New Mindset

March 24, 2019

Third Sunday in Lent

There is something particularly distasteful about the early part of our gospel reading today. The phrase 'whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices' is both obscure and nasty. The Galileans in question must have been busy slaughtering animals when Roman soldiers came up behind them and treated them in the same way. Once you start to imagine it there is a very high yuk factor indeed.

But I am also rather put out by the way Jesus talks about this event and the collapse of the tower of Siloam. What strikes me is a complete absence of compassion or concern for those who were killed.

Of course the gospels were written many decades after the events they describe and were written not to give the full picture but to make certain points, Nonetheless I myself would have liked it if Luke - the most humanly sympathetic of the evangelists - had conveyed some sense that Jesus was rather sad and sorry when he thought about the victims in these events.

But you can't have the bible you want, any more than you can have the Jesus you want or the God you want. And before I continue down this track of criticizing Jesus for a lack of pastoral sympathy maybe I should think again about what he was saying and why. One thing that you can say about Jesus as pastor is that his concern always seems to be primarily with the people in front of him. Indeed his capacity to focus on individual need in the midst of a crowd or the busy press of event after event is something quite distinctive, and in it perhaps lies origin of the Christian concern with individuals.

In this particular passage his concern is with the lives of those in front of him, and it seems he was using shock tactics to achieve a particular end. He wanted them to repent.

If you read through the first 12 chapters of Luke you will see that this is the first time that Jesus has said 'repent'. He has been busy traveling, healing, exorcising, preaching and from time to time he has let rip with some pretty hostile criticism, pronouncing woes on the rich and on hypocrites. But never has he explicitly said 'repent'. In Luke's third chapter we meet John the Baptist proclaiming 'a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins' but in Luke gospel John does not tell people to repent in the abstract he says, 'bear fruits worthy of repentance'. When they ask what on earth that might mean he gives very practical answers - 'if you have two coats give one away. If you have food enough , give some of that away.' Some unlikely characters also asked advice - so we read that tax collectors are not to ask for money on top of the taxes and soldiers (Roman ones presumably) are to stop extorting and to be content with their wages.

In chapter 13 Jesus is not so practical; he is urgent and (perhaps) exasperated. I get the impression that the people around him had quite liked the healing and the casting out of demons side of his ministry, but hadn’t really got the message that their own lives had to change. Or maybe they thought that there would be time enough for repentance in years to come. You can see the argument. Once you get to a certain age various sins and excesses are less attractive, and the young at least, imagine that the compulsions and desires that pull our lives out of shape diminish as the years click round. But whether younger or older we can all succumb to the thought that repentance is something for another day.

And yet when we think of this that we need to hear Jesus say, 'You remember that natural disaster you heard about on the news a few days ago. What do you think of those people? Were they being punished? Had they been set aside for this because they were so evil? Not a bit of it.'

And here Jesus doesn’t do what we would like him to do and give some kind of explanation of suffering that seems random ... he just says 'these things happen' and 'next time it might be you'. 

There are some people whose lives are so vulnerable that they don’t need to hear this sermon. They know from their near misses they have had already and from the damage that has been inflicted on members of their community, that their life hangs in the balance every day. I don’t know, but I suspect that for the Episcopalians of Chicago it isn’t quite like that - any more than it is for me - a Cambridge Dean.

So it is the likes of us who need not an interpretation of this message of Jesus but its amplification. 

So maybe I should shout the word 'repent' as loud as I can. You'll be relieved to know that's not my style. Nor do I believe it to be very effective. I have seen it done. We had a service of Evensong interrupted by a student who thought this was the very message for the hundreds of people in the Chapel that evening. He succeeded in embarrassing himself, but I am confident that his shouting caused no one to repent. So I am not going to follow the example. Rather let me take the advice of a very poor man I met on the Cape Flats of south Africa who said if you want to communicate something very important and difficult you must speak in a low voice.

So let me, in a low voice mention, gently and kindly, that a little bit of repentance would not come amiss, brothers and sisters. You may think that there will be plenty of time for that sort of thing later - but, as Jesus says, whose knows whether there is going to be a later? And even if there is some later- who knows if there is going to be enough?

Now if I have convinced you then you ought to come back to me and say 'and what do you think repentance might look life in my life?' and I would have to answer 'I'm sorry I don't know you well enough to answer.' But you know that so if you are smart you will ask - 'can you say a little more about this word 'repentance' which, to be honest, we don't use in our everyday lives and so it is hard to make any realistic connections'.

 

To which I reply, 'fair enough'. Indeed I agree with you very much that its no good using fancy language in church if you really want people to actually do anything about it outside of church'.

 

So let me be clear. To repent means to change. In particular, it means to change your mind - or to develop a new mind, a better way of looking at things. You could reasonably say that the Greek word 'metanoia', which is translated repentance, means 'new mind-set'.

Actual repentance always involves a deep change at the head level - but is also a change or heart and behaviour. So to repent is not to take on the punitive practices of the self-hating, but rather to grow into habits of living that are better for you, as well as for everyone else. Very often this will involve changing our relationship with things that give us comfort or pride or security, or away from our compulsions and addictions. But to repent is not to give something up for the forty days of Lent. Rather it is to develop an outlook on life that puts the highest value on the things that are the most worthwhile. These I suggest are things such as the love of people we know, concern for the wellbeing of people we don't know, justice and freedom for all, and then truth and integrity and beauty and peace. A person who repents is not one who feels deep guilt about minor matters but one who puts their best energies into progressing these Christian values.

Our first lesson began, as our gospel ended, with some spiritual botany -a plant that drew attention to itself. And both these vignettes can teach us something about repentance.

Moses is going about his work when he notices the bush on fire but not being consumed. 'I will turn aside and see this great sight', he says. Here is a moment of repentance. He turns. He looks. He listens. Just for a minute. And his mind is changed. His outlook is changed. His life is changed. And history is changed.

Then there is the fig tree that is bearing no fruit - yet again. The man who put it there is fed up. But the gardener protests. Give it one more chance. I will feed it, and then it will bear fruit.

The repentance here is in the mind of the man who had run out of patience. But this is also a kindly note. There is recognition, perhaps, that the story about the slaughtered Galileans and the poor people killed when the tower of Siloam crashed on them went a bit too far. The point is not that you have to turn your life around on a sixpence, but that there needs to be some hope of improvement.

Does this mean that I am going to give a pass to those of you who are thinking that the road of repentance is not for them? Not at all. What I am going to say to you is that if you can't work out what repentance might mean in your life at this stage get yourself some serious spiritual manure. Steep yourself in the bible, in the sacraments, in some spiritual reading or listening or get yourself some kind of spiritual life coach. Any of these activities would be great uses of your time - and to begin to engage with them for the first time would itself be an act of repentance.

I am not saying the end is nigh, which is just as well because most of use are going to need all the time we have to turn ourselves around that we might, when we see God, see loving acceptance and not sad disappointment.