in Matthew and Mark. Mark’s
version is likely the original, and it begins at Mark 11, verse 12, which, in
case you want to look it up. It comes
right after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we’ll remember in a few
weeks on Palm Sunday, at the conclusion of which Jesus goes into the temple and
looks around a bit, before returning to his base in Bethany. On the way back into the city the next day, he’s
hungry and looks for fruit on a fig tree.
Finding none, he curses the tree, and says “may no one ever find fruit
on you again.” Jesus then goes to the
temple, where he stages a protest, turning over the tables of the money changers,
and shouting that they have turned the house of prayer into a robber’s den—you
know the story. The next day he and his
disciples pass by the fig tree again, and find it withered to the roots.
By bracketing
the story of the so-called cleansing of the temple with the parable of the fig
tree, Mark makes a connection between Jesus’ physical hunger for figs and his
hunger for God’s righteousness, which is the only hope for his people. Jesus goes to Jerusalem, not in a bid for
political power, but because he is on fire with a prophetic desire. He longs for the people of Jerusalem, and especially
the elite in the temple, to repent--to turn from their cynical, self-satisfied,
self-interested ways and return to the ways of God. But on coming there, Jesus finds no fruit to
satisfy this hunger. There is nothing to
work with here, no openness to his message or willingness to act on it. And this can only mean one thing for
Jerusalem—inevitable destruction.
We
can go further in understanding the story of the fig tree, if we consider the historical
circumstances in which the gospels were written. The author of Mark was likely writing just
about the time of the doomed Jewish revolt against Rome in the year 66. It was a period of extreme religious and
psychological distress for all Jews (and the author of Mark was almost
certainly a Jew), as Jerusalem became the focal point, first, of armed insurrection,
then of savage civil war, and finally of a brutal Roman campaign of re-conquest. So it’s not too surprising that the author of
Mark wrote in an apocalyptic mood. He sees
Jerusalem’s inevitable fall, and connects it with the things that Jesus said
thirty years before: his condemnation of the hypocrisy and corruption of the
temple, and his warnings about the final judgment of the world.
But
the author of Luke has a different perspective.
For one thing he or she is probably writing a full generation
later. For Luke the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Romans is a done deal, a past event as distant as the fall of Saigon
or the Berlin Wall is for us. And Luke
is interested in what happens next. For
Luke, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not the last faint glimmer of
light piercing the darkness at the end of history. It is the light of dawn, at the beginning of
an amazing new story that is already under way.
And Jerusalem’s part in that story does not end with Jesus’ trial and
crucifixion. The city and the temple
will stand for another thirty years, and in that time it will be the birthplace
of a new community, even a new humanity. The power of the Holy Spirit will come upon the
pioneers of this community in Jerusalem,
and from there they will spread news of forgiveness and reconciliation in the
life and death and resurrection of Jesus, to Ethiopia and Syria, to Libya, and Asia,
and Macedonia, even to Athens and Rome.
So Luke
reworks the story of the fig tree, to say that God is not ready to give up on
the world just yet, so let’s not give up on each other. It’s as timely a message now as it ever was,
in these days when people seem so ready to harden their hearts against the most
desperate and vulnerable people in the world, so ready to blame them for the disaster
that has fallen upon them. When the
church is true to Jesus, we are like the gardener he spoke about in Luke’s
story of the fig tree, like the gardener he was. He tells us to roll up our sleeves and go to
work. He tells us not to be afraid to
dig around, to loosen the hardened of sin and injustice, and the tangled roots of
deceit and delusion and denial. He tells
to be unashamed to scatter the manure of kindness and encouragement,
compassion, and helpfulness, and prayer.
He tells us to be patient and watchful and not to lose faith in the
power of God, because the old tree in the garden might still bear fruit.
