Today’s Psalm reminds us “The Lord is kind and merciful”. The Gospel Verse calls us to “Repent, says the Lord; the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. And the Gospel (Luke 13:1-9) offers insight to all this in the setting of my life, if I am open to it.
In the Gospel Story the people asked Jesus about Pilate killing some people. They felt they had Abba all figured out. Abba took care of the good and punished the bad, at times by letting bad things happen to them. Jesus told them to repent, to change how they see God, or they would be miserable in their ignorance. In the Psalm we pray, “The Lord is kind and merciful.” Many folks are more comfortable with the idea of an angry punishing God than with a God who is kind and merciful to everybody. But we know people who are bad and certainly need to be punished. We don’t mind mercy for ourselves, but we want some control over who receives mercy, certainly not the people we don’t like. So we set up our own standards, sure that our version of god will follow them.
Jesus says “if you do not repent”. Repent is not about sin. Metanoia, which we translate as repent, has to do with changing my mind. When Jesus calls me to repent he is not talking about my sinning. He is talking about my openness to the Spirit moving me to change how I see things, how I see God, to change my way of thinking. Being a disciple of Jesus is being open to the Spirit leading me on a life long journey of growth and repentance, of coming to know Abba up close and personally, but never privately. My relationship with Abba always includes everybody else who is in my life. This can be a hard lesson to learn.
When he was among us Jesus did not refer to God by his formal name, which could not be spoken, but by Abba, Dad, a very familiar form for his Father, God. The Father he knew as Abba was vastly different from the God presented by the Temple system, and as it often is today. Yet, in the Our Father, he invites us to know and address God as Abba. When we do this in our own prayer, it is the beginning of a wonderful experience, one that we cannot control, only accept and go where it takes us.
In the Parable of the Fig Tree, Jesus offers a hint as to how he will help us do this in our own daily living. He is offering us an invitation, not giving us an order. I have the right to refuse to let go and grow. If I don’t want to take the next step, and prefer to hold on to what I know and am comfortable with and can control, I can choose to stay where I am in my relationship with God, I’ll never know what I am missing out on, how real and good Abba is. The gardener says, “leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future”. This Parable might well be the story of my life, of any of our lives as we travel on our journey from Abba, with Abba, to Abba. The gardener offers to fertilize the fig tree to help it bear fruit, This certainly has been true in my life, and I suspect I am not alone in this. I’ve had a lot of fertilizer thrown my way, as we all have. It’s what we do with it that helps us grow, or not.
Like many of us, I was raised to see God as Someone ‘out there’ who was always watching me, and whom I had to please or I wouldn’t get to heaven later. This notion of pleasing usually had to do with keeping all the church rules. I knew all the rules, dogmas, and definitions. I was safe and comfortable in my black and all that it stood for. I had the answers to people’s questions. I learned a lot of that didn’t really matter so much.
While I didn’t know it at the time, one of my most meaningful repent experiences was in Viet Nam. I learned and grew a lot there. One night I was with a platoon. We had set up an NDP (Night Defensive Position) in a valley of some sort. We had reason to believe we were not the only ones there, and we were not welcome. Due to a fluke in commo we could not reach anybody on our tactical radios, but we could pickup AFN (Armed Forces Network) radio. We were pretty scared, as usual. About 0200 the AFN radio played Judy Collins singing Amazing Grace. We all huddled closer as we could and still be alert. All of us felt peace, some, including me, emotionally so. For a brief while it was clear to all of us that God, or Something Good, was very close with us. I think what I learned, or repented, was that God does not save me from much, but is with me, in me, in everything, and I have not forgotten this. I know I did not arrive at this by thinking, only through my lived experience. Abba is real, not out there, here in me and I in him, in each one of us, and we are in Abba.
Often Abba is with me through the people in my life. This means that I’m asked to recognize Abba happening in other people, even, or maybe especially, in people I don’t like. And there are times when Abba asks me to be his presence to others around me. As other guys took care of me in many different ways, I learned to take care of my people, and do whatever it takes.
We are living in difficult and painful times. With so much nastiness and just plain evil going on all around these days, it might be good to ask the Spirit to help me recognize ever more deeply the kind and merciful Abba who is with me, in me, and happening in all this. Jesus is not asking me to know, but to believe, and go where it takes me. A journey of openness and trust, wandering and wondering. A life long process, probably with more fertilizer and digging. I’m okay with that. Just sayin . . .