The Third Sunday in Lent

Today, on the Third Sunday in Lent, I am at Christ Church Cathedral The readings for this day can be found here.

Before we take a closer look at today’s gospel reading, I want to say just a few words about Pontius Pilate. We will see him again, soon enough, so consider this a preview of coming attractions and I ask the Dean to indulge me and not to count it against my sermon time today. It’s more of an aside. Or perhaps a prequel…

By all accounts, Pilate took his job very seriously. And his job was to enforce the Pax Romana in Palestine. Sometimes that meant reminding people who was in charge. A few slaughtered Galileans here and a few murdered Samaritans there was simply factored into the cost of maintaining the Empire. That’s how Empires work. Pilate was neither a nice nor a weak man. And to be on the receiving end of imperial power is always dehumanizing and we have way too many historical examples to point to. Turning human beings into “pawns” for their game on an international chess board of Realpolitik goes against everything our Baptismal Covenant stands for, especially respect for the dignity of every human being.

Pilate was good at his job. This is important to say as we approach Holy Week, because as I said, we will see Pilate again. But the Gospel writers, including Luke, had to be very careful about how they told the story of Jesus’ Passion and particularly how they characterized Pontius Pilate. By the time the gospels get written down, those early followers of the Way of Jesus were just beginning to show up on the radar of the Roman authorities as distinct from Judaism. They had to be politically savvy. They had to be “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” It was only a matter of time before they’d be facing the lions in public arenas.

So Pilate’s role is subtly down-played in the passion narratives for precisely this reason. But make no mistake: it would have been crystal clear to anyone living at that time that crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one and that Jesus was executed primarily because he was perceived as a political threat far more than as a religious threat. So don’t be fooled by the whole “what is truth?” thing that is coming or him washing his hands of it all: Pilate was a cold, calculating, manipulative operative who depended for his paycheck on the Roman Empire remaining intact. If keeping control of the situation meant that a few Jews needed to die, to show who is in charge; well, so be it.

The point is that in today’s gospel reading, those who come to Jesus assume that Pilate is ruthless and they aren’t shocked by it. We shouldn’t be, either. The questions posed by Jesus in this text appear to be “ripped from the day’s headlines.” While we don’t have any confirmation from outside the Bible about the particular incident of Pilate mingling the blood of slaughtered Galileans with the blood from their sacrifices, we have plenty of references to confirm his barbarism. One example, recorded by Josephus, is about a group of Samaritans who were climbing Mt. Gerizim that he had killed. So in today’s gospel reading, Jesus seizes on current events to ask the theological question that is raised whenever bad things happen to innocent people. The first of those two incidents is a ruthless act ordered by Pilate on behalf of the Roman government. “Do you think that this happened to the victims,” Jesus asks, “because they were worse sinners than others?” The second is a tragic accident, the collapse of a tower over at Siloam that raises the very same question every collapsed tower in every time and place raises: “Do you think those who died were worse sinners than others?”

Notice that it is Jesus who asks and then answers both of his own questions. And that he is clear: no, they were not worse sinners. Those two events were not some punishment from God. Jesus rejects the notion that tragedies like this are connected to moral behavior. Those people did not deserve to die. Full stop.

Yet behind such questions is always another question, usually buried under some amount of anxiety and uncertainty. Sometimes we ask such questions because we already know deep down that the answer is “no.” But that can be a terrifying reality to confront. If the answer is “yes”—if those people were in fact worse sinners, then our world can remain a tidy and ordered place. If bad things only happen to bad people and good things happen to good people, there is some comfort in that. We can keep ourselves safe by behaving. By showing up in church on the third Sunday of Lent.

But of course that isn’t how the world is. And if it might just as easily have been you or me who was among those Galileans or in that tower in Siloam, or in one of those World Trade Center towers or one of those apartments in Miami, then the world turns out to be a whole lot more complicated. Sometimes people never smoke a cigarette their whole lives and they get lung cancer and die. Sometimes people get all the aerobic exercise they are supposed to and eat a low-fat, healthy diet, and then they drop dead of a heart attack. Sometimes chaos is unleashed, and things happen for no good reason. Ask Job. (Phone a friend!) Sometimes life is uncertain, and brutally unfair.

