Home Alone
I heard steps on the front porch and peered out the window. No car on the street or in the driveway. I heard the door begin to jiggle. It was the afternoon, and my parents were not due to be home for another few hours. My heart was flooded with fear, and my imagination began to draw from the deep repository of stories and images that had been mentally recorded from years of watching television and movies. Theft, kidnap, car trunks, dark rooms, locked doors, sinister laughter, hushed ransom messages, and so on. Perhaps foremost in my mind was Home Alone, a movie comical in style but frightening in substance, where two older men planning the theft of a home end up waging war on a solitary eight-year-old boy.
As the door continued to jiggle, I jumped out of my paralysis and made a beeline for the back door. Just as the front door began to open, and I rushed out the back door and across the backyard and began to climb the fence. As I dismounted in our neighbor’s yard, I looked behind me. The back door was opening. Was I really being followed? Was this a chase?
There in the frame of the back door stood…my brother. He looked quizzically at me, as if to say, “What are you doing?”
It is a good question, even now. What was I doing? In my ten-year-old thinking, it was quite simple: I was fleeing for my life. But in my forty-year-old thinking, I’m wondering, “Why was my heart filled with fear? Why, when I heard the front door jiggle, was my first thought, ‘Intruder!’?”
Gripped by Fear?
Today’s scripture opens with a crowd of people around Jesus talking about some Galileans who had lost their lives to the paid swords of Herod while offering sacrifices at the Temple (cf. Luke 13:1). While we cannot know for sure what sparked their conversation, it’s not difficult to imagine. Jesus has been talking to his disciples about conflict and violence looming on the horizon. He says to his disciples, “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do no more” (12:4). He tells them a story about a rich fool, a man who had accumulated more than he knew what do with, and yet instead of sharing it with others, he saved it for a rainy day, only to receive what sounds like a death-threat from God: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (12:20). Then Jesus expresses his mission in fiery terms: “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! … Do you think I have come to bring peace to earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (12:49, 51).
In the context of these words, it is almost as though the crowd around Jesus has been gripped by a fearful fascination. They begin talking about a group of Galileans who lost their lives in the Temple, perhaps wondering if this misfortune is part of the conflict and violence that Jesus is anticipating.
The Fig Tree That Lives Without Really Living
For his part, Jesus does not dispense any cheap comfort. He responds by citing the tragedy in the Temple and another tragedy as well—where a tower fell and killed eighteen people—and, if anything, he takes away the conventional comfort that we often look for in such tragedies, a reason that simultaneously makes sense of the tragedy and distances us from it. Jesus’ words suggest that the crowd is blaming the victims, saying that they must have been worse sinners and that they only got what was coming to them. Such an explanation would reassure them that they would avoid such a fate themselves, if only they stay on God’s good side.
But Jesus pushes back against this idea, insisting that those who lost their lives were no more sinful than those who survived. And then he drops this bombshell, twice: “Unless you repent you will all perish just as they did” (13:3, 5). It is a claim as concise as it is ambiguous. Is Jesus making the threat that unless they repent, they will all die in a tragic accident? Surely not. Jesus is no statistician, but surely he would recognize that the odds of his entire audience dying in a tragic catastrophe would be nil. But what else could he mean?
He follows this mysterious claim immediately with a parable, in which a fig tree goes three years without bearing fruit—which is sort of like saying, it lives three years without really living. The owner has lost patience and decides to get rid of it, when the gardener steps in and says, “Wait! Just wait one more year. Let me dig around it and put manure on it and tend to it.” In other words, let me care for it. The gardener—and we can guess who the gardener is—insists that this tree, which hasn’t really lived, may yet live if it will just receive his care.
