Dirty Work

Luke 13:1-8

Third Sunday of Lent:  March 3, 2013

“You do the dishes!”  “No, YOU do the dishes!”  “No, YOU do the dishes!”

“You tell mom” etc.

Whenever something was icky, or scary, or taxing, we pretty much sounded like this.

“A man had a fig three that had not produced fruit in three years.  He called his gardener and said, ‘You cut it down.’”

Says the gardener to the man, “…if after I tend to it for a year it doesn’t produce fruit, you cut it down.” 

It seems neither wants to be the one to chop down the tree themselves.    No one wants to do the dirty work. 

Of course, this isn’t a story of petulant children.  It’s a parable, and when you try to figure out what a parable means, it’s all in the casting.  And this one has been type cast for a long time.

Traditionally, here’s how it goes:

God = the land owner

Jesus = gardener

We are the tree – us…not producing any fruit.

Garden or the field is God’s kingdom…the field of the saved.

Briefly put, then, the meaning is:  God is angry at us = we are sinning.  There’s no fruit, so God threatens to condemn us all.  Jesus is there to give people one more chance to repent.  If we don’t, the land owner, God, will come back and chop us down.  You can’t stay in my kingdom. 

In this version, God does the dirty work of judging and killing.  Jesus does the dirty work of spreading the manure around the tree…the last chance to coax a few buds to break through in hopes of saving everyone, and somehow God and Jesus end up sounding like me and my siblings:  “You cut it down!” “No, you cut it down.” 

Interpreting the bible is always a little fraught.  We don’t know what the authors were thinking, we don’t know exactly what Jesus said or did, and ever if we did we don’t know what was going on in Jesus’ head either.  Parables add a dimension to this fraught journey that makes it even worse.  They are inherently a little cryptic – it’s supposed to be hard to figure out what they are saying.  That’s built in to the literary form of a parable. 

We can debate endlessly why Jesus – or the authors of the gospels – thought it was a good idea to use parables if they were trying to get people to understand something, but there they are.  Cryptic, ancient, odd, and whenever you finish interpreting them, you better go back and try again. 

So I offer you how the story speaks to me this week.  I hope the Spirit is in my understanding, or at least in yours so that you can correct mine.

And I tried to be traditional.  I tried to take the cast as it has always been.  But, I made the mistake of reading the paragraph right before the parable, and I got this funny feeling that with the traditional casting, I was doing the very thing the people Jesus was talking to in this passage were doing and it seems Jesus wasn’t impressed with their thinking.  So, traditional wasn’t feeling so good. 

By this time in his ministry, there were crowds pretty much wherever Jesus went.  This time, he’s surrounded by people and some of them start talking to him about something Pilate had done.  Pilate had killed – slaughtered - some Galileans when they brought their sacrifices to Jerusalem.  We don’t know exactly why these folks brought up this gruesome event, but Jesus takes a guess at their intentions.  He thinks what they are really asking is, did God use Pilate to do God’s dirty work; to be an agent that exacted God’s judgment.  Did they die because they displeased Yahweh?  Or put another way, what do their deaths mean?  Does God make people suffer for their sins?

And here’s what Jesus said:   “Do you think these Galileans, because they were ruthlessly killed by Pilate, are any worse sinners than any of you?”   Apparently, the people thought of God as judge, jury and executioner (even if by proxy) of the human race.  And since Pilate killed “them” and not “us” then we must be cool with God.  Jesus says, “yeah – God doesn’t work that way.”

And then he gives another example they didn’t even bring up; the tower of Siloam fell and killed 18 people.  Also, he says, not God’s judgment.  Those folks, the Galileans Pilate killed and the victims of the tower disaster, they died because in our world people die in many ways – including at the hands of ruthless dictators and from random disasters.   “Our brokenness,” Jesus says, “means there will be deaths that are meaningless – people will suffer senselessly.  God has nothing to do with that.”

It’s a tempting way to look at God and the world:  God punishing us for our sins by causing our suffering.  For one, you get to feel pretty good about yourself if you aren’t the one being “punished,” so to speak.  But I think it’s tempting for another reason.  At least this gives meaning to things that don’t otherwise make sense.  If somehow it’s God’s plan, it’s meaningful in some way, even if we don’t understand it.  And that’s a big draw for many of us – meaning; ways of making sense of what seems senseless. 

Even if we are the ones suffering, we tend to want to make meaning of it in this way:  What did I do to deserve this, we ask.  Or the more subtle version:  “What is God trying to teach me with this?”  The assumption seems to be that God causes, or uses, suffering to teach us, judge us, and punish us.

