Just Do Love.

Luke 13:1-21.

I.

            Jesus has just finished talking about how the Day of Judgment for anyone could arrive at any time.  He told the story about the rich man who built larger barns to store his surplus grain, but then suddenly died.  And the illustrations about how we have to be always ready because the Day of Judgment could come like a long-delayed master or a thief in the night.  His point seems to be that we have to get our act together now, in this life, today, or we may perish in our sinful existence and stay cut off from God forever. 

            Then he mentions the signs of the times and how to read them and what they predict is coming.  And the people are getting into it.  So they start thinking of examples of things that might indicate the proximity of the Day of Judgment and the danger of suddenly dying in your sins.  And they hear what Jesus has said, as if sudden death were a punishment for personal moral lapses.  They think the Day of Judgment will be a time of reckoning, when individual sins will be punished.  They ask him: “What about when Pilate killed those Galileans and mixed their blood into their sacrifices?  They must have been real sinners, eh Jesus?”

            Questions like this were somewhat loaded.  If Jesus says anything that sounds like he is excusing or justifying Pilate’s actions, he alienates the people who know Pilate is a tyrant and hated him.  But if he criticizes Pliate, he could get arrested before his time by annoyed Roman authorities.

            Neither does he want the interpretation of this incident just reduced to God snuffing out people because of their immoral behavior.  That depoliticizes the issue, and, most importantly, blames the victims for what happened to them.  The easiest way for society to avoid offending the governing authorities and uphold the unjust political order is to blame people for their own oppression.

            “No,” says Jesus.  “They weren’t any worse sinners than anyone else.  It’s not about them.  It’s not even about Pilate.  It is about you.  I am not asking you to look around for examples of sudden death to prove that God punishes sinners.  I am certainly not advising you to keep up with this practice of blaming victims for their own death.  I am telling you to change your lives now, because unless you transform your way of thinking and acting, you will all perish just as did those people Pilate murdered.  That is, you will end your lives as unconscious, unthinking, pointless victims.

            “I can come up with examples too.  Those eighteen people who died when a tower fell on them in Siloam; do you really think they died as a punishment from God, as if they were worse sinners than everyone else in Jerusalem?  I don’t think so!  There are some pretty bad sinners in Jerusalem, let me tell you, and many of them are doing just fine!  My point is that you have to change your way of thinking and acting or you could also have the same fate as the people who perish in accidents or by murder, which is a meaningless death.  And the only way our lives are made meaningful is when we live them as an active participation in God’s truth, will, law, and love.  And the time to do that is now, immediately.”

II.

            Jesus continues, as if to say, “You have to live like God is giving you extra time.  Life is too short to mess around.  It as if 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, ‘What’s up with this?!  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?’  The gardener 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.’”

            We’re all living in that ‘one more year’, folks!  Now is the time we are given by God to produce the good fruit of justice, peace, and love.  Now is the time to live with each other in equality and sharing.  Now is the time to forgive and set people free.  Now is the time for honesty and grace.

            It’s not about your moral failures; it is about whether you are producing good fruit or not, that is, whether you are doing the works God has put you on this earth to do.  Or are you just sucking up the nutrients of the soil, the resources of the earth, while producing nothing for anyone but yourself?  God is graciously giving us a window of opportunity here.  There is an urgency here; our life is at stake!  Produce the fruits of good actions now, before it’s too late and we manage to perish in our clueless selfishness.

            One of the reasons that Presbyterians are so bad at evangelism is that we tend to lack the urgency necessary to inspire conversion in people.  I wonder if our urgency doesn’t have to come from the fact that the creation itself is at stake.  Jesus’ parables about vineyards may be seen as referring to creation.  The creation is the vineyard, the garden, over which we have been given stewardship.  The creation is designed by God to produce good things: joy and delight, love and compassion, justice and righteousness, peace and goodness, blessing and life.  Our job as conscious humans is to give God the glory, and grow into spiritual union with the Creator by walking in the Creator’s ways.  That’s what “bearing fruit” means.  We are supposed to produce love like a fig tree produces figs.

            Those ways are finally revealed and exemplified in Jesus, who is the Creator who becomes flesh to dwell among us.  God puts us on the earth to live like Jesus, now.  Not tomorrow.  Not after we die or at the Day of Judgment.  Now.

 

III.

            At this point Luke intentionally recounts a story about Jesus in a synagogue on the Sabbath.  Maybe he is remembering how Jesus would answer someone who was confused about exactly what this life of repentance, this new way of thinking and acting, is all about.  If someone understands that, yes, we have to repent now, but can’t figure out exactly what they are supposed to do now in terms of actual behavior, Luke gives us an example of how Jesus does just this.

