Lent 3C, am, 2025

3rd Sunday in Lent, Year C

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Brothers and sisters in Christ: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

This morning I want us to focus on the Gospel lesson from Luke 13. Now Jesus uses a reference here that’s not well-documented, so I want to explain it and give it some context. Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright offers a really good explanation:

“If the New Testament had never been written, we would still know that Pontius Pilate was an unpleasant and unpopular Governor of Judaea. The Jewish historian Josephus lists several things he did which upset and irritated the local Jewish population. Sometimes he seemed to be deliberately trying to make them angry. He trampled on their religious [passions]; once he tried to bring Roman [military emblems] into Jerusalem, with their pagan symbols. He [mocked] their laws and conventions; once he used money from the Temple treasury to build an aqueduct, and then brutally crushed the rebellion that resulted. These incidents, and others like them, are recorded outside the New Testament, and help us to understand what sort of person Pilate was.

“So it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that on another occasion, while some people on pilgrimage from Galilee had been offering sacrifice in the Temple, Pilate sent the troops in, perhaps fearing a riot, and slaughtered them. The present passage simply speaks of their own blood mingling in the Temple courtyard with the blood of their sacrifices—polluting the place, on top of the human horror and tragedy of such an event. It is as though occupying forces were to invade a church and butcher worshippers on Christmas Day.”

[Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 161–162.]

Now this gives us a better appreciation for what Jesus is saying in Luke 13:2 “... ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?’” The idea that the Galileans who had been killed by Pilate suffered such a horrific, unclean, and shameful death would be interpreted by most Jews to mean that they had committed sins so awful that they brought God’s wrath upon them. They “deserved” to die in that way, or so people might think. He even brings up another example: 18 Jews who were killed when a tower fell on them. That would be like lightning striking and killing them in a group - a freak accident bringing great tragedy - Jews in this era would see it as God’s judgment on an entire group of awful sinners. This is exactly what Jesus is trying to debunk here. “Do you think they’re worse sinners than anyone else in Galilee or Jerusalem?” We can read this as “do you think they were any worse sinners than you are?” And Jesus’ answer: “No, I tell you. But unless you repent, you will die the same way.”

Someone shared an illustration with me in seminary that helped me a lot. If I were to take a poll and ask you to grade sins as “really bad” or “not so bad”, I’m guessing we’d agree on a lot of that. Murder and violent crimes would probably be in the really bad category for all of us. Stealing and adultery probably somewhere in the middle. Lying to someone or coveting someone else’s possessions would probably be seen as “not so bad” by most of us. Fair? That’s all sins against neighbor. Would we agree on idolatry? Taking the Lord’s Name in vain? Violating the Sabbath? I’m guessing we’d not all agree on those things. But still, there would be a variety of “badness” on our chart for these sins.

Now, how does God view them? It’s helpful to remember that our relationship with our neighbor is horizontal, while our relationship with God is vertical. As He’s looking down on us, quite frankly, sin is sin. (If you have any Roman Catholic friends, they’ll disagree with you here… but I’m telling you the Lutheran understanding.) Sin is sin, and all sins are serious because they separate us from God. Now certainly the earthly consequences of our sins will vary based on the seriousness of the sin (murder = jail, while lying might mean a small argument, but the relationship mends quickly); but with God, when we sin - any sin - our relationship is made right with God by faith alone. The fancy church word for that is “justification”. God’s forgiveness comes to us through our faith and trust in Christ’s sacrifice.

Now we get to the heart of this passage, and why it’s good for Lent. We’ve heard before that Lutherans are “pretty good at confession, but we’re not so good at repentance.” Why do you suppose that is? What’s repentance? I think we got a good start with the kids a few minutes ago, but let’s dig a little deeper.

The short definition is that “to repent” means to “turn to / turn back to God”. Not a bad definition. I found it interesting in my study of this passage that the idea of repentance as we find it in the New Testament really doesn’t have a good counterpart in the Old Testament. The best one I found is from Joel 2:12 “‘Yet even now,’ declares the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;’”

That shows us that there’s something you do externally (you make the choice to fast), while there’s something going on internally as well (you’re sad/upset by the conviction that you’ve done wrong in God’s eyes, and you have a deep desire to make it right). It seems logical that confession comes first with this Old Testament understanding. But here’s the hard part: “it is not enough to be sorry for past sins and to pray for their remission or for the aversion of calamity, that what counts is a turning from the sinful nature as such.” [“Μετανοέω, Μετάνοια,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–), 983.]

