Repent or Perish
David Orendorff · Luke 13:1-9 · March 11, 2007
My NRSV Bible has captions. Before a particular passage there will be something like “Jesus Heals a Crippled Woman.” Today’s passage carries the caption “Repent or Perish.” There is a threat in this which reminded me of a story. 1 “Pecans in the Cemetery,” email from Elaine Kinslow, Dec 2007
On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts.
“One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me,” said one boy. Several dropped and rolled down toward the fence.
Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, he heard, “One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me.”
He knew just what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off. Just around the bend he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along.
“Come here quick,” said the boy, “you won’t believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the Souls.”
The man said, “Beat it kid, can’t you see it’s hard for me to walk.” When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery.
Standing by the fence they heard, “One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me...”
The old man whispered, “Boy, you’ve been tellin’ me the truth. Let’s see if we can see the Lord.”
Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord.
At last they heard, “One for you, one for me. That’s all. Now let’s go get those nuts by the fence and we’ll be done.”
They say the old man made it back to town a full five minutes ahead of the kid on the bike.
Humorously, this story reveals a fundamental misconception about how folks get into the hands of Satan (perish) or into the hands of Jesus (live), and how this misconception can send us running in terror. It is not that Jesus and Satan choose us like dividing nuts, but that by being nuts we choose to bring ourselves harm.
In today’s scripture Jesus shows those who are questioning him how they are nuts in two ways. First, he repudiates the common belief that people get the tragedy they deserve. And secondly, Jesus calls the hearers to repent or they will perish.
First, then: apparently a couple of tragedies have occurred. Some Galileans have come to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage. While they were preparing their animal sacrifices for the temple, Pilate has them killed, thus mixing their blood with the blood of the sacrifice, which is an abomination to God. Notice you are already wondering what they did that made Pilate and/or God angry.
This common belief, supported by some scripture, looks for the cause of the tragedy in the fault of the victim. It is called blessings theology. In its simplest form it says, “Do good and get good. Do bad and get bad.”
It is a sort of Hebrew karma theory, a version of “what goes around comes around.” But it gets into trouble when it extrapolates the logic to say, “If something bad happens, then something bad must have been done.” The whole book of Job was written to repudiate such nonsense. Sometimes, and way too often, very bad things happen to very good people. Jesus doesn’t spend any time explaining why tragedies happen, in answering his own question, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus?” he says, “I tell you ‘no’.”
Then he throws in his own example of another recent tragedy. It seems that some workers were building a tower and it fell on them, killing eighteen of them. Again he asks, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?” and answers flatly, “I tell you ‘no’.”
Jesus doesn’t explain why those particular Galileans are murdered or why those particular 18 are killed by the falling tower. He just says that it has nothing to do with how good or bad they are as people.
Tragedies don’t just happen to the people who have earned them. Some smokers never get cancer and some non-smokers do. Some bad drivers don’t have accidents and some good drivers do. Some people, even very good people, lose their job through no fault of their own. Some folks are killed by tyrants and wars not of their doing. Some laborers are in accidents they did not cause.
But Jesus adds a twist and a threat to both tragedies. And this is my second observation. Twice Jesus says to those who have brought the question of tragedy, “Unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” Jesus loves to twist the listener’s brain as he teaches. Here, he says, on the one hand, “Tragedy does not strike because we are bad.” And on the other hand Jesus says, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
For the first, we know that suffering is no respecter of persons. We know very good people who suffer one tragedy after another. And we also know people who deserve to suffer but seem to skate wickedly through life.
But Jesus seems to say there that we can avoid this suffering if the hearers will repent. Repentance may not avoid tragedy but it avoids perishing. Repentance is not an escape from the suffering in this life, but it is a way to life that is of shalom, is of the Kingdom of Heaven, even in the midst of the tragic.
So what is this repentance that prevents our perishing? “To repent” has a common meaning for us, “Say you are sorry and promise not to do it again.” But “repent” has a very different and a very specific meaning to the gospels. Its Greek word metanoia is a compound word composed of “meta higher” and “nous mind.” It literally means to have a higher thought, purpose or opinion. My lexicon says it this way, “to change one’s mind, or purpose, or opinion.” 2 Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, (Claredon Press, Oxford, 1968), 1115. To the Greek listener, a call to repentance is a call to a new and higher thinking about what life is and who we are. And that higher thought for disciples of Jesus is that God is in charge of our lives, be it joy or suffering, that God is always near to us and that God has a higher purpose for us. Without God we perish. With God we thrive even in tragedy.
A nurse took the tired, anxious serviceman to the bedside.
“Your son is here,” she said to the old man. She had to repeat the words several times before the patient’s eyes opened.
Heavily sedated because of the pain of his heart attack, he dimly saw the young uniformed Marine standing outside the oxygen tent. He reached out his hand. The Marine wrapped his toughened fingers around the old man’s limp ones, squeezing a message of love and encouragement.
The nurse brought a chair so that the Marine could sit beside the bed. All through the night the young Marine sat there in the poorly lit ward, holding the old man’s hand and offering him words of love and strength.
Occasionally, the nurse suggested that the Marine move away and rest awhile. He refused.
Whenever the nurse came into the ward, the Marine was oblivious of her and of the night noises of the hospital: the clanking of the oxygen tan; the laughter of the night staff members exchanging greetings; the cries and moans of the other patients. Now and then she heard him say a few gentle words. The dying man said nothing, only held tightly to his son all through the night.
Along towards dawn, the old man died. The Marine released the now lifeless hand he had been holding and went to tell the nurse. While she did what she had to do, he waited.
Finally, she returned. She started to offer words of sympathy, but the Marine interrupted her.
“Who was that man?” he asked.
The nurse was startled, “He was your father,” she answered.
“No, he wasn’t,” the Marine replied. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“Then why didn’t you say something when I took you to him?”
“I knew right away there had been a mistake, but I also knew he needed his son, and his son just wasn’t here. When I realized that he was too sick to tell whether or not I was his son, knowing how much he needed me, I stayed.” 3 Email from Peter Wilson March 2007
The Marine repented, he changed his mind about his intended mission and purpose, in fact we never learn why he was in the hospital to begin with. And he surrendered to a higher mind, a mind of compassion, the mind of God. And in his repentance he comforts the soul of a dying stranger and finds life in himself.
We are asked by Jesus to think anew and to think higher about why we are here. If we believe that our purpose and meaning is about serving first ourselves, then we will perish. But if we repent, change our minds and believe that we are here to worship God, study Jesus and serve others, then we will not perish but have life, and have it abundantly.
We have a choice. We can live with ourselves as the center of the universe or we can live with God, known to us in creator, Christ and Holy Spirit as the center of the universe. To do the former is to invite our own destruction. To do the latter is to live in the Kingdom of Heaven and to know shalom even as we suffer and die.
The season of Lent invites us to reflect on the meaning and purpose of our lives as we come to the end of Jesus’ life. Jesus died to make peace, shalom, possible for us. We are called, as disciples of Jesus, to do the same for each other. In Lent we are asked to repent, to change our minds to a higher way of being. We are asked if we will indeed worship God alone and follow Jesus to the cross.
Shalom and Amen.