Richard Davenport
March 23, 2025 – Third Sunday in Lent
Luke 13:1-9
Jesus and his discussion of fairness and gardening resonates with me a bit. In my case, it isn’t so much that I want things to grow and bear fruit, but rather that they didn’t grow. Our next door neighbors have beautiful landscaping. The front of their house is carefully maintained. They have plenty of shade during the hot summers. It certainly adds to how their house looks.
Our house…has bamboo. Thankfully all of it is in the backyard, so you can’t actually see it running rampant and plotting world domination, but we have to deal with it anyway. It looks nice enough, but there’s no way at all to control it. It grows faster than just about any other weed you can think of, by that I mean that, during growing season, a shoot will grow 4-5 in a week. The only real silver lining is that it doesn’t grow year-round. It has a couple of months from mid-spring to mid-summer when it really grows and then it fizzles out and stops.
Still, when Jesus is talking about plants and fairness, our bamboo problem comes to mind. We had a little Japanese maple tree along our front walk die a year or two ago from a hard freeze. It’s unfortunate, but it was at least a problem we could deal with. I got out there and hacked it down and dug out the roots and such. It was a manageable problem. The best we’ve managed with the bamboo is to stem the tide. Each year there’s a certain amount of hacking and slashing that goes on just to keep it on one side of the fence. We’d probably have dealt with it already, except that no one seems to know how to deal with it. Few landscapers even want to touch it and those that are willing to try only have vague notions of what might kill it.
It does feel rather unfair. After all, it’s not like we planted it. But, even though we didn’t plant it, we still have to deal with it, year after year. What did we do to deserve this? We’d love to make the place more functional, to use the space for useful things. We love to add beauty and order to the land we are supposed to be stewards of, but instead we get this nonsense.
The concept of fairness is one that arises very early on in kids. I’m not really sure how the thought process arises in kids, but it seems to be a pretty universal thing. Somewhere within the first couple of years, fairness becomes a huge concern to every kid. Their view of fairness tends to be very rigid. They focus almost exclusively on immediate, tangible things. “My sister got a candy bar, so I should get a candy bar. Not only should I get a candy bar, but it should be one that’s exactly the same size. It could be bigger, that would be ok, but then she’ll want more or she’ll complain that it isn’t fair. That isn’t really my problem though, as long as I get what’s fair for me.”
As adults, we grow out of the sense that fairness is all about physical things and immediate rewards, but that doesn’t mean we all agree on what fairness is or what it looks like. It also doesn’t mean our ideas of fairness are necessarily reasonable. We may adapt and expand what we think of fairness. We may allow more elements on the scales to balance things out, but we still decide for ourselves what counts and what doesn’t.
We look at the state of the church and see how very unfair everything is. Plenty of people out there, atheists, non-believers of every sort, do very well for themselves. They live comfortably and have little worries. Even if they aren’t openly attacking the church, they aren’t living the lives we are called to live by our Creator.
All of that gets compounded when we look at those who do actively attack the church. They are never content to argue against it. They want to silence the church. They want to eradicate it completely. They want to rid the world of God and his laws. The church gets attacked. Christians get attacked. Nothing in this world seems to treat us as it should.
The people who question Jesus today aren’t really trying to trip him up. Jesus has been teaching the people since the beginning of chapter 12. The crowds of people around him are those who a hungry to hear more, or at least curious about what he might say. There probably are some priests and Pharisees in the crowds, but they’re keeping silent for now. The people want to know. They want to understand. There’s no reason to believe the people who had been crushed by the falling tower were doing some sort of terrible thing. They weren’t rioting. They weren’t looting. They were just going about their daily business. The people in the temple had it even worse. They were doing the kinds of things God wanted them to do. They were offering sacrifices to God. What could possibly be wrong with that? Yet they died. They died for no discernable reason. It all looks manifestly unfair and unjust and the people around Jesus want to know why these things happen.
You might argue that this kind of senseless death is a far cry from having bamboo take over your yard, but unfair is unfair. These aren’t the kinds of things that are supposed to happen. If there’s no fairness to the world, if there’s no guarantee anything you do will amount to anything, if there’s no guarantee you won’t just get struck down by some random event, if there’s no guarantee doing the right thing makes any difference at all, then why bother with any of it?
If you look back at the days of the early church, you find it isn’t really what you might think. Jesus sends the apostles out to spread the Gospel. Jesus triumphs over death. There’s nothing that can stand up to him. Yet, the chronicle of the early church is not one of strength. There are no widespread reports of the Christian church standing up to the pagan Roman Empire and ushering in an age of holiness and morality.
No, rather, instead of might we find martyrdom. Christians are scooped up en masse and slaughtered in the worst ways the Romans could think of. They are unfairly vilified and become the pariahs of the Empire. That’s been the story of the church all along. We do ok here, sure, but the same story plays out in many countries all over the world. The church is undermined, banned, insulted, attacked. God’s people deal with problems, frustrations, sadness, and grief, even though we’re supposed to be the ones God blesses.
It rather sounds like God isn’t doing his job. He’s just letting unbelievers walk all over his people. He’s letting the world grind us down until there’s nothing left. He’s ignoring us, or worse, just watching us suffer without bothering to lift a finger. If we can be attacked with whatever abuse the world wants to heap on us at any time, then how can he claim to be our protector and defender? How is being a follower of God really any better than anything else people do?
The church’s problems have always been there. The people in the Gospel reading want to make sense of it. There are those few times, like in the days of Solomon, when things really seem like they’re going well. But, it’s a lot more likely that misery is going to be the order of the day. Solomon did well, but even he fell off the wagon. Things got worse and worse after him until it all hit rock bottom.
The contrast is pretty stark. No, it doesn’t seem very fair that all of these kinds of things happen. No, these aren’t things God’s people should have to deal with. People shouldn’t have a tower fall on them. People shouldn’t get cancer. People shouldn’t have to work constantly to keep their houses and land cared for. They shouldn’t have to worry about their cars working. They shouldn’t have to worry about natural disasters.
Good people, God’s people, shouldn’t have to deal with any of it. But we do. Not only do we have to deal with it, we don’t get the luxury of saying any of it is unfair. We come up with our ideas of fairness by looking at other people. We look at our justice system and say it is fair, we say that it works when bad people are punished and innocent people are exonerated. When bad things happen to good people, or bad people get away, we seek justice. We want the scales to be balanced again. We want everything to be fair.
Jesus responds to the people in a way that only makes sense from God’s perspective. God doesn’t compare us to one another. He compares us to his perfect creation. To understand what God means, we must look at everything that happens in life in light of sin. Should any of these things happen? No. But they do, not necessarily because you or I are any worse than anyone else out there, but because we are all worse, far, far worse, than we should be.
Seeing our lives in light of sin, everything that happens is perfectly fair. Bad things happen. Bad things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, because none of us are truly good. In that regard, we aren’t being treated unfairly at all. It is all a matter of balancing the scales and in order to balance the scales for all of the rotten, malicious, and cruel things we do, there’s a lot that needs to get put on the other side, including death and eternal isolation and loneliness. It’s all perfectly fair.
We continue through Lent, and so it is very appropriate we consider the nature of sin and our place in the world. We see what our sins deserve. We see how sin affects our lives and that the only way to truly make sense of all of the evil that happens is by remembering sins effects on us and the world. But, Lent isn’t just about sin. Lent is still the story of Christ. It’s the story of how God deals with sin very fairly, and yet, because of Christ, he doesn’t deal with us fairly at all. In fact, everything he does for us is completely unfair. It is undeserved and unmerited. Because of Christ, God stacks the scales the wrong way. We don’t get what we deserve at all. God scoops up everything that we should be getting and puts it on Jesus instead. He gets the effects of all sins, everyone’s sins, everyone who has ever lived or will ever live. God treats Jesus unfairly, so that he can then treat us unfairly.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem, but not to get what he deserves, but what we deserve. We are saved, not because God balances out the world, but precisely because he doesn’t. God in his loving grace, forgives our sins and counts them against Jesus instead. Someday, the world will be perfectly fair and just, because sin will no longer be in it. But that day hasn’t come yet. We deal with unfairness now, injustice now, because sin is a reality. We give thanks that God, in his great mercy, looks at us in mercy, instead of justice. We give thanks that Jesus, in his love for us, took what we deserved, and gave us what he deserved instead.