A Fig Tree With No Figs

Below is the manuscript of a sermon first delivered at Cortez (CO) Church of the Nazarene on Mar. 24, 2019.

Text: Luke 13:1-9 (ESV):

13 There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. 4 Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
6 And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. 7 And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’8 And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. 9 Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Making Sense of a Crazy World

Human beings like the world to make sense. Things happen for a reason, and sometimes that reason is that we need things to happen for a reason! We want good things to happen to good people, and bad things to happen to bad people. And we want to know that when things upset our routine, or the expected order of things, that there is some reason behind it. There’s a very good reason for this. We were created to perceive patterns in the world, to discover the order behind it, and to relish the beauty found in it. This is so that we can perceive and know God’s love and care for His Creation by studying the works of His hands. After all, when you want to know the mind of an Artist, you study His Art.

As Paul says in Rom. 1:20 says, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”(1)

But sometimes our ability to perceive order and patterns in the world and the events which take place backfires. The same sense that helps us see beauty in the Cosmos is also responsible for people seeing the Virgin Mary in their toast, or faces in clouds, or sometimes even Divine punishment and blessing in the tragedies and triumphs which we experience. We want the world to make sense. And so, in our effort to find meaning, we impose sense on senseless happenings and then get mad at God when the World doesn’t look like we believe it should be.

The Arrival of Bad News

This is what happens in Luke 13. Over the past several weeks, we have been walking with Jesus and his disciples as they head to Jerusalem so that He can fulfill His mission and triumph over sin and death on the cross. But along the way, he has continued to heal, cast out demons, and teach the crowds. As he gets closer and closer to Jerusalem, we notice a subtle shift in his teaching in chs. 12 and 13 as he emphasizes more and more the need for repentance in the face of coming Judgment. This Judgment would arrive very soon for Israel, as the Temple was about to be destroyed and the city of Jerusalem abandoned in a few short decades. But, as Jesus is about to make clear, the Judgment facing Israel is one from which no man or woman is immune.

And so, when we find Jesus in Luke 13:1-9, he is in the middle of delivering a large block of teaching to the crowds, when a group of people rush in with bad news. The emphasis in v. 1 on “that very time,” lends a sense of urgency to their news. Something terrible has happened! A group of Galileans who were bringing their sacrifices to the Temple have been slaughtered by Pilate’s ruthless command, and their blood has been mingled with their sacrifices. For an observant Jew, no greater sacrilege could have taken place. Roman occupation was bad enough. And murder was certainly worse. But the time to bring sacrifices was supposed to be one of peace. It was supposed to be off-limits. And the idea that holy sacrifices offered to God would be polluted by human blood was unthinkable to them.

Now such an episode might be shocking to some of us. When most of us think of Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea, we think of him as a passive and almost unwilling participant in Jesus’ crucifixion who washes his hands of the whole affair and hands Jesus over to the blood-thirsty crowds. I’ve even heard sympathy expressed for Pilate, as if he were forced into a position which he otherwise would have avoided. The fact is, Pilate was known throughout the ancient world for his brutality and iron hand in dealing with the occupied territories.

The Romans crucified thousands, and as far as Pilate was concerned, there was always enough wood available for more crosses. Though we don’t find this episode of the slaughtered Galileans outside the New Testament, the ancient Jewish historian Josephus tells us of two other instances of Pilate’s brutality. In one (and this may very well be the news Jesus was receiving), a group of Galileans were protesting Pilate’s raid on the Temple treasury to build a new aqueduct for Jerusalem, so he sent soldiers dressed in plain-clothes to infiltrate the crowds, and they beat the protesters so severely in the streets that many of them died.(2) The Galileans of the time were noted for agitating against the Roman occupation, and so had gained a reputation as insurrectionists, which may have prompted Pilate’s especially brutal treatment of them.(3)

In another instance of unrestrained violence, he put to the sword a large group of Samaritans who had gathered on their holy mountain Gerizim, where they still offer sacrifices today, and it was this episode which when reported to Caesar in Rome, caused Pilate to be recalled in disgrace in 36 AD.(4) Whatever the event is which the people report to Jesus here, it was certainly well within Pilate’s brutal character to kill a bunch of Galileans in the midst of their offering sacrifices to God.

The Crowds Want an Explanation

Naturally reeling from this horrifying news, the crowds want an explanation. Things happen for a reason. Surely these men who were so brutally murdered with their sacrifices so outrageously polluted must have done something to deserve this sudden, unexpected death. Just like when Jesus’ disciples ask him about why a certain man was born blind and they assume the only two possibilities are that either he or his parents must have sinned in some way for him to wind up in such a state.(5)

But Jesus makes it clear that that isn’t really how the world works. Sometimes people suffer. Sometimes there is no good reason for suffering! That’s an answer we don’t like to hear. The world has to make sense. Things happen for a reason. Or at least that is what we would like to believe. And that is what the Jews of Jesus’ time had been raised to believe. They were no strangers to experiences of tragedy and Judgment. When the people grumbled and disobeyed in the wilderness during the Exodus from Egypt, they were struck down with snake bites and plague until they repented. When they wandered from God during the period of the Judges, they were repeatedly put under the control of foreign powers until they cried out to God for help and God delivered them. When Israel neglected the poor and needy, when they abandoned justice in favor of the rich, and when they oppressed the orphan and the widow during the time of the prophets, they were once again handed over to foreign powers, this time to the Assyrians and Babylonians who sent them into exile.

They knew God to be a just God, and they knew that when the people abandon God’s precepts bad things happen. But that isn’t the whole story. Just as integral to their experience is the story of Job, where a righteous man suffered for no discernible reason or fault of his own or the observations of the writer of Ecclesiastes, who saw evil men prosper and good men go to the grave early.

But it’s easy to forget those stories, because a world that makes sense, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, is safe. If we just do what is good, we won’t suffer. When taken to its extreme, this view almost makes God a big bully whose attention we don’t want to attract. But as Jesus is about to make clear, that is not what God is like, and that’s not why we suffer.

In vv. 2-5, Jesus replies to the crowds, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you: but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Sometimes bad things happen to good people (or at least, they are good by our standards). This is because we live in a fallen and broken world, and we were broken with it. The very sense which allows us to search for and perceive order in the world was corrupted when we first sinned. Continuing Paul’s thought from Romans 1 that I cited earlier, v. 21 says,

“For although [we] knew God, [we] did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but [we] became futile in [our] thinking, and [our] foolish hearts were darkened.”

I mentioned last week that in Hebrew thought, the heart was not just the seat of emotion as we think of it, but also the seat of the senses and of reason. So, when we perceive suffering in the world, or experience it ourselves, our ability to perceive the causes behind it is clouded by the debilitating effects of a fallen world. Sometimes people just hurt one another because they are selfish, or because they don’t realize all the consequences, or sometimes bad things just happen for no reason because of the broken nature of reality.

Jesus gives this unsatisfying answer to the crowds around him. Maybe they wanted him to make a political statement in the wake of the Galileans’ reputation for resisting Rome. Maybe they wanted him to denounce the Galilean movement.(6) There are certainly many preachers today who wouldn’t hesitate to do just that. I remember when 9/11 happened, and later when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans; there were prominent televangelists who claimed God had visited these calamities on the nation or on the city because of its sins. When tragedy struck, instead of pulling the people together to care for those whose lives were devastated by these tragedies, they sought to divide them further by fueling their need for somebody to blame.

Now, I’m not denying the reality of Judgment here. God’s wrath is a necessary result of His justice, and His justice is a necessary component of His love.(7) But the irony is that it can be incredibly self-serving to find fault in others to explain calamity. We think: if they sinned, they deserved it. And if they deserved it, we can avoid deserving it (and so avoid suffering) if we just do what is good and right. But Jesus makes it clear that this isn’t the case. Our future with Him, though it ends in glorious triumph, includes suffering and a cross. Anyone who wants to follow Him has to come to terms with that.

Instead, what Jesus tells them is that all Galileans are just as deserving of judgment as those who were brutally killed in Pilate’s crackdown. And by bringing up the fall of the Tower of Siloam, a tower near the SE corner of Jerusalem(8), Jesus is making it clear that the Jews who live in Jerusalem are no more righteous than the Galileans, who had a reputation for being less-than-observant when it came to keeping all the minute kosher laws emphasized by the Pharisees.(9) Jesus is taking these tragic events and making them metaphors for the final Judgment to which we are all liable if we remain unrepentant.(10)

A Fig Tree with No Figs

To bring this point home, Jesus then tells the crowds a story. In vv. 6-9 he says, “And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

For ancient people, figs were symbols of prosperity and God’s blessing, but they were notoriously difficult to grow and their trees required constant care.(11) Here, Jesus is recalling the prophet Micah’s words when he says in Micah 7:1-4,

“Woe is me! For I have become as when the summer fruit has been gathered, as when the grapes have been gleaned: there is no cluster to eat, no first-ripe fig that my soul desires. The godly has perished from the earth, and there is no one upright among mankind; they all lie in wait for blood, and each hunts the other with a net. Their hands are on what is evil, to do it well; the prince and the judge ask for a bribe, and the great man utters the evil desire of his soul; thus they weave it together. The best of them is like a brier, the most upright of them a thorn hedge. The day of your watchmen, of your punishment, has come; now their confusion is at hand.”

He’s saying the people are like a fig tree that has been given plenty of chances, plenty of seasons to grow and bear fruit, but again and again they have proven barren. Despite God’s many chances, despite his repeated calls to the people to return to Him, they remain bare branches and they stubbornly refuse to repent. All people, not just a subset of Galileans or even just the Jews living in Jesus’ day, but the entire human race is being called back to through Jesus.

Like John the Baptist earlier in the gospel, Jesus is telling the people to “bear fruit in keeping with repentance” or else they will be “cut down and thrown into the fire” like every other tree that doesn’t bear good fruit.(12)

The Good News

Still, the news isn’t all doom and gloom. God doesn’t relish in punishment and He doesn’t delight in destroying the creatures He made to pour His love into. As He says in Eze. 33:11,

“‘As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?’”

It is for that reason that Jesus, the gardener, pleads with the Father represented by the owner of the vineyard, on our behalf. Though we deserved judgment the very moment we sinned, Christ has pleaded on our behalf from the beginning. Just one more season. Let them have just one more season to repent. And so he digs at our roots, aerating the soil around us, he clears the brush that inhibits our growth. He fertilizes our soil with the means of grace: the sacraments, studying scripture, prayer, acts of service, and evangelism. Because without His mediation, without His intervention, we would be utterly barren and lost. But He gives us everything we could ever need to flourish. He nurtures our fruitfulness so that we may repent of our sins, turning away from them and toward him, and so bear the fruit of love which He planted us to grow in the first place.

But it’s still up to us to respond. He has enabled us to have the choice, but it is still our choice whether we will repent or not. Whether we will bear fruits of love or not. Notice in the parable, Jesus doesn’t tell us what happens to the tree. He leaves its fate open-ended and up to us to decide. But whatever choice we choose, we need to be aware that the Judgment which Jesus promises is very real and very near. It isn’t a myth, it isn’t hyperbole. God’s justice won’t wait forever, and it is only because His justice is itself part of His love that he waits for us to respond. Please don’t delay! If you search your heart, and find you need His grace and forgiveness, don’t wait! Call out to Him this morning. He is quick to forgive and it is desire that you be saved. It’s his desire that we all be saved.

Footnotes

(1) All scripture references are from the ESV.

(2) Josephus, “Antiquities of the Jews”, 18:3, 2. From The Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus the Jewish Historian. Transl. by Willian Whiston, 1737. Retrieved from the University of Chicago Website.

(3) Ibid., see footnote to the text.

(4) Josephus, “Antiquities of the Jews”, 18:4, 1-2.

(5) cf. Jn. 9:1-3.

(6) Neale, David. A. “Luke 9-24.” in New Beacon Bible Commentary(Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2013), 110.

(7) I had many conversations about this topic with my Pastor, Rev. H. Gordon Smith III, while I served as his Associate Pastor in La Junta, CO.

(8) Liefeld, Water L. and David W. Pao. “Luke,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Revised Ed. Vol. 10. Ed. by Tremper Longman III & David E. Garland. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 232.

(9) Ibid., 59, 232.

(10) Neale, “Luke 9-24,” 110-111.

(11) Ibid., 112.

(12) Luk. 3:8-9.

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