Do you remember the story Jesus told of the Pharisee and tax collector praying in the synagogue (Luke 18. 9-14)? The Pharisee prayed, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector’. The tax collector prayed, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ Jesus said that it was this man that went down to his home justified, rather than the other. The prayer of the tax collector opened him up to reality – the reality of who he really was – while the prayer of the Pharisee was an exercise in unreality because it was designed to make him look better than he was by comparison with others.
In today's Gospel reading (Luke 13: 1-9), something similar is happening as the story told to Jesus about the Galileans was supposed to demonstrate that their sins had been particularly bad. The belief, at the time, was that bad ends or outcomes were equated to severity of sin. This carried over into experiences in life perceived to be particularly difficult, such as disability. People attempted to identify the particular sin in someone's life that had resulted in the disability, as when Jesus was asked whether it was a man's own sin or that of his parents that had caused the blindness experienced by a man who met Jesus (John 9. 1-12). Jesus said that his blindness was nothing to do with sin at all.
These stories show the extent to which we can come to think of God as a kind of old-fashioned headteacher keeping a record of our sins on a chalkboard and marking some sins as particularly reprehensible and, therefore, deserving of greater punishment. Sometimes we think of God in this way because, like the Pharisee, we want to say ‘I'm alright, Jack!’ meaning it's other people that are the problem and, sometimes, we do it because, like those in the other two stories, we want to identify particular sins done by particular people as being particularly bad.
Jesus is having none of it. God doesn't keep league tables for sins, the challenges we face in life are not punishments inflicted on us by God for particular sins, and we all are sinners. The fact that we are all sinners is the fundamental reality that we need to face and all attempts to grade sins are simply distractions and deflections from facing that core reality.
Lent is an annual opportunity to reflect on that reality. That's why, on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, the sign of the cross is marked on our foreheads and we are told to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. The prayers and practices of Lent exist to open us to reality. Their words of penitence urge us to face the truth about our sins and their impact on others.
We receive the sign of the cross because it is the sign of God's enduring love for us, despite our sin which nails his Son to the cross. It is because God's love for us is deeper than the effects of sin that we can turn to him and know forgiveness and live changed lives.
That is the point of the parable that Jesus tells in response to those who come to tell him about the Galileans. In the story, the vineyard owner wants to get rid of the fig tree which is not bearing fruit, but the gardener says to give it another chance.
The imagery of trees and fruit was regularly used by Jesus in his teaching. His followers are chosen and appointed to bear fruit, so fruitfulness is the overall aim and he tells and enacts parables of fig trees which don’t bear fruit being given further opportunities to become fruitful.
So, God is the one in this story wanting to give the barren tree a new opportunity to flourish. That is what Jesus wants for our lives and what he endured the cross to show; there are no depths to which God will not go to enable us to turn from our sins and be faithful to him. And that means, too, that there is no league table of sins with some being worse than others. We are all sinners and are all in need of the second chances that God provides to turn from our sin.
How do we do this? Like the fig tree which if it doesn’t bear figs is not being fruitful in the way it was created to be, so we need to become authentically the people that God created us to be. David Runcorn argues that if “we define sin solely in terms of wrong actions or thoughts, we trivialise it [and] our diagnosis does not go deep enough.” He says that the Pharisees trivialised sin in this way by being pedantically obsessed “with external standards of behaviour” and that that is why “Jesus furiously castigated and mocked the religion of his day.”
Runcorn says that “who we are always comes before what we do” and that “our choices, desires and actions … always flow from our sense of personal identity.” This means that “our deepest need is not primarily to stop doing or saying bad things” because the power and significance of sin “lies not so much in what we are doing or saying, but in who we think we are.” Real sin, Runcorn argues, is insisting on being what we are not; the desire for a life other than the one God intended human beings to live.
We can, of course, make the decision to live the life that God intended human beings to life at any point and at any time in our lives, but, I wonder, how we are using this Lent to reflect on our own sinfulness, rather than that of others, and also are making this Lent a time to turn back to God and be faithful to Christ. May that be our intent and activity this Lent and always. Amen.
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