So Jesus is clear: no…they were not worse sinners. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t important things to ponder after such tragic events. Precisely because the world is not always tidy and predictable, we can take such moments and reflect on them. Moreover, they can become for us occasions that invite true repentance. That’s where this journey of Lent began, after all: remember that you are dust. Remember we will all return to the earth. So repent now, and live.

Repentance. In Greek, it’s meta-noia. Meta- is the prefix we know from metamorphosis; it means “to change.” The root word is the same as in the English word, paranoia. Para-noia is when you are, literally, “out of your mind.” Noia, in other words, is “mind.”  So metanoia means, literally, “to change your mind.”

Repentance isn’t a feeling of being sad or ashamed or even guilty. Repentance is about changing our minds and amending our lives.

Most people I know, including myself, don’t like to have to consider changing our minds about much of anything. Most arguments are more about stating our case than listening. We try to keep things in order, holding onto the “way we were raised” or the “way we were taught” as if that settles the matter. People were taught for centuries that the world was flat, though. People were taught for a very long time that black people were property and that women must never be ordained, and that the first European settlers and the native Americans got along just swell and that gay people should stay in their closets and keep quiet.

The story is told from the desert tradition: once upon a time a visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life. The Teacher said to the visitor, If what you seek is Truth there is one thing you must have above all else. I know, the visitor said. To find Truth I must have an overwhelming passion for it. No, the Teacher said. In order to find Truth, you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.

Faith is not a security blanket to keep us snug and warm. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says that the Bible isn't there to give us easy answers; it's there to help shape better questions that keep us moving in the right direction.

At the heart of Lent is this notion that true repentance is not about stability, but about being shaken up from the inside-out. It demands that we learn to live with contradiction and ambiguity; that we learn to encounter “the other” as a gift and not someone to be feared. We are commanded to love the stranger and not fear her because that person sees things from a different angle than we do and therefore can help us to change for good.

It is of course easier to just shout louder than it is to listen and easier still to make our world smaller and smaller until it is filled only with people who tell us what we already know to be true. We can make echo chambers that assure never allow us to question what we know. The problem with that way of being in the world, however, is that we stop learning and we stop growing. And when that happens, repentance becomes nothing more than spiritual narcissism.

The Christian journey is about growth into the full stature of Christ, and there is never growth without change. Jesus invites us to true repentance. He seems to be suggesting in today’s reading that the uncertainties of life can become an opportunity for spiritual growth. It isn’t always about big national tragedies. Sometimes it can happen when a person who is very dear to us dies. Or when we encounter failure. Anything that helps us to see that we, too, are mortal; that we, too, will one day return to the dust.

The parable of the fig-tree comes at all of this in a way that speaks more to “right-brained” people. A fig tree that doesn’t produce figs isn’t doing what it’s meant to do. The owner of the vineyard says to the gardener that he may as well cut it down; it’s just wasting soil. The gardener, however, buys the tree another year by digging around it and fertilizing it in the hopes that it will still bear fruit. The tree gets a second chance, another year to see if it might do what it is meant to do.

Jesus invites us to see our lives in the same way. What if when tragedy strikes, we ponder the implications long enough to ask the question, “what if that was me?” And what if in the very asking of the question we discover the seeds of change and become willing to dig around the ground of our lives and to fertilize our souls? Such things offer us an opportunity for real change, for new possibilities, and therefore for authentic spiritual growth. What happens when we hear God giving us a second chance, another year “to bear the fruit that is worthy of repentance.”  How might your life change if you were told you had one year to live?

What needs to happen for you to tap into the creativity God has given you, the gifts God has given you to use in service to others, that make you more fully alive? If your present life bears no resemblance to the way you answer that question, and you begin to make some real changes in order to get closer (even incremental ones) then this will indeed by a truly holy Lent that leads to the joy of Easter morning and to new and abundant life.

So, those Galileans who were killed by Pilate…those eighteen who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them…were they worse sinners than anyone here today? No, of course not. But may the very asking of such questions be for us an invitation to reflect on the fragility and vulnerability of our lives, and in so doing to reevaluate our priorities and get real about what is important. May the asking of such questions remind us that we are all dust and become an opportunity to make some changes that allow us to return to God with all our heart and with all our mind and with all our soul. And then bear fruit that is worthy of repentance.