What the fig?!
We have been going most
often these days to a little Episcopal church we can walk to. There’s an early
service – an early, not-very-long service – so we can fulfill our religious
obligations almost before Sunday has begun; and we have the rest of the day for
easygoing semi-paganism (and the semi-pelagianism semi-pagans are prone to).
The service is short and the sermons are
short; and the preacher, kind and soft-spoken, ardent without being overzealous,
is usually pretty close to right. As she was this Sunday, I thought, when the
text was that story in Luke where Jesus takes on Pat Robertson and his ilk
(though they’re so damn smug they don’t even know it).
When I was a child, speaking
like a child and especially (clearly) thinking like a child, I was fascinated
that our junior senator, Pat
Robertson’s father, A. (for Absalom) Willis Robertson, could be older than our senior senator, who was 78. My mother
suggested I look up “sclerotic,” but I don’t recall that I did.
The kind preacher did not, incidentally,
use Willis or Pat Robertson as examples in her sermon. But the sermon brought
both to mind.
The story in Luke goes
something like this – my interpretation more than the preacher’s, though suggested by hers:
Jesus attracts people;
it’s not always clear why. But they’re constantly coming to him with something
to say, mostly the kind of self-righteous claptrap people like to be confirmed
in and many now preach in his name.
This time, we are coming to tell him about
“the
Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” – whatever that
means; it sounds horrendous. Pilate must have butchered some worshipers in the
temple and poured their blood over the altar mixed with the blood of the
animals they’d butchered in the temple to pour over the altar. It sounds more than horrendous; it can’t
be the sort of thing that happens all the time. There must be a reason for it.
People don’t suffer like that for no reason. People don’t suffer like that if
they don’t have it coming. (Ask Pat. See him sitting behind his desk, smiling,
waiting for your query.*)
The
people that have come to Jesus seem to be suggesting that they had it coming, the
slaughtered Galileans, because . . . they had it coming. Jesus looks at them.
He says, “You’re thinking that these Galileans suffered in this way because
they were worse sinners than any other Galileans?” He pauses. They don’t nod .
. . at least not outwardly, but he shakes his head: “Unless you change your
thinking, you could end up as they did.”
He
pauses to see if what he has said is sinking in. It’s hard to tell. Now they
are nodding, outwardly.
“Or
those eighteen poor souls that were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on
them – you’re thinking they must have been worse sinners than any other living
in Jerusalem to be crushed to death that way?” He pauses again. They look as if they are (definitely) not confused.
“Not at
all,” Jesus says. “But unless you change your thinking, you could die the same
way they did.”
The preacher paused now, to comment on the story
thus far. “’Repent,’” she was saying, “means turning
 |
| Getting off the point. |
around: changing the way
you think, the way you feel, the way you are, especially if you enjoy the
misfortune of others, if you think their mis-fortune is deserved as much as
your good fortune is.
“It
doesn’t work like that.”
None of us deserves his or her good fortune, she
said. She might have been a Lutheran, except that she said it kindly. None of
us really deserves God’s patience.
Is God patient? This is an aside.
I don’t
think he is. I think he pretends to be, but he is constantly exasperated. He
isn’t patient, there just isn’t much he can do about anything. He isn’t
patient, but he has decided it is best not to care, maybe about the big things –
maybe! – but generally he follows the biblical mandate, “Don’t sweat the small
stuff. And it’s all small stuff.” (Ecclesiastes passim.)
Jesus’ parable is about patience, though; but whose?
The
preacher thought it had to do with the story that preceded it, the one about
the self-righteous Pat Robertsons and their questions. Jesus says to them, “A
man like you planted a fig tree (or, more likely, had one planted); but it hasn’t
turned out the way you thought it should: three years and still hasn’t grown up
and begun to fly right. So you tell your gardener to cut it down: it’s a waste
of the ground it is standing on, the air it has been breathing, the water it has
been slurping up.
“But he
says, ‘What’s your hurry? You are always in a hurry, especially to condemn.
Give it time.
“‘Let’s
say a year,’ the gardener says. ‘I’ll spend some time with it, since you don’t
seem to have any. Maybe that’ll help.’ He looks at the landowner. ‘If it doesn’t,
I’ll propose another year.’ He looks at the landowner again, who is shaking his
head. ‘If you don’t like that proposal, you can cut the thing down yourself.’”
The gardener is thinking, I think: “You just want
to sit behind your damn desk and mug at the cameras. Get the handle of a hoe or
an axe in your hands, or shut the fig up.”
He was
a gardener, and he talked like that.
I’ve gotten off the point of the sermon, I’m
afraid; but sometimes you have to do that. If you want to understand life, the
universe, and everything – and especially Jesus – you have to get off the
point.
_______________
* The Ambiguities regrets it can’t supply a
photograph, because it couldn’t find one on the internet of Pat waiting. In no
image our search turned up was his
mouth not open.
03.01.16
