Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Lent 3, 23^rd of March 2025

Luke 13:1-9
1 Corinthians 10:1-13

The Apostle Paul can do things that we cannot. As I said last week, when we twenty-first century Christians read Paul’s letters some two thousand years after Paul wrote them, we must remember that Paul is writing as a Jew who believes that Gentiles have become part of the covenant people of Israel through their faith in Christ. Paul does not see Judaism and Christianity as separate religions. As a Jew, Paul can use the Jewish Scriptures in ways that make most Christian biblical commentators very nervous. Very few Christian biblical scholars would read the story of Israel in the wilderness in the allegorical way Paul does in his first letter to the church in Corinth.

Corinth was a Roman colony, built on the ruins of a city Rome had destroyed in the second century BC because the Corinthians had led the resistance to the Roman invasion of Greece. The first colonists had come from the excess population of Rome, and included freed slaves and army veterans. This was a very Gentile city, the centre of Roman imperial culture in Greece. The Christian community in Corinth was riven by internal division, which was why Paul needed to write to them several times. In today’s reading Paul is answering the argument of some Corinthians that, since they know that there are no such things as idols, they can eat the food supposedly sacrificed to them. For many of the Corinthians food sacrificed to Greek or Roman gods, bought from their priests, might have been the only meat they could afford to eat. Why not eat food sacrificed to non-existent gods?

Paul agrees with the Corinthians’ argument that there is only ‘one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’. (1 Corinthians 8:4-6) But he warns the Corinthians that they still need to be careful. After all, the Jewish people, the Corinthians’ ancestors in the faith through their baptism, also knew this. And yet they fell into deadly idolatry.

To warn the Corinthians not to be too certain that their faith means that they cannot fall, Paul does some very interesting biblical exegesis. He says that the people of Israel had been baptised by passing through the divided sea when escaping from Egypt, and then following the pillar of cloud. (Exodus 13:21 and 14:22) He compares the manna they ate in the wilderness to the bread of the Eucharist: ‘spiritual food’. (Exodus 16:4-35) He describes the fresh water that came from the rock at Horeb as ‘spiritual drink’ like the blood of Christ, and even says that ‘the rock was Christ’. (Exodus 17:6) Paul is arguing that the people of Israel had the same initiation and practices as the Corinthians. They were baptised, and they participated in the Eucharist. This is an argument that only someone like Paul could make.

Then Paul gets to the meat of his argument. Despite being baptised, despite being fed and having their thirst quenched by the self-giving of God, the people of Israel worshipped idols, complained, and tested the Lord. So sinful were they that God decided that of the wilderness generation only Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun would enter the Promised Land. (Numbers 14:26-30) The people of Israel worshipped the golden calf made by Aaron (Exodus 32:4-6) and the Moabite god Baal. (Numbers 25:1-9) They whinged about having no food and water in the wilderness (Numbers 21:5-6) and complained about the leadership of Moses and Aaron. (Numbers 16:41-49) On each of these occasions, Paul reminds the Corinthians, thousands died. ‘Now these things occurred as examples for us,’ Paul writes, ‘so that we might not desire evil as they did.’

The way Paul uses the Jewish Scriptures in his argument makes me nervous. It seems to me to be denying the integrity of the story of the Exodus, to read the Christian sacraments back into it in this way. But I do agree with Paul that we can look to the people of Israel as ancestors in the faith, examples for us. And what Paul points out to the Corinthians is that even as the people of God, even as those saved from slavery and promised a land of their own, the people of Israel continuously fail and fall short and spend an enormous amount of time whinging and moaning. Paul warns the Corinthians, those who believe that they have the truth and are wiser than others, that having such wisdom does not mean that they will never fall. As Paul writes elsewhere, ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ both Jews and Gentiles. (Romans 3:23)

In today’s reading from the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus also reminds his hearers that everyone sins and falls short of the glory of God. I have talked before about the way Jesus’ response to those asking him about ‘the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices’ destroys the ‘prosperity gospel’ and victim-blaming. Today I want to focus on Jesus’ call to repentance. Jesus is walking the road to his death, a death that will come as suddenly and violently as the deaths of the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices and the eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell. Knowing that his time is almost up, Jesus warns those around him to be prepared because their time may come at any moment, too. Rabbi Eliezer had told the Jews that they should spend the last day before their death in repentance. His disciples said that since a person could die at any time, repentance should happen every day. Living in a wealthy, peaceful country with an unbelievably good health system, we twenty-first-century Australians do not believe that every day might be our last. But for us, too, there will one day be a last day, and Jesus wants us to be ready for it.

Yet when Jesus goes on to tell the parable of the fig tree, there is no talk about immediate perishing. John the Baptist may have warned that ‘Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire’ (Luke 3:9) but the fig tree in today’s parable is not immediately cut down. It has been useless for three years, and yet it is still given a fourth year in which to bear fruit. More than that, it is given every opportunity to bear that fruit. The gardener is going to dig around it and put manure on it before finally giving up on it.

The manure, koprian in Greek, poo in the words of today’s picture book, is a metaphor for the humility needed for repentance. The root of the word ‘humility’ is the Latin word humus, which means dirt or ground, the dust from which all human beings are made. Lent begins with the reminder that we were made from dust and to dust we will return. It is only when we accept our dusty status that we can have the humility needed for repentance. This humility is a gift; it is soothing not to have to try to be perfect. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk, said that ‘when he failed, he did nothing but admit his fault and say to God, “I will never do anything else if You leave me alone; it is up to You to prevent me from falling and to correct what is not good.” Afterward, he did not trouble himself at all about his fault.’ He also said, ‘when I recognize that I have failed, I confess my failure and I say, “This is my ordinary, my usual behaviour; I do not know how to do anything else.’ If I have not failed, I give thanks to God and confess that success comes from Him.”’[1]

Twentieth-century author Madeleine L’Engle wrote something similar:

I do not have to be right. I have to try to do what is right, but when it turns out, as happens with all of us, to be wrong, then I am free to accept that it was wrong, to say, “I’m sorry,” and to try, if possible, to make reparation. But I have to accept the fact that I am often unwise; that I am not always loving; that I make mistakes; that I am, in fact, human.[2]

The Corinthians believe that their wisdom and knowledge will keep them from idolatry. Paul uses the example of the people of Israel to show that the wise and knowledgeable are just as prone to sin as anyone else. Indeed, Paul warns the Corinthians that it is when they feel least in need of repentance, when they are most sure that they are free from sin, that they are most at risk: ‘If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.’ The people around Jesus reassure themselves that they are not the sort of wrongdoers whose sins are punished with death. Jesus points out that those who had died in atrocities had not been worse sinners than them. Lent is a time when we are reminded that none of us is perfect. All of us fail and fall short; we always do, say, and do not do, things for which we need to repent.

Yet, despite every way in which we fail to live as the people God created us to be, God remains faithful. We may feel that we are wasting the soil, incapable of producing fruit, but God does not give up on us. The gardener continues to care for us, providing everything that is needed for us to bear good fruit. Every day until our very last day is a chance for us to accept the gardener’s tending, so that we can produce figs, not thorns, grapes, not brambles. Amen.

[1] Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2010) pp. 37,40.

[2] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1980), p. 59.