Sunday 11th March 2007LENT III

Fr Julian Browning

Isaiah  55  :  1 – 9 ; I  Corinthians  10  :  1 – 13 ; Luke  13  :  1 - 9

My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. Isaiah 55:8

...we have to learn to see a God who forgives, rather than a God who smites down sinners, in other words, as Jesus says today, we must all repent.

We can't read God's mind, but we do want to know why God allows suffering in the world, and, in particular, we would like to know why the innocent and the good people suffer while the villains get off scot-free. It upsets us.  Why do thousands of innocent people die in an earthquake? Today's Gospel is rather modern in feel, because Jesus tackles this problem head on. Ever since Cain and Abel, people had wondered, why do bad things happen to good people? Appalling things happened to Job, and everyone said that he must have done something terribly wrong to deserve all that, but we know he was a good man. Jesus the Son of God received the worst fate, the most terrible death that the world could devise at that time. The Jews associated sin with suffering; you got what you deserve. So when a construction project went wrong, and the tower of Siloam fell down, killing eighteen people, it was natural for them to assume that the workers somehow deserved their fate. Not so, says Jesus, they were no worse than anybody else. An earthquake doesn't care who's good or who's bad.

But although we know that, deep inside remains the conviction that God is the Great Revenger. For some people, when misfortune strikes, it just has to be God making their lives miserable, getting His own back for something, even if they're not sure what it was. Jesus's answer is that God doesn't do this. God is a father, and a father does not stop loving his child. Some things happen by force of nature, other things happen by human folly, but God is not busy smiting sinners at every turn. But to understand this properly you and I have to change our way of looking at things, we have to learn to see a God who forgives, rather than a God who smites down sinners, in other words, as Jesus says today, we must all repent. What is repentance? Repentance is turning again, saying sorry and returning home, but in the New Testament it means more than that. It means more than a change of mind. It means conversion, a reorientation of your personality. Jesus says, Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. To perish in the New Testament means not to know eternal life, never to come to repentance, never to know a loving God. There used to be men walking round London with banners or sandwich boards saying things like Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. They've all won the lottery or gone to heaven, or both. You couldn't get away with it these days, because everyone would think you were advertising a new shopping centre. Modern life is about denying yourself nothing. Ho, every one that thirsteth, come to Bluewater, with that subliminal promise of spiritual refreshment. So I suppose it's down to me, and I haven't got a banner, but the message is the same. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, there is a life for us beyond ourselves. This contradicts the self-sufficiency of our age. Now I for one do not practise what I am preaching, but from the past comes this strong message to us all: there is virtue in self-denial. Lent is a great drama about self-denial, giving up a life, building up to a massive finale in Holy Week. The little acts of self-denial, giving up this that or the other, they might seem artificial, and they are, but they show that we're joining in, they symbolize the self-denial that is part of being alive as human beings, the self-denial that Jesus preached.

Lent is a time for repentance, for turning back to God. We learn a lot about God from horticulture, looking at nature, looking at plants. Jesus chose a fig tree as an illustration. This particular fig tree hasn't done too well. In fact for three years it has produced nothing at all. It's a useless tree. Any of you who have done any gardening will know that moment. You stand in the flower bed, and you say (to the plant, probably)  I'm sorry, but you'll just have to go. Then you think of the three years you have spent weeding the wretched thing.  And it's Lent 2007 in St.Cyprians Church, and of course we are these fruitless trees, and the gardener is giving us yet another chance, one more season to produce the fruits of the Spirit, the self-giving love which can bring about the Kingdom of God. Why is it so urgent? Because with God  it's now or never. He lives in the present. Because, just as we depend on God, so God is counting on us to read the signs in the world around us, not to be complacent about our prosperity and success. In this story of the fig tree, have you noticed what's missing? The story doesn't have an ending. We never find out whether the fig tree produced fruit or whether it was cut down. It's up to us to write the rest of the story for ourselves.

My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord. Self-denial is so unfashionable, so far removed from the spirit of this age, that we must now see it as an unexplored country, we have almost lost the way there. We've lost that art of living with God, which in days gone by was symbolized by Lenten observance. Yet the voice of Jesus is no less insistent: Whosever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.