The Life That Is Really Life: From Fear to Trust
In her poem, “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver writes:
…
When it's over, I want to say: all
my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to
wonder
if I have made of my life something
particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing
and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Here is an exquisite recognition of the fact that a person may live without ever having lived—that is, a person may live biologically while missing out on life spiritually. In 1st Timothy, Paul expresses this same truth when he talks about Christ-followers who “take hold of the life that is really life” (1 Tim 6:19). In other words, there is a life that is not really life, a life that is just “visiting” the world rather than living in it, a life without the fruits of God’s goodness, without fruits like love, hope, peace, and joy. And then there is the life that is really life, a life married to amazement, a life that embraces the world.
When Jesus tells his parable about the fig tree, I think he is explaining his earlier words to the crowd gripped by a fearful fascination about their volatile, violent world. I think he is explaining what it means to “perish” and what it means to “repent.” To “perish just as they did” means to die without having really lived, like the fig tree that has not borne any fruit. While I do not think Jesus is really making a claim on the people who lost their lives—that they had all not really lived—I do think he’s implying that the general population in his world were not really living. I think he’s implying that most people are running away from life in fear—not unlike me running away out the backdoor—and that as a result of fear most people are not bearing much fruit on their trees. In this context, to “repent” is no small feat. In a world where their Roman overlords regularly terrified the population with horrific acts of violence (the cross of Jesus was also the cross of countless Jews), to “repent” means to change one’s mind from fear to trust. It means to look around and see not Roman swords but the gentle hands of a gardener. It means trusting and receiving the tender care of this divine gardener and patiently bearing fruit. In our world, perhaps it means looking around and seeing first not the rage of our politics or the violence of people bearing deep emotional and spiritual wounds, but rather the care of faithful individuals and the kingdom of God in our midst.
“We Are What We Do with Our Attention”
Our passage concludes with some friendly Pharisees informing Jesus that Herod intends to kill him. Jesus then puts his life where just a moment ago his mouth was, explaining that he will not be deterred by the threat of death. Indeed, he practically acknowledges that he will meet his own death before long in Jerusalem. But his focus is not on death or the fear it can inspire. His focus is on life, on the care of God that needs to be shared.
The poet John Ciardi once said, “We are what we do with our attention.” Jesus attended his whole life to God’s tender care. Is it any surprise that he cared for others? He received the care of the great Gardener, and walked through the garden with the same care for others. He lived the life that is really life.
When I think back to my ten-year-old self, jittery with fear, running out the back door, I wonder where my attention was…and where it has been since. I do not mean to advise against being cautious or exercising good judgment in potentially dangerous situations. I just realize that as a child I had consumed what I would consider to be an average (or even less than average) amount of television and my attention was frequently given to situations of fear and the threat of violence. And so I wonder: when my attention is fixed on fear and the threat of violence, when security ascends to the status of idol, am I running away from the gospel? When I see only potential dangers rather than opportunities for receiving and expressing God’s care, am I running away from God’s kingdom?
Jesus invites me to repent from a fixation on death, violence, and security, a fixation on scarcity, competition, and conflict, so that I may not perish as so many have: without having first lived. And while this might seem like a hard and difficult lesson, I am reminded that this repentance does not involve steeling myself up for difficulty and death. Rather, it involves trusting in and receiving the tender care of our Gardener. Or as Jesus puts it toward the end of today’s passage, it involves being gathered under the caring wing of our Mother Hen.
Response
Before concluding, I would like to invite your response—only if you feel so inclined. There are grey slips of paper and pencils in the pews, and if you do write a response, you may decide for yourself whether you’d like to include your name or remain anonymous. (If you write your name, please know that I would still check with you before ever sharing your response with others.)
The question I’d like to ask is this: Have you ever encountered God’s care in a situation where you felt afraid? What happened? How did you feel afterwards?
Prayer
Gardener God, Mother Hen,Ever patient and caring:
Where we live in fear,
Bowing to the idols of control and security,
Draw us toward Christ.
…
Help us to heed his call to repent,
To change our minds,
So that we might live before we die.
Help us to trust in and attend to your care,
Which reigns over all.
Gather us not behind walls of our own making,
But under your wing of belonging.
In Christ, our teacher: Amen.
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