            He is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath, and he looks up and sees that one of the worshipers, way in the back, is a woman who has an acute case of what we would identify as some kind of sciolosis of the spine.  It is so bad that she is literally bent over and unable to stand up straight.  The bones of her back are fused in a forward curve so she is always bent double, looking down at the ground.

            When Jesus sees her, he calls her to the front, which was forbidden for a woman, and simply says to her, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”  And he lays his hands on her, another forbidden thing, and she immediately straightens her back and stands up.  She starts praising God, and everyone is astounded.  I mean, they know this woman.  She has been among them crippled for 18 years!

            But the leader of the synagogue is not happy.  He considers this to be “work” that is forbidden on the Sabbath.  So, amid all the amazement and praising of God, he shouts to everyone: “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day.  She was sick for 18 years; what’s one more day?”

            Nothing makes Jesus lose his patience more quickly than a Jewish leader’s lack of compassion.  “You hypocrites!” he thunders.  “Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?”  The Sabbath is about liberation.  It is about freedom.  It is about healing.   

            Why should a daughter of Abraham be oppressed by Satan one day, or one minute, longer?  How did the Sabbath degenerate into a time to maintain Satan’s oppression over God’s people?  We don’t have time for this!  This is not why we are here!  People are being crippled, humiliated, broken, misshapen by the power of evil.  We should not tolerate it for one more second.  People are not created to legalistically keep the Sabbath; but the Sabbath is made to create true, blessed, good, beautiful, joyful people.  And the Sabbath is just a window into the Kingdom of God, where these things are being done all the time.

IV.

            To illustrate what he has just done in healing the crippled woman, Jesus tells two little parables of the Kingdom of God.  He talks about how a tiny mustard seed becomes a tree that can host birds.  And he talks about the way a woman uses a little yeast to transform a whole loaf of bread.           

            His point is that the Kingdom of God is about transformation and change.  Just as he changed that woman’s life from being twisted in the crushing grip of disease, to one where she stands upright and able to look others in the eye, so also he has come to change us from broken people in an unfruitful tailspin of despair, to people who are living in the joy and freedom of their Creator, producing the fruits of minds that are open to God’s love and actions that express God’s love.  Instead of only being able to look down and in, we now look out and up. 

            We get transformed from a tiny individual, like a seed, into something that spreads its arms in hospitality to others, like a tree welcomes and provides a home for birds.  We get changed from a teaspoonful of micro-organisms, into a warm loaf of bread that can nourish a whole family.  We go from being something only concerned about itself and its own survival, and become something that can express the way God provides a home and food for other creatures.

            A seed that stays a seed is useless.  Yeast that remains yeast is also useless, as useless as the man in last week’s parable, whose farm over-produced.  Instead of changing, sharing, being transformed into a benefit to the whole community, instead of welcoming or feeding anyone, his approach is to build bigger barns to store the surplus, thereby keeping it to himself.  And then he dies!  So he doesn’t get to keep it anyway!  Like the bent-over woman he couldn’t see any further than the ground around his own feet; he saw himself, his family, his farm, and that’s it.

            And that’s all that most people see.  That’s all that most people are concerned about: their own self and their own people.  In this situation we are just wasting the resources of the earth like that tree that didn’t produce figs.  In this situation we are anonymous victims of arbitrary events, like the people murdered by Pilate or killed in an accident.

V.

            So Jesus is saying two things in this section.  First, it is up to us to give our lives meaning by being transformed in our minds and actions into the people we truly are in God’s sight.  We do this by following, obeying, and trusting Jesus.  We do this by living according to his values.  We do this by living the life he gives us to live.

            This is a life characterized by generosity, hospitality, feeding others; it is characterized by helping people to stand up straight and be free; it is characterized by bearing the fruit, which is to say performing the actions, we were created to bear.  Like a fig tree bears figs, people are supposed to spread the Creator’s love in the world.

            Secondly, he is continually making the point that the time for this to happen is now.  It happens in the living present, in decisions we are making at this moment.  It does not wait until we have sufficient resources or enough information.  It does not wait until we are adequately trained, or have the right partners, or enough popular support.  It does not wait until the time feels right.            

            In terms of discipleship, Jesus says: “Just do it.”  But don’t just do anything.  Just do justice.  Just do love.  Just do equality, generosity, blessing, beauty, forgiveness, and liberation.  Don’t live like there’s no tomorrow; rather, live like Jesus Christ is our tomorrow and our forever.  Because he is. 

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