What the fig?

  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