A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 18, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  Psalm 103;  Luke 13:1-9

He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year,
until I dig around it and put manure on it.” — Luke 13:8

Does anyone here know who Frank Richard Stockton was?  I had to check Google to recall the name of this author of a very well-known story—perhaps the most famous mystery tale ever written that doesn’t have an ending.  Frank Richard Stockton wrote “The Lady or the Tiger?” more than 125 years ago.  Does anyone remember anything else he wrote?  Somewhere I have a copy of The Griffin and the Minor Canon.  There’s a storry called The Bee-Man of Orn illustrated that appeared in a children's picture book edition in the mid-60s illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

“The Lady or the Tiger” is one of the most frustrating stories ever!  In it a man is sentenced to an unusual punishment for having a romance with the king’s daughter.  As the tale comes to a close, he is taken to a public arena where he must choose between two doors.  Behind one is a hungry tiger that will devour him, and behind the other is a beautiful lady-in-waiting, a rival to the princess, whom he will have to marry right then and there. As the crowd waits anxiously for his decision, he sees the princess among the spectators, who points him to the door on the right. The lover starts to open the door and… Here’s where I should say, “Spoiler alert,”  except there’s nothing to spoil.  The story ends abruptly with a question for the reader, “Which came out of the opened door—the lady or the tiger?”

 

Without a doubt, this non-ending is powerful.  It compels the audience to enter into this unfinished story to decide how it should end.  I don’t know about you, but I can remember long arguments with friends about which it was—the lady or the tiger—when we read this story in high school.  Teachers often had students write essays in defense of their answer.  In 1884, literary critics were outraged by this non-ending—it so shook up the literary conventions of the day.  And Stockton was careful never ever to hint at any time in the rest of his life what he thought the ending should be.

Stories without a clear ending…  It occurs to me that Jesus frequently told stories that did not end.  Many of his parables have no clear final act in which all of the loose ends are tied up neatly.  I suspect this was on purpose, at least in part for some of the same reasons Stockton left his story hanging.  For example, in this morning’s parable of the fig tree, we are left in the end with the gardener having a year in which to cultivate and fertilize the tree.  Will it bear fruit or not?  We’re not told.  The story draws us in, asking us to decide which.  And if we see ourselves as the fig tree, then the decision seems pretty important.

One difference about Jesus’ parable, however, is that it is a far more hospitable place for us to enter into than Stockton’s story.  If you engage with the question of the lady or the tiger, there is no way for you to win.  Either choice is a disaster in the world of the story.  He has already opened the door.  If it’s the tiger, he’s dead.  If it’s the lady, then the princess’ heart will break to see him wed to her rival.  But Jesus’ parable offers the possibility of hope.  And the lack of any final resolution at this point actually becomes a way of offering space in which we can live and experience grace.  Let me show you how this works.

Consider a couple of possible endings.  One way Jesus could have wrapped up this story would be to tell how the next year there again was no fruit.  So sure enough the landowner decided to cut down the tree and burn it up in the fire.  In the context of sin and repentance that Jesus has established just prior to this story, such an ending speaks only of final judgment.  In the end, we hearers are left in a place where condemnation reigns supreme, and our only choice is to repent or perish.  So lets consider an alternate, happier ending.  In this version, the gardener cultivates and fertilizes the tree, and it yields a bounteous crop of figs.  So the owner spares it.  That sounds a little better.  But the story remains one of final judgment that still depends on performance, on merit, on works.  What about those of us who understand that all people are sinners and that true repentance can be difficult and problematic?  How can anyone’s repentance be perfect enough that judgment and condemnation might be avoided?  Despite a happier ending, this is not a good place to live.  It is far too difficult to earn our salvation.

Stories with neat and tidy endings assume that some sort of final judgment is always underway.  They tell us we live in a world where accounts are always being totaled up, where we are always judged, and where good is rewarded and evil punished.  But Jesus has just countered all such assumptions.  Those Galileans killed by Pilate and the eighteen killed when the tower of Siloam fell did not perish because of their sin.  He tells those who have been questioning him that they must repent or perish themselves.  That sounds odd considering what he just said about those who dies, but remember that metanoia, the Greek word for repent, literally means to change your way of knowing, think differently.  These people must “repent” or perish because the judgment/punishment way of thinking is destructive and death dealing. 

