The Time of Mercy
March 24, 2025
The Time of Mercy
Luke 13:1-9
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
23 March 2024
What happens when we read, or listen to, a story like this one in the Gospel of Luke?
One of my favorite books to help understand how we read and interpret stories is David Jasper’s A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics. “Hermeneutics” is the fancy, academic word for the study of how we interpret texts.
Here’s how Jasper answers my question of what happens when we read a story like this one—“The text becomes a ‘world’ which we inhabit for a while, participating in its drama and its claims on us.”
That’s much easier to see in a rich a full story, the kind that captures our minds and imaginations, where we fall in love with the characters. Our ways of interacting with such stories have only become more immersive and even participatory. One reason the most sophisticated and artistic of video games, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, are so popular is because they bring this idea to greater fulfillment—that a story becomes a world we inhabit.
The few verses we read today in the Gospel of Luke aren’t that rich or captivating, but they still function by inviting us into a world to see what claims it makes upon us.
This particular text first draws us in by tugging at our emotions. We are told that Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, has killed some Galileans. And given this reference of mixing their blood with their sacrifices, it implies that they were killed while performing a religious ritual.
What a heinous action! Our sense of justice reacts with righteous anger at Pilate, and all the Pilates throughout history who have unjustly killed oppressed and occupied peoples.
But, somewhat strangely, Jesus’ response isn’t righteous anger. No, instead, he immediately shifts to another topic. Maybe the people who called Jesus’ attention to this injustice wanted his self-righteous anger, to join them in feeling morally superior? But, that’s not at all what happens. Jesus doesn’t react to this news at all; he changes the subject.
He changes the subject to one of the most central of human problems—understanding the nature of suffering and evil.
Now, I’ve been pastoring for decades and philosophizing even longer, and I can tell you that there is no topic that more often comes up in people’s discussions of faith than this one. People want to know why bad things happen. They get upset at all the unjust suffering of this world, demanding to know why things are this way and couldn’t they have been different.
These have been fundamental questions in my own life. When my Dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 41 years of age, when I was sixteen, I struggled with my faith and how to comprehend what had happened. That’s ultimately one reason I immersed myself so deeply in philosophy and theology, wanting to better understand such things. My favorite philosophy class as an undergraduate was called “Evil and Suffering.”
Jesus does not, in these few verses, provide a comprehensive answer to that deepest of human existential questions. But his changing the subject to this topic, draws the reader and the hearer further into the story, further into the world the story creates, because it now resonates with some of the deepest longings and needs of the human soul.
What Jesus does say in these few short remarks is that bad things don’t just happen to bad people. Debunking what is probably the worst theological position any human can take. And it’s an idea that doesn’t go away. Despite Jesus criticizing it here or the whole book of Job undermining the notion. You still encounter people who think when something bad happens to someone it’s because they did something to deserve it. Or the people who believe that they will be spared natural disasters or life’s calamities if they are simply the right kind of person.
The appeal to such a cut-and-dried, black-and-white universe is obvious. It would seem more fair than the world we actually occupy. More rational.
Part of the implication of Jesus’ response is that this world is not fully within our understanding. There are mysteries we won’t understand. Also, it’s not even clear that there is any deep underlying meaning to it all. Maybe the only thing to understand is that humans are violent and random accidents occur, which means that people end up hurt, harmed, and dead.
Maybe Jesus wants us to grasp the randomness of a world that doesn’t follow any tidy rules?
If we are now asking such questions, then we’ve entered into the world of the story and it’s beginning to lay its claims upon us.
But, then, the gospel shifts again. Jesus tells a parable. We now enter a story within the story. This new story is a parable about a fig tree. And it is in no way clear what these verses have to do with the ones we’ve just read about the tower of Siloam and the murdered Galileans.
Fig trees were and are common in Palestine. They were staples of the local economy and used often in Hebrew writings as metaphors and symbols. The others gospels record other parables Jesus told about fig trees.
In this one we encounter a fig tree that hasn’t produced figs in three years, and the owner wants to cut it down. According to what I’ve read, three years is the normal amount of time for a fig tree to mature. If it hasn’t born fruit, then it is likely infertile. Rather than waste that space, and any time, effort, or resources, on an unyielding tree, let’s cut it down, and replace it. Seems wise. Good stewardship.
But the gardener resists that advice. He wants to keep at it. Keep trying to get the tree to produce. He wants to spread some manure around it, to fertilize it, in the hopes that something will happen.
The commentaries I read point out that the word for manure here is a vulgar term, irreverent in religious discourse. So, you can use your imaginations to supply the more appropriate English word to use.
This vulgar word is also a reminder of humility. A reminder of the humble and vulnerable, and even messy, nature of our reality.
Is the gardener a fool? Is he just wasting time? What’s going to happen next year? Will the tree produce or not? And then, what will happen?
Well, here’s the most interesting thing about this story, we don’t get the final act. Jesus’ parable just ends without telling us what happens next. We don’t know if the gardener or the owner was right. We don’t know what happens to the tree. Brandon Scott, the great commentator on the parables, says that this way of telling the story draws the hearer into supplying the missing details.
The funny thing is how often this happens in Jesus’ story-telling. In fact, James Breech in his study of the parables says that they always finish without a clear ending. One of the key features of Jesus’ stories is their openness. The story goes on; it isn’t over.
So, why is this? What’s happening?
Scott says that the unresolved endings leave open future possibilities. Michael Curry adds that it’s about future possibility that we neither control nor can manage. James Breech writes that these open endings emancipate our imaginations. Breech adds:
In place of closure, ending, or finality, at the end of these stories we have opening and complexity, a sudden revelation of the genuine ambiguity that occurs when the consequences of actions are seen in terms of the way they penetrate the lives of others.
(That “lives of others” is our theme for Season of Lent.)
Instead of clarity and closure, we experience ambiguity. Jesus is inviting us into a mode of living that rests within the ambiguity and messiness of the world. And, I think that’s what ties together the two parts of today’s Gospel reading! The first part about unjust violence and our deep human need to understand evil and suffering. Plus, the parable of the fig tree that doesn’t produce fruit. Our spiritual task as followers of Jesus—this new way of being human he is modeling for us—means NOT having certainty, not having clarity, not have closure. But, instead, learning to live fully within the messiness and ambiguity and openness to possibility that is the real world.
Now, let’s go back to what happens when we read or hear a story. Here’s David Jasper again, “Interpretation is not a process along a linear trajectory from ignorance to understanding . . . but an endless stimulation to further inquiry and conversation.” We never arrive at a final answer or understanding. Interpretation is an ongoing task.
The theologian Ephraim Radner writes that what it means to be faithful to the biblical text is to understand that reading and interpreting it is an ongoing process. It is in fact not faithful to reading the Bible to arrive at one final, clear, and conclusive answer for all time. Radner says our goal is not one point to arrive at, but instead a whole realm, a world in which we can move around and explore, and in that process come to understand ourselves.
Which also means playing with multiple interpretations. John Caputo emphasizes this idea in his work, the playfulness of reading and interpretation. And that the real goal is not one answer, the real goal is to multiply interpretations, to see the text from as many vantage points as we can.
Now to a certain type of religious mind this sounds awful, even heretical. A sign of a fallen and sinful creation. Surely there must be one final and certain answer.
But I love how the Reformed scholar James K. A. Smith writes about it:
The sin of [the Tower of] Babel was its quest for unity—one interpretation, one reading, one people—which was an abandonment of creational diversity and plurality in favor of exclusion and violence . . . . Plurality in interpretation is not the original sin; it is, on the contrary, the original goodness of creation.
I love that idea. God created this world rich in perspectives and different voices. So to be faithful to God is to open ourselves to listen to all that variety. Smith concludes his book with calling us to a “field of multiplicitous meeting in the wild spaces of love where there is room for a plurality of God’s creatures to speak, sing, and dance in a multivalent chorus of tongues.”
And because we cannot rest on one final, settled meaning—of the story, of the Bible, of the world, of ourselves—then we should be humbly reminded that we aren’t in this alone, but part of a great, wonderful web of creation. We cannot begin to understand anything without being open to the ways that the lives of other people and the rest of creation shape us.
Which then leads us back to the gardener spreading his manure on the tree. I think Jesus is reminding us to be merciful. To each other. And to ourselves. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen.
I love how Brandon Scott, then, concludes his telling of this story, “We keep on manuring. What else is there to do?”