Luke 13:1-9

This passage in Luke begins with Jesus’ thoughts about “karma,” the belief that nothing either good or bad happens to a person that he does not deserve. In a nutshell, Jesus thinks karma is hogwash. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares unambiguously that God “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Here, where people are speculating about what victims of a couple of tragedies did to deserve their ill fate, his answer is “Nothing.” Tragedy is not a punishment for sin. Which is good news. Sort of.

Sort of, because Jesus uses the occasion to talk about another kind of human tragedy that could happen unless things change. He shifts the conversation: “Enough about those other guys,” he says; “what about you?” Verses 3 and 5 are particularly scary: “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” We really don’t know for certain what Jesus means here, but given that he’s just dismissed the notion of karma, I believe he means that bad behavior has consequences. There are consequences to our individual and collective bad behavior, and those consequences could destroy us. In fact, they will destroy us, if we do not change.

Jesus’ “you” here is plural: “unless [you all] repent, you will all perish.” He’s speaking to the community. He follows with a parable: A landowner had a fig tree that didn’t produce and so he wants to cut it down. He complains to his gardener, “Three years, and nothing! Get rid of it!” The gardener pleads for the tree, saying, “Let me try one more year; I’ll tend it and see if I can get it to bear fruit.”

Some assume the landowner is God and the gardener is Jesus, but nowhere in Luke do we find an angry or impatient God who needs to be placated by a merciful Jesus. In Luke, God is the father waiting for his prodigal son to return; God is the woman searching all night for her lost coin and throwing a party when she finds it. So perhaps God is the gardener who is partial to unyielding fig trees, willing to loosen the soil and spread fertilizer in the hope that we may bear fruit. This parable describes a God who doesn’t give up on us, who gives us another chance, who loves us and wants the best for us.

When the gardener asks for just one more year, I don’t believe it’s a threat. It is reality. We do not have unlimited time to come to our senses, to turn and move in a new direction, to turn in God’s direction, which is all Jesus means by “repent.” I’ve sat with many grieving people who told me that their parent, sibling, or offspring died before they could make things right with the person; before they could reconcile, before they could set the record straight, before they could come to their senses. We can be so stuck on what’s happened in the past, who did what to whom and how angry or hurt we are about it, that we forget, as Frederick Buechner wrote, “True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

As individuals, as a culture, and, yes, even as a nation and a species, we do in fact run out of time to turn things around. We really can destroy our economy, our democracy, our planet, ourselves. And yet here we are, today, not cut down. We have a little more time. We can choose fruitfulness: an act of love, an act of mercy, a work of justice, speaking up for the marginalized, caring for creation, extending time into another season. It requires a turning. A turning of the soil. A turning of the soul. Looking to the future and saying, “Wow!”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Yvette Schock, http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2013-02/grace-or-judgment
David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=671
Nancy Rockwell, http://biteintheapple.com/siloam-and-the-fig-tree/.
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1973; rev’d 1993).