Lent 3, Year C | Luke 13:1-9
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 23, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“…unless you repent you will all perish as they did.” – Luke 13:3, 5[1]
During the most recent season of Doctor Who, Ruby and the Doctor arrive on a mysterious, war-torn planet sometime in the future. They soon encounter a squad of Ordained Anglican Marines engaged in a prolonged war against an unknown enemy. Whenever someone was injured, a wheeled robot called an ambulance would come to the scene to evaluate the individual. If the ambulance determined the recovery would be too expensive or the time needed would be outside acceptable parameters—like three weeks—a grandmotherly face would appear on the robot’s front screen, say, “Thoughts and prayers,” and then kill the wounded party before compressing their body into a boney cylinder that could then be sent to the next of kin as a memorial to their loved one’s heroic sacrifice.
Those scenes have been playing on repeat in my mind ever since I heard about the shootings that occurred Friday night in Young Park. Frankly, it’s hard not to be callous. For more than half my life, I’ve watched as major incidents of gun violence have become more and more common in, and less and less of a concern to, our society. At first people reacted with rage and sorrow and demanded change. As more and more bodies piled up and change never moved beyond theory, it became obvious that those we assume have the power and authority to do something simply weren’t going to act. Now, with the casual way we Americans simply accept and shrug off death and mass casualties, no matter how senseless or horrific they might be, we might as well start building those robot ambulances ourselves and commission them to wander our streets.
But attempting to step past the seeming hopelessness of it all, our Gospel reading has a remarkable amount of relevance to our current events, even for those of us whose hearts might feel as desiccated and compact as a “sacrificed” Anglican Marine.
The text opens with people telling Jesus about a horrific scene recently enacted upon some of his fellow Galileans. We aren’t sure what exactly happened—the early historian Josephus offers several possible incidents that may have precipitated this tale. Whatever it was, Pilate, Rome’s highest authority in the region, took such severe action that he didn’t simply execute the parties involved but chose to terrorize and humiliate the greater community by desecrating sacrifices with the victims’ blood.
Luke’s Jesus generally has a strong response to what we might call social-justice situations, so it’s more than a little surprising when he, too, seems to find the horror passe. “Yeah, that happened. Do you really think you’re any better than they were? If you don’t repent, expect the same for yourselves.” He then brings up another recent news item involving 18 people from Jerusalem crushed under a collapsing tower, following it with the same cold response before going on to tell a story about a fig tree threatened with destruction and someone trying to offer it one last chance.
It’s hard not to find the two halves of the reading as disjointed or to hear in them a cynical response from someone who’s seen the same thing happening so many times that it’s become hard to care. Violence wasn’t unusual in Roman-occupied areas. The government rapidly stepping in with brutal action was to be expected. And with the tower, it wasn’t like they had building codes or occupational safety regulations or the like. If you get a bunch of untrained labor working multistory masonry, accidents are bound to occur—just flip the “days without incident” counter back to zero.
That makes it easy to jump past Jesus’ response by adopting the classic philosophy of, “Oh well, there’s nothing to do about it. ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!’” and then go on with our lives unchanged. But that isn’t remotely what the text is saying, and doing that would lead us to completely miss what Jesus is telling us.
Back in Advent, Luke offered us a related short story. John the Baptist, while speaking to the gathering crowds, encourages the people to repent using imagery of trees being cut down and tossed into a fire. What we learned upon closer examination, however, was that it was the trees themselves doing the chopping and throwing. Their own, ongoing refusal to stop their own actions simply fed their own destruction. Something similar is taking place here.
Although it isn’t quite so active as the ones from John’s story, Jesus’ parable still offers us a willful fig tree. We don’t hear much about the tree’s desires during the course of the tale, but the garden worker’s final statement clarifies that, even with all the work they plan to put in and all the support they’re willing to give, the end result depends on the tree itself: its fate rests on whether or not it refuses to bear fruit in the coming year.
The same sort of volitional “no” the fig tree is left to ponder riddles Jesus’ responses to the preceding tragedies as well.