Accepting meaningless suffering and death is not easy.  But Jesus says it’s worse if we convict God of something for which God is not responsible.  It gives us a picture of God that is hurtful to others, ourselves, and creation.  It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the character and nature of the divine.  God is not judge, jury and executioner. 

Having said all that first, Jesus turns to the parable.  And based on this first conversation about God’s role in suffering – or lack of role – I’m gonna go ahead and start by taking God out of the role of the axe-happy land owner.  “Bad tree:  must kill.”  That’s not God.  That’s Pilate.

So with God out of the role of land owner, I had to figure out the rest of the cast.  Here’s how I would do it, not that anyone asked me to be the casting director.

Pilate = Land owner

God = Gardener

those who suffer meaninglessly and die ruthlessly = The Barren Tree

The field in which the tree is planed is all of creation and every creature in it…not the domain of the saved.

And you may have noticed I’m still missing the lead actor:  Jesus…well Jesus really takes one for the team:  Jesus is the manure.

From what I can tell, the land owner acts like Pilate:  When people don’t do what he wants – when they don’t produce the fruit he wants – and give it to him – he finds someone to kill them:  chop them down.  They are a waste of good land – they have no value – they’re expendable.  When he has the axe, people die senselessly, and suffer meaninglessly.

And God is the gardener – the lover of the land and the tree alike. And when God has the axe, she hands it back.  Because the tree does not represent sinners to be judged; rather the tree is all of the victims of the broken world – it’s all of us that are subject to senseless suffering and meaningless death.  And it’s the brokenness in us and the world that chops people down for no reason, or for bad reasons.    

God isn’t going to do Pilate’s dirty work for him.  And it is dirty work...blood on your hands kind of dirty work.  God hands the axe back.  That is not dirty work God would do. Instead, God turns to the manure and begins to spread it the soil…work it into the field in hopes that it will enrich the soil and make the land fertile and save any victims on that tree that are subject to the whims of Pilate. 

The only dirty work God is going to do is working the manure into the soil of humanity.  In Jesus, God does get dirty…God gets her hands dirty – but it’s the beautiful kind of dirty.  The kind you want your young child to get because she’s curious and wants to feel the soil and revel in nature and know that dirt is part of creation.  It’s messy, it doesn’t have neat corners and tucked in sheets, but God  plunges her hands into the manure and starts spreading – with the love any gardener has for her garden.  God is the gardener, and Jesus is the life giving fertilizer. 

When cast this way, you get a pretty different picture of God’s nature and the purpose of Jesus’ life.

For example, look at what Jesus has just said to the folks concerned about God’s role in suffering.  He makes that point that the folks who die are no worse or better than anyone else.  Everyone, he says, is equally sinful.  Then he says, “I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”  In the traditional casting, this sounds like a threat.  You’re not better than them, and God, the judge, is gonna get you if you don’t listen to me, your last chance at turning things around for yourselves. 

But if God is the gardener, and we know that’s not how God works, then we hear that verse in a totally different way.  First, we notice that this verse never mentions God, divine judgment or even sin.  He says, “you will perish just as they did – the ones I just got done telling you died senselessly.  Not at God’s hands”  It’s not a threat – it’s a description of reality.  There is senseless suffering, and until things change – until there is a seismic shift in humanity and creation, people will continue to die senselessly.  Pilate still has the axe. 

And the parable Jesus gives them offers the key to making that seismic shift:  Repentance, he calls it.  A turning from one thing to another – one way to another.  The key is to stop looking to Pilate in order to find God acting in the world.  Turn around – God is the gardener…Jesus is the manure, and we’re transforming this field.    

When we see God as judge, wielding an axe, our view of the human condition, our own worth, and the meaning of being in relationship with God is so dismal…and I think Jesus says, “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

When God is gardener, we see a God that would never chop a tree down.  Rather a God who chooses to tend, care for, nurture, the tree…always giving it more time. 

And when the soil is us, instead of the tree, we see that we do need something to help us along.  We can see how we have become dry in places.  How there are times life is destroyed, not nourished, by our brokenness.  How we chop the tree down over and over.  We need a hefty dose of fertilizer:  of walking, talking love.  In other words, we need Jesus as the manure.

I think too often we think God is the one with the axe.  I worry that far too often we think God has handed us the axe to do God’s dirty work of judging and executing.  But if we see someone with an axe, someone appointing themselves as judge and jury, they are not God’s agent.  And if they hand us the axe, we need to hand it right back…if we want to join in the divine activity in the world, we need to hand it back.  If we want to join the divine activity in the world, we have to take one for the team:  we have to be the manure God spreads in the soil.  We have to be fertilizer for a broken world:  Walking, talking love.  Amen.