I like this definition. If you confess your sin, but you keep going back to the sin… then you haven’t really repented of it. If “repent” means “turn to God” then it also means “turn away from the thing which separates you from God.” Going back to that sin means you haven’t turned away from it. You haven’t turned to God.

There’s another piece to this that I think becomes more clear in the New Testament, and that’s the idea of conversion. This is first described by John the Baptist, whose message was one of conversion. He was calling for people to let their hearts be changed. We don’t change our own hearts; God must change them for us. “God grants conversion through baptism.” (ibid.) God gives it to us, and we must let Him give it. Don’t refuse the gift!

Jesus takes this preaching of conversion even farther. His miracles are calls to conversion. Whoever does not convert will fall under divine judgment - that’s what he says in verses 3 and 5 of today’s Gospel lesson. And so having warned his listeners clearly and plainly, he punctuates his teaching with the parable of the fig tree. It seems pretty clear that God is the owner of the vineyard. “it is God who has been coming to Israel these many years, seeking fruit. Maybe Jesus is the gardener, the servant who is now trying, as the owner’s patience wears thin, to dig around and put on manure, to inject some life and health into the old plant before sentence is passed. Either way the end result is the same: ‘If not, you can cut it down.’ Luke’s arrangement of the material from chapter 10 onwards leaves us in no doubt as to how he saw the matter: when Jerusalem fell in AD 70, it was a direct result of refusing to follow the way of peace which Jesus had urged throughout his ministry.

“The passage therefore bristles with a double tension. Will Jerusalem repent and be rescued? And if, as he has been saying, Jesus expects to die himself when he goes there, how do his fate and that of the city relate to one another? What is God up to? And, if we can begin to think about those questions, there are others for us to face ourselves. What is God up to in our world today? In our own lives? Are we bearing fruit for God’s kingdom?” [Wright, 164].

These are wonderful questions to ask ourselves during this season of Lent. If that fig tree metaphor is a little too vague for you, allow me to help a bit. One of the most trusted and beloved Lutheran professors of the last 30 years - Dr. Jim Nestingen - told a gathering of pastors from across the NALC, that it’s our job as preachers of the Gospel to spread the manure. So… I’m your guy when you need the manure. Now, of course, he means fertilizer - to help the soil around the tree of your spiritual life to have the nourishment and environment it needs to grow and bear fruit. Any idea what that might be? First, it’s God’s Word and the Sacraments - make sure you get plenty of that. Gathering with the Body of Christ in worship and fellowship. Personal devotion - prayer and the reading of Scripture. And let’s not forget doing good works for the kingdom of God. That’s also the fruit God is looking for. In this passage, the fruit that *and* the fruit of repentance and conversion.

As we take stock of our spiritual growth and do a little work on our faith journey during Lent, there’s always a danger that we might be thinking about this the wrong way. These things we’re doing to “work” on our faith are not earning God’s favor. We are not working our way to get God to love us more. God’s love and favor have already been earned for us by Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection. There is nothing we can do to add to that. All of that is given to us as a free gift, with no requirements but to trust in Him and believe that He is our Savior. But what we do in our lives is how we respond to this wonderful gift. We respond in faith. As Pastor Dave says “the first thing faith says is ‘thank you’”. How does our Lenten journey show our response to God’s gift of salvation? What fruit do we bear?

Some of you have asked me about what I spend so much silent time during confession doing. Much of it is confessing my sins of the last week - naming them and asking God’s forgiveness. But the end of my silent time is asking God to help me to REPENT. And I always acknowledge that I can’t do it without His help. That conversion that He wants of all of us - that’s His work, and I ask Him to work on me. I invite you to consider doing that for yourselves.

Brothers and sisters, we have indeed been given a great gift. The God Who Created all that there is loves us so much that He sent His Son to fix what we could not. As we examine our faith during this season of Lent, let us invite God in to work on us, and to convert us… to help us turn away from the things that pull us away from Him and turn back to Him. Let’s ask Him to pull us ever closer to Him and lead us to bear the fruit that He created us to bear. What a Lenten journey this will be.

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.