Quick recap for those who may be new: ancient Greek used two words for negation. One was factual or objective: the thing did not or cannot happen. That word appears when the owner says he doesn’t or can’t find fruit on the fig tree and when Jesus answers his own questions asking if the victims of the violence or accident were worse people than anyone else: “no,” they factually and objectively were not. The other form of “no” involves some amount of choice or an act of will. That “no” is more hidden in our translation, having slipped into our word “unless.” A more blatant translation of Jesus’ statements in verses 3 and 5 is, “if[2] you all won’t repent, likewise, you all will destroy yourselves.”
And yes, you heard those last words correctly. Similarly to John’s willful trees, not only are the people choosing whether or not to repent, they’re also the ones doing the destroying (aka “perishing”) on their own behalves.
This same thing appears in our Corinthians reading.[3] All of the “do not” or “must not’s” are those volitional “no’s,” so it’s more accurate to read them as “should not’s.” But in verses 9 and 10, the people aren’t being destroyed; they destroy themselves. The snakes or “the destroyer” (which may be the embodiment of some kind of plague) are simply the means they’re using to accomplish their own ruin.
Now, I want to be careful that we don’t turn this into an opportunity to blame the victim. Bible verses ought not be ammunition, nor should sacred texts become fire hoses we turn on others to say, “This is all your fault. If you would just stop [X], things would be better.” Or “If you really had faith in God, you wouldn’t have to suffer like that.” These kinds of statements are based in what’s commonly called the Prosperity Gospel, the idea that outcomes prove God’s feelings toward a person; good people are “blessed” with wealth and pleasant lives while bad people bring poverty, pain, and sickness upon themselves.
That’s the direct opposite of what Jesus is saying here. The Galileans suffered, but not because they were worse people than anyone else. A tower crushed a crowd, but that doesn’t mean the dead were morally inferior—accidents happen, even among those who love and follow God. A lot of the negative things taking place in the world come from sources over which the victim has no power, whether the root is systemic injustice or natural disaster or violent actions or plain old gravity. Look carefully and intently before you choose to cast stones.
Rather than using these texts to point out others’ flaws, what we need to do is take responsibility for ourselves and our own part in the failures and devastation we observe erupting throughout our world. We, as individuals and as interdependent communities, need to repent, which is simply to change—not just consider the need to change but to intentionally alter how we behave and interact with the world and one another. Genuine repentance goes beyond internal shame or recognition of fault. It demands physical action—embodied change.
Things today look hopeless not because we can’t change but because we won’t change. The fault lies with us.[4] We would rather bind ourselves to words someone with no comprehension of present circumstances wrote hundreds or thousands of years ago than take the uncertain responsibility of working toward substantive efforts to save or enhance lives in the present. Violence is rampant in modern society, not because someone else didn’t train their children properly—that’s the same poisonous lie Adam and Eve fed each other in the Garden of Eden; aggression roams freely because we won’t change. The callousness my and others’ hearts feel isn’t necessarily lack of compassion. It’s protection, a way of guarding ourselves from the unending pain and despair of watching “never again” become again and again and again as we observe our entire society continuing to choose not to change.
At the end of that episode of Doctor Who, after an ongoing bevy of “thoughts and prayers,” everyone begins to arrive at the same conclusion, leading to a crisis of faith amongst the Anglican Marines. The reason they haven’t been able to locate this enemy or effectively fight this enemy or protect themselves against this enemy has become obvious. They themselves are their enemy. The weapons have programmed limits not only on maximum acceptable casualties in any conflict but on minimums as well. Their standard operating procedure of declaring war upon landing on this desolate, uninhabited world triggered the machines they rely on—arms and ambulances alike—to simply maintain the “appropriate” levels of death. Recognizing their own complicity in their friends’ and comrades’ “thoughts and prayers,” the soldiers have a choice. They can continue waging their illusory war, all the while knowing they’re the ones continuing to kill themselves, or they can choose to act outside their superiors’[5] authority and simply shut down the machines, leaving us with the question, what will they do?
What would we choose to do?
“…if you all won’t change, you will likewise destroy yourselves.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Possibly “whenever”
[3] I Corinthians 10:1-13
[4] Especially in a system wherein the people are the government.
[5] “Bishops,” in the case of Ordained Anglican Marines