Repent or Perish...Sort of
Luke 13:1-9
Repent or perish! [Let us pray.] If you read from a Bible that features subheadings, that could well be the subheading for this passage, as it is in my edition of the New Revised Standard Version. Repent or perish. It sounds like a message you would hear shouted at you from a street preacher in Times Square. “God is love, but unless you repent, God is going to send you to hell. Repent or perish!” I can’t help but hear that message in the voice of Frank Costanza, the father of Jerry’s best friend George, from the TV show Seinfeld. “I gotta lot of problems with you people!”
And yet “repent or perish” is essentially what Jesus says in this passage. It’s right there in verse 3: “No, I tell you, but unless you repent you will all perish.” Our task today—mine certainly, but also yours, and with the Holy Spirit guiding us—is to hear this message as the good news that it is. That’s right, as difficult as it may seem on the surface, “repent or perish” is not an ultimatum but an invitation, and ultimately good news.
We have been jumping all around the Gospel of Luke now for weeks: Chapter 4, chapter 6, chapter 9, back to chapter 4, and now ahead to chapter 13. As we catch up with Jesus and the disciples here in chapter 13, Jesus has been preaching to large crowds. Some in the crowd tell Jesus about an incident—an atrocity, really—committed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, against some Galilean Jews who were making sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem. The exact nature of what happened remains a mystery. Was it spontaneous or planned? Did the Jews fight back or were they simply slaughtered? We don’t know. This brief mention of the incident in one verse of Luke’s Gospel is the only time it is mentioned in the Bible.
The sketch that we can outline looks something like this. A group of Jews from Galilee—the northern region of Israel where Jesus is from—were visiting the temple in Jerusalem. While they were offering sacrifices, Roman soldiers under the authority of Pilate stormed into the temple and massacred them, mingling their blood with the blood of the animal sacrifices upon the altar. Again, why the Romans did this is unknown. It’s an altogether horrifying incident but just another day in the life of the Roman occupation of Israel.
Luke doesn’t tell us why some in the crowd mention this incident to Jesus. Do they think he hasn’t heard of it? Do they want to know what Jesus thinks about it? Are they trying in some way to test him?
Whatever the case may be, Jesus, as he so often does, responds with a question. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Jesus is challenging the notion of a moral cause and effect. If these Galileans suffered so egregiously, the thinking goes, then they must have done something to deserve it. The unspoken implication is that God would not allow the innocent to suffer, especially in such a horrifying manner. Therefore, those whom Pilate killed must have done something to deserve it.
This way of thinking can be found throughout the Old Testament. The Book of Proverbs is filled with practical wisdom that sets forth two paths: the path of the wise and the righteous and the path of the wicked and/or foolish. The wise and righteous obey God and are blessed while the wicked and foolish disobey and are punished. Proverbs 3:3 lays it out clearly: “The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous.” Cause and effect.
When Job suffers the loss of all his possessions and the death of all his children, his friends tell him that God must be punishing him for some unacknowledged sin.
The consequences of sin can even carry down from one generation to the next. In the Book of Exodus the Lord proclaims that the sins of the parents will be visited upon the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation. That is, sin will leave a legacy, its consequences handed down from parents to children just like brown hair or blue eyes. Cause and effect.
The most salient example, of course, is the Babylonian Exile. The people of Israel understood that their banishment from the promised land and the suffering they endured in exile were God’s just punishment for their sin. Again, cause and effect.
This concept of moral cause and effect is found in the New Testament as well. In the Gospel of John Jesus’ own disciples ask him about the reason that a man was born blind. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). The possibility that the man may have been born blind for any other reason than sin never occurs to them. They simply see an effect and look for a cause.
That is what we do as humans. Where we see an effect, we search for a cause. Why? Because cause and effect makes the world make sense. Cause and effect means that there is an order to things, and we want to see order, because if there is order, then there must be rules. And if there are rules, then we can learn them and follow them and thereby gain for ourselves a sense of control.
It’s like when we hear of some tragedy that befalls a stranger or an acquaintance—not someone with whom we are close and with whom we’d have immediate empathy. What do we do? We look for ways to assure ourselves that whatever it was that happened to them would not happen to us because we follow the rules. Lung cancer? It’s good that I don’t smoke. Mugging? I would never walk through that part of town after dark. Car accident? I always drive defensively.
But what if the rules of moral cause and effect don’t apply? What if there are no rules? That’s what Jesus suggests when he says of those who were murdered in the temple, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem?”
This incident with the tower that collapsed, like the temple massacre, is something that’s mentioned only in the Gospel of Luke. Nevertheless, the point is the same: those who died in the collapse, like those who were killed in the temple, were not exceptional sinners. Their sins were no worse than those of their neighbors.
Put away your measuring stick, Jesus is saying. Stop judging the sins of others. As he so often does, Jesus turns the focus away from others and puts it back on the one asking him the question. “Do you think that they were worse sinners?” is another way of saying, Do you think that you are any less of a sinner than they were? When you gossip about a colleague, when you cheat on your taxes, when you envy your neighbor’s good fortune, when you hold a grudge against your sibling, when you wish destruction upon your enemy, do you think that you are any less of a sinner?
Why do you preoccupy yourself with the speck in your neighbor’s eye when there’s a 2”x4” in your own eye? Don’t concern yourself with the sins of others. You’ve got your own sins to think about. “Unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.”
We must not hear “repent or perish” as an ultimatum but as an invitation.
Boom! There’s the hammer (a fitting tool for a carpenter). “Unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.” Jesus slams it down twice, in fact, in verse 3 and again in verse 5. His point is that we are all sinners. We are all guilty. We are all under a death sentence. We are killing ourselves! All our attempts to justify ourselves before God by trusting in our good works or by thinking (incorrectly) that our sins are not so bad (at least not as bad as some people) are killing us. We are dying.
That is why Jesus invites us to repent. Yes, invites! We must not hear “repent or perish” as an ultimatum but as an invitation. True, in isolation, “repent or perish” does sound threatening. It suggests a God whose anger is barely contained and who can hardly wait to deliver divine justice against a stubbornly sinful humanity.
But that is not at all the image of God that we see in the parable that Jesus tells immediately after saying “repent or perish.” He tells of a man who planted a fig tree in his vineyard and for three years he waits for the tree to bear fruit but it never does. Frustrated, he tells a worker in the vineyard to chop it down. Why should this bad tree waste good soil?
But the worker replies, “Sir, let it alone for one more year. Let me dig around it and fertilize it with manure. If it bears fruit next year, all well and good, but if not, then you can cut it down.”
Last week I mentioned the book Patience With God, which makes the case that patience with God is faith. But in this parable we see a God who is patient with us. We see a God who waits one year, then another, and then still another. And even after that, God allows more time for grace to grow in us until we bear the fruit of repentance, until we repent of our moralistic understanding of a God who rewards the good and punishes the guilty, because that is not the God we meet in Scripture. That is not the God who manifests in Jesus Christ.
The God who comes to us in Jesus Christ does not wait for us to come to him; he comes to us. The God who comes to us in Jesus Christ simply will not give up on us but loves us unto death—not our death but his.
Repent or perish? Well, yes, sort of, but not as an ultimatum but rather as an invitation…as an invitation to let go of our self-justifying ways and receive with gratitude God’s saving grace.