Roots and Fruits: Luke 13:1-9 - Second Sunday in Lent

When I was very young, nearly all my friends had dreams of becoming an astronaut. That wasn’t my dream, but I still remember learning about the NASA Challenger mission, especially because schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was a passenger on the space shuttle. I remember watching shuttle launch on TV, together with my mom and my grandmother. I was home sick from school that day.

I’ll never forget the sound of my mom and my grandmother crying when the space shuttle exploded. I was only five when that happened, so I didn’t really understand what I saw on TV until they explained it to me.

The global trauma of that tragedy is probably why I remember exactly what I was doing when it happened.

Click here to read the Scripture text

The collapse of the Tower of Siloam was a tragedy well-known to people in Jesus’s day. The tower was situated near the Pool of Siloam, which was a freshwater pool in Jerusalem where sick people would bathe, as there was a widespread belief that the waters had healing powers.

Not much is known about this tragedy, but let’s assume for a moment that an earthquake struck which caused the tower to collapse on those bathing or gathering water at the pool, many of whom would have been severely ill.

Naturally, many would have been asking how God could allow such a thing to happen. Many religious leaders would have asserted that these deaths were acts of divine judgment.

That’s a very simple explanation, but not one Jesus embraced. Jesus does not address any questions of “why” this tragedy happened, or why some Galileans fell prey to Pontius Pilate’s monstrous cruelty. Instead, he mentions these tragedies to make an important point: “unless you repent you will all perish just as they did.”

Image by Thomas Hoang from Pixabay

To be clear, Jesus is not suggesting that you can protect yourself from bloodthirsty tyrants or tragic accidents with repentance.

I believe Jesus is raising an altogether different point: that life is short, and death can come without warning. Therefore, repentance is not something you can afford to put off until a more convenient time.

There is no other time but now to reject the gods of this world, put away pride and self-centeredness, and re-orient your life to God and God’s purposes. But you cannot do those things on your own.

Repentance always begins with God taking the initiative. God calls out to you in love through the Gospel, convicting you of your sin, exposing the unrighteousness of your thoughts, habits, lifestyles, and ambitions. Often times, you don’t really hear him until something happens that shatters your illusions of invincibility, or until you do something that shatters your illusions of infallibility.

Every time God acts, you will face a choice: will you continue to live for the here-and-now, to gratify the desires of your flesh, to make a name for yourself in the world? Or will you leave these things behind to live for God’s eternal purposes?

You can be rich and leave behind monetary or material gifts that bless future generations. You can have monuments erected to tell the world you existed when your life disappears from memory. But without Christ, you cannot do any lasting good. You cannot be free of sin. You cannot save yourself from death. Your body, your spirit, and your memory will perish in time. The sum of all your strivings and hard work will be zero.

A tree cannot bear fruit without good soil. Lent is a time for you and for all Christians to attend to your roots, because it is impossible to bear the fruits of repentance unless your mind, your soul, and your will are rooted in the soil that is the Gospel.

There is already more than enough anger, anxiety, greed, hatred, and violence contaminating this world, and if your life is rooted in these things, you won’t bear fruit. Just pollution. To waste your life is to leave the world in a worse state than it was when you came into it.

The good news is that you have a choice. You can turn off cable news, you can put down your phone, you can climb off the hamster wheel, you can call off your dogs and eat the bread of life that is the Gospel, drink the cup of your forgiveness, receive your welcome into the Body of Christ, and live for what really matters. In Christ, you will bear the sweet fruits of faith, hope, and love, so that family, friends, neighbors, and strangers will be fed with the goodness of God. The fruits of faith, hope, and love you bear today will ultimately become foundation stones upon which God’s coming Kingdom will arise. When you die, your life will keep bearing fruit.

Jesus is calling, and you can make this moment matter for eternity. You have the time, so take it. Salvation isn’t something that happens in the future. It is happening now. You don’t want to miss out. Will you continue to live for the here-and-now, to gratify the desires of your flesh, to make a name for yourself in the world? Or will you leave these things behind and let your life be rooted in God’s eternal purposes?