“1 Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. 2 Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? 3 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. 4 Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
6 Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree, planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but did not find any. 7 So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’ 8 “‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’ ””
I have no idea how important repentance is. Neither do you. None of us will see anywhere near it’s full importance until eternity. We, as a church, know it matters. We call ourselves and others to it, but we won’t recognize how much it matters until the final judgment and everything after.
Repentance matters now. It can be the difference between divorce and remaining together. It can be the difference between reconciliation and alienation. Repentance matters forever. It is the difference between heaven and hell.
Tonight’s teaching and parable are designed to help us who are quite blind to importance to recognize the importance of repentance. Repentance is more important than you know. Do it and keep doing it; that’s the claim of this sermon: Repentance is more important than you know. Do it and keep doing it.
We will study this in two points. First, a warning from current events. Second, a warning in parable form. First, in verses 1-5, a warning from current events. Second, in verses 6-9, a warning in parable form.
We first see this call to repent in Jesus’ teaching; that’s our first point: a warning from current events. How does Donald Trump fit in with the plan of God? How did Joseph Biden? How did 9/11? Those are the sorts of questions we might ask Jesus if he came not to Jerusalem in the first century but to Kalamazoo in the 21st century. The people of Jesus’ day did ask him about current events and that’s what’s going on in verse 1, “Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.”
Jesus had been teaching about the times—end times and otherwise. These Jews wanted to know how Pilate’s atrocities fit into it all. It seems that the Roman governor had tried to put some rebellious Jews in their place—and all Jews in their place—by defiling their temple by way of mixing their blood with temple sacrifices. This would have been as explosive of a move as you can imagine, but there was no love-loss between Pilate and the Jews.
Pilate committed some horrific outrages against the Jews. We can’t corroborate the one mentioned here with outside sources, but we do know that is the sort of deed Pilate did. The people naturally wanted to know how this fit into God’s plan.
Zealots took offenses like this as fuel to motivate their rebellion. We don’t know the motivation of the people asking Jesus about this event. Perhaps they truly wanted to know how it fit into the Father’s plan for history. Perhaps given everything we’ve studied about the kingdom of God, they were suspicious as to where Jesus’ political loyalties lay. No matter their intention, I doubt any of them saw Jesus’ answer coming; verse 2, ‘Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”’
Jesus doubtlessly had dozens of other thoughts on this atrocity, but he knew that these people wanted him outraged like they were outraged and, “this… call for repentance,” as Bailey explains, “can be seen on its deepest level as a profound concern for the welfare of those whose outrage he refuses to reinforce.” Jesus wanted these people to take their outrage and channel it into recognizing how outrageous their own sin was and how worthy of a fate to similar to those Galileans their sin made them. The people wanted to get Jesus the Galilean riled up about the fate of these Galileans. Jesus wanted his questioners to get riled about their own sin. As we’ve been seeing Jesus seeks to surprise us out of what we can’t seem to see.
Jesus then brought up another recent event—one in which there was no political overtones; verse 4, “Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” Many people in the ancient world, as with today, thought that calamity implied corruption. Something bad happened to you because you were bad. You can see how this thought process develops because sin does bring negative consequences. This is particularly easy for us to do regarding guilt because we are all so guilty that we can’t bear to think straight about it. However, it’s not the case that all negative experiences are consequences for specific sins—see Job, see Josiah, see Daniel.
I’m currently reading a book about God’s judgments in history—what can be said from the Bible and what’s best left unsaid. It’s by Steven Keillor, the brother, interestingly enough, of Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companionfame. As a historian who is a Christian, Steven Keillor writes about the responses to 9/11, which if you look at verse 4, “those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them,” seems highly relevant. He remembers the way the political right and left responded to the tragedy. I remember my own alma mater, Hope College, being in Time magazine in their story on faith responses to the attack. I started reading Keillor’s book to help me with our time in the Exodus—studying God’s judgment upon Egypt, but it’s proved helpful here because it’s about 200 pages unfolding what Jesus said in less than ten seconds, “do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
The people then, as people after 9/11 and with events this last week, wanted commentary, but as Bock explains, “Jesus does not enter into the social, racial, or national issues, but instead turns the incident into an opportunity to issue a warning… the opportunity for political commentary becomes an occasion for spiritual reflection.”
That’s sobering. I was involved in a mission trip to New York City shortly after 9/11. I saw the site. I saw the makeshift remembrances put up to honor the lost. It’s proper to think, “that could have been me.” There were any number of stories about people who didn’t get onto their flight that day or who didn’t go to work at the towers. Jesus cares about that. He calls us to mourn with those who mourn. Now later, though, as with years after certain events, Jesus calls me to put aside, “that could have been you, Adam,” and say, “that will be you, Adam, if you don’t repent.”
We Americans, after 9/11, were saying, “you don’t know how important coming home to your loved ones is. Tell them you love them every day.” Jesus was saying, “yes, neither do you know how important repentance is. This catastrophe should give you a small picture of destruction, so repent and keep repenting.”
At the same time, Jesus wants us to know that those people killed by Pilate and the tower falling can’t be assumed to be worse than me or you. “Do you think they were more guilty than all the others?” he asks. We might assume they were because that would make sense of the universe. We can then say, “that tragedy could never happen to me because I don’t…” and fill in the blank with the sin of your choice. Such a mental move seems to make life sensible again, but Jesus says it’s nonsense. Those people who died in the 9/11 attacks—do you think they were more guilty than you? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will perish.
Jesus thinks repentance matters more than we think it does. We will never think that repentance matters as much as Jesus thinks it matters. The best we can do is to repent and keep on repenting. “This passage is highly useful,” Calvin wrote, “were it for no other reason than that this disease is almost natural to us, to be too rigorous and severe in judging of others, and too much disposed to flatter our own faults. The consequence is, that we not only censure with excessive severity the offenses of our brethren; but whenever they meet with any calamity, we condemn them as wicked and reprobate persons. On the other hand, every man that is not sorely pressed by the hand of God slumbers at ease in the midst of his sins, as if God were favorable and reconciled to him. This involves a double fault; for when God chastises any one before our eyes, He warns us of His judgments, that each of us may examine himself, and consider what he deserves. If He spares us for a time, we are so far from having a right to take such kindness and forbearance as an opportunity for slumber, that we ought to regard it as an invitation to repentance.” I quoted Calvin at length because his thoughts are worth us considering at length. It’s worth considering the importance we put on repentance. Jesus gave us this teaching so that we, down to this day, would consider the importance of repentance. Next he gave us a parable for the same purpose and that’s our second point: a warning in parable form.
I preached from the previous verses during the height of the pandemic. We pre-recorded our sermons, which was exactly as enjoyable as it sounds, and for the evening services looked at passages which seemed related to what was unfolding in history. For our purposes in this series now, we are thinking about the previous words insofar as they relate to the parable Jesus told next; verse 6, ‘Then he told this parable: A man had a fig tree, planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, “For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?”’
As we saw the parable of the hours, a vineyard tends to represent God’s people. This is a vineyard parable and in this vineyard is a fig tree which is another common symbol for Israel. To sit under one’s vine and fig tree was as symbolic for as good as it gets in Israel like “mom, baseball, and apple pie” are for what’s right about America. So, this is symbol for Israel upon symbol for Israel. Jesus’ listeners would have picked up on the fact that he was still talking about them as God’s people and that this parable was about them.
Jesus tells us that this tree—this representation of the people—hadn’t produced anything for three years. Three years tended to be how long gardeners gave trees to start producing. The tree was now an obvious failure. Jesus was telling these people who were outraged by Pilate’s atrocity that they were heading in that same direction. He was warning them that God was going to cut them off. That’s what you do with a tree that won’t produce. It takes valuable nutrients from the soil to no purpose. “The master acts to preserve the health of the vineyard, not destroy it,” as Bailey puts it.
That’s how it goes. God’s people are repentant people; there is no other kind. If people won’t repent—if we won’t—eventually we won’t be God’s people. Repentance is the inescapable birthmark—or rebirth mark—of God’s people. Not perfection, not the level of obedience that you or I might want, not having never done this or that, but repentance. That’s the mark. The people to whom Jesus was speaking got good and riled up about over what Pilate had done to God’s people but Jesus knew that they weren’t doing what God’s people do—repent—and so he told them this parable.
Jesus didn’t tell them this parable to tell them that they are already irrecoverably lost. He told them so that they would repent. This is needful to recognize. We take so many warnings of God as condemnations when they are, in fact, glimmers of hope that all is not lost… yet. They warning designed to avoid trouble.
When I started college, I was slow in getting my license plate tabs renewed. My father told me to get busy on it because the police notice such details. I thought I’d have until the end of September to get it done, but I got so into my new life at college that I forgot. Well, I got my ticket in October. My dad, though, hadn’t warned me about consequences for getting the tabs to condemn me. He did it in hopes of saving me from the consequences I did receive. He was telling me to use the time I still had to make changes and get those tabs.
You see this offer of time to make changes in verse 8’s response of the gardener to the owner of the vineyard regarding this figless fig tree; ‘“Sir,” the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.”’
Jesus’ teaching on current events was about the need to repent. This parable tells you to get busy with it now. God is merciful so as to grant a stay of execution but don’t push it. Don’t see how close to hellfire you can get. If God’s offer of mercy doesn’t lead to repentance, it will lead to judgment. You see a picture of this in the two comings in Christ. The first coming offers mercy. The second coming brings judgment.
The call now is to repent and keep repenting. It’s worth noting that we need help even in that. The gardener fertilized the tree in hopes of reviving it. We need to God’s reviving help to so that we “come to our senses” to borrow a line from the parable of the forgiving father. “Renewal cannot come from within the resources of the tree itself,” as Bailey explains. “It cannot gather the strength it needs from its own roots. The vinedresser must act to save the tree and at the same time the tree must respond to those acts or they are of no avail.”
God has been good enough to offer grace and we must respond. Oscar Wilde was a nineteenth century playwright and one of the bad boys of his time. He was immoral, bitter, and arrogant. The story goes that he was entering the port of New York and a customs officer asked him if had anything to declare as in prohibited items, foreign currency, and the sort. When asked if he had anything to declare, Wilde responded, “I have no nothing to declare except my genius.” There are doubts as to the reliability of this story, but it is certainly the sort of statement Wilde would make, and if he didn’t say it, he likely wishes he would have.
Oscar Wilde would never repent. He went from bad to worse. Considering his life, GK Chesterton wrote, “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” In other words, we can respond to the underserved goodness of God by repenting and we, as much as Oscar Wilde, need to repent. Your sins and mine might be different from his but we, like Jesus’ listeners too, are not less sinners; rather, we too are sinners. Repentance is what’s needed—early and often.
Jesus doesn’t tell us whether this fig tree produced figs. There is no ending—happy otherwise. The message is that you will write your own ending with your own life. Life is difficult. Horrible events happen. It will be all the worse and eternally horrible if you won’t repent and don’t repent So repent. Repent. Repent. Amen.