Jesus might quote Psalm 103 at this point—that “the Lord does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities… as far as the east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us.”  But instead he tells a story—a story with no final ending that invites us to see ourselves as living in a world of possibilities, where the operative word is not judgment but grace.  Through the parable of the fig tree, Jesus indicates that we live in the time when the gardener (a figure for Jesus) is at work in the vineyard of the owner (a figure for God) cultivating and fertilizing the fig tree (the figure for us) so that it might bear fruit.  And some particular features of the parable hint at three important aspects of life in this time and place in God’s vineyard.

The first two involve a close look at two particular Greek words.  The gardener says to the owner, “Let the tree alone for one more year.”  But he’s actually saying much more.  The Greek word we translate as “let” is aphes.  “Aphes,” the gardener says to the owner, “Let it be.”  But aphes means much more than “let it be.”  It means “forgive.”  This is the very word that Luke places on Christ’s lips as he faces death on the cross.  “Aphes… forgive… Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”  So in the Greek text, the gardener literally says to the landowner, “Lord, forgive the fig tree this year also.”  We have lived and continue to live under the forgiveness of divine grace.

Second, there’s some pretty nasty stuff in this world, but somehow it ends up being used for good.  The gardener speaks of digging around the tree and putting manure on it.  The Greek word here for manure is koprion, which is actually a shockingly crude term to come from Jesus’ lips.  This is the only place in all the New Testament that this word occurs.  “Manure” tones it down a lot, and many translations go further by rendering it as “fertilizer.”  But Jesus is not referring to Scott’s Miracle Grow here.  The word koprion lands with a splat.  And while it’s really not appropriate to translate it literally, it reminds the parable’s hearers that life entails both cultivation and koprion—both the good and the bad.  When I ponder Jesus’ use of this word, I recall some of those times in my life as an alcoholic when everything seemed to have turned into crap.  But there is something about the grace of God able to bring good fruits out of truly horrible, even evil, situations.  I know, for I have experienced it.  And I have heard others struggle to express the strange and marvelous mystery that somehow they are grateful for some awful experience because it helped them to grow.  This is not to say that God sent something awful to “teach them a lesson,” but that somehow God brought good out of it.  As the cleaned-up version of the familiar bumper sticker says, “Do-do occurs.”  But the koprion of life somehow contributes to the yield of fruit.

Finally, there’s something going on in the parable of the fig tree (as in most of Jesus’ parables) that challenges and shatters how we commonly view the world.  All too often, our conventional wisdom seems to get things exactly backwards.  So we need to change how we think—metanoia again—repent, turn and try to look at things in a God_centered rather than a me-centered way.  Note that the fig tree will produce fruit only after the gardener cultivates and fertilizes it.  The tree cannot suddenly decide to produce fruit on its own because it has been threatened with destruction.  That is in the hands of the gardener.  The fruit that is repentance does not come first in order for us to earn blessings or grace.  Repentance must be cultivated.  Blessings come first, then repentance.  Grace comes first, then repentance.  Just as we must first experience love, before we can love; just as we must first experience forgiveness, before we can forgive; so we must first experience the grace and blessings of God, before we can repent and turn to God.  Repentance is not so much something we decide to do on our own out of fear of punishment, as it is an overwhelming response to experiencing the love, forgiveness, and grace of God. 

What this all means is that the process of repentance is not so much a matter of figuring out what it is we have done or are doing wrong.  Nor is it so much a matter of trying to get things absolutely right in the way we think, believe, or act in order that we might be more acceptable to God.  Rather repentance involves opening ourselves to experiences of God’s grace—to those moments when we feel God’s tender care in our lives.  It might happen in an unexpected comforting touch… or a time in conversation when someone says exactly the words you needed to hear… or seeing a rainbow… or experiencing undeserved forgiveness… or hearing a child laugh… or attending a wedding and witnessing the love that can fill a sanctuary.  And the appropriate response is a wild mixture of awe, and wonderment, and gratitude, and repentance.

Frederick Buechner captures this insight in his entry for “Repentance” in a marvelous little book he wrote called Wishful Thinking:  An ABC Theologized.  In defining repentance, Buechner writes, “To repent is to come to your senses.  It is not so much something you do as something that happens to you.  True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”  There’s a lot packed into this definition.  Listen to it closely.  “To repent is to come to your senses.  It is not so much something you do as something that happens to you.  True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”  Repentance happens.  (That ought to be on a bumper sticker.)  It happens because grace happens.  And our first word as we turn to God in grateful praise is “Wow!”  Amen and amen.