At one level, God sounds pretty mad. How do you read it?Jacob Under the Fig Tree, Vatican Library
Luke 13:1-9
There were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them--do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."
Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?' He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"
3 comments:
In Stephen Holmgren's book, Ethics after Easter, he poses the question why we wish to identify the moral good: so that we can find out what is permitted? or so that we can learn what God asks of us?
The tension in the gospel reading seems to reflect the tension that holds us between these questions in our lives. Are we living the lives God calls us into, giving back to the creation that sustains us as only we uniquely can contribute, or have we chosen passive consumption with a form hold on the remote.
The first Jews to come to America were brought by French privateers who had found them at sea--cast out of Brazil. Nearly a century and a half later 'In 1790, after the Revolution had swept away even the paper disabilities of religious minorities, Moses Seixas wrote to President Washington on behalf of the Jews of Newport, R. I. to tell him how thankful they were to be living under "a government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Wrote Washington in reply: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. [In this nation] everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." (From Time, Sept 20, 1954 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,820258,00.html
I once heard a young gay college student say he thought conservative religious people (like his parents) condemned gays and lesbians so thoroughly because they could be sure they (the straight) weren't guilty of THAT. That if homosexuality was a really BAD sin then NOT being guilty of it would add more weight to the good side of the scales at the Last Judgment. Our blood was not mixed with Pilate's sacrifices, so there must be something good about us. This seems to me to be just one or two synapses removed from shadenfreude.
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