Luke 13: 1-10
“Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.”
Ray Davies of the Kinks used to
sing, “I’m not like anybody else….I ‘m not like anybody else….”
This is what the people are
thinking as they pepper Jesus with questions. What about the Galileans who had
been slaughtered by Pilate? Or, the eighteen people who died when the Tower of
Siloam collapsed on them? Was it because they were greater sinners than anyone
else? Which is what the people want to believe. It’s what we all want to
believe. There must be some significant difference between us and them. There
must be some significant reason why they were killed. Which is all a way of
saying, we are better than they are because we did not get killed. We were not
destroyed by a similar tragedy.
Jesus says, in a word, “No. And
unless you repent, you will end up like them.”
Only Jesus being a teacher in the great tradition of Jewish rabbis and
Pharisees tells a story instead. It’s a
story about a fig tree with no figs. The owner wants it cut down and use it for
firewood. The gardener suggests giving it one more chance. One more year. Dig
around it, put some manure on it, and give it one more year. Then if there are
no figs, cut it down.
So Jesus first pokes a hole in
the thinking that we are different. It
turns out the kingdom of God is an equal opportunity destroyer of those who
refuse to repent – a rather simple word in Hebrew: shuv, pronounced “shoove.” It means to turn around. The idea seems to be
that we are to walk in a particular way. Jesus would call this halakha, which means walking, but more
particularly to walk in the way of Torah, or God’s law.
The idea of repentance asserts
that we are walking in the wrong way, or some other way, any way but God’s way.
One would think it is pretty self-evident. People being slaughtered by a
tyrannical despot. Natural disasters. Or, in the case of the falling tower,
perhaps corners were cut, the required permits obtained with bribes, the
construction not exactly up to code. Fig trees with no figs.
John the baptizer had a quaint
phrase: Bear fruit befitting of repentance. Begging the question: what kind of
fruit am I bearing? Am I bearing any fruit at all? Just what is the connection
between walking in God’s way and bearing fruit?
Leave it to the lectionary
committee to stop the reading at verse nine before we get to the punch line:
“Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.”
Some have said that Israel was
made for the Sabbath. Others suggest that the Sabbath makes Israel. Israel is
construed by some to be the people of God. And curiously Israel as a name, a
new name for Jacob once upon a time, means “one who struggles with God.” And
anyone who thinks he or she is not struggling with God is just fooling
themselves. So just for the sake of
learning something about ourselves, let’s say we are all Israel – people of God
who struggle with God.
Do we allow the Sabbath to make
us? I am thinking this is at the heart
of all this talk about mass killings and toppling towers and fig-less fig
trees. Do we allow the Sabbath to make us?
Keeping Sabbath is the one
religious ritual that has been observed from the time of the Exodus to the
present time. Sabbath is about time. It has been called a Cathedral of Time. We
tend to think we do not have much time. We see time itself as tyrannical as
Pontius Pilate.
But
what if there is another kind of time? What if there is a kind of time that
exists beyond the busyness of doing things, even Holy things? What if in his
teachings in the synagogues Jesus calls us to recognize that there is a kind of
time that is God’s time? Abraham Joshua Heschel in his tiny little book, The Sabbath (Shambhala,
Boston:1951,1979), introduces us to this other realm of time: “There is a Realm of Time where the goal is not to
have, but to be; not to own, but to give; not to control, but to share; not to
subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the
acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”
Lately
there is a new found fascination with the Ten Commandments. It is interesting
to note that one-third of the language of the Ten Commandments is devoted to
the command to Keep Sabbath. I would agree with those who observe that Sabbath
is not so much a religious habit as it is an alternative economic practice:
slaves got no time off in Egypt. Keeping Sabbath, the gift of the Sabbath, is a
habit that calls for us to withdraw from the chronos (clock and calendar) time of our workaday world and enter
into the eternal kairos time of God.
And
yet. And yet, how many of us cannot even
take an hour out of the day, let alone a day out of the week, to just be?
With
all this talk about falling towers, fig-less trees and all, Jesus is calling us
to take a look at ourselves. He is convinced we will see, with all due respect
to Ray Davies, that we are like everybody else in most fundamental ways of
being a person – a person of God – a person created in the image of God.
When
we do not take Sabbath time, we forget who we are and whose we are. When we do
not take Sabbath time, we resort to having, owning, controlling and subduing. When
we do not take Sabbath time is when we think we are somehow different and better
than others – especially those who suffer at the hands of others or natural
disasters.
When
we do take Sabbath time we learn to say, “There by the grace of God go I,” instead
of “there but by the grace of God go I.” The difference between the two makes
all the difference in the world - a world that is waiting for us to make a
difference. To be the difference you
want to see in the world, first you have “to be.” Sabbath time helps us “to be.”
Sabbath is the manure that enables us to bear figs!
“Now he was teaching in one of
the synagogues on the Sabbath.”
